…the scheduling system the entire company runs on?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s true.”
Twelve years earlier, our company had nearly gone under because our logistics system kept failing. I’d stayed up nights teaching myself to code and built a scheduling platform on my own laptop, on my own time. When I offered it to the company, my boss, Craig, didn’t want to pay a developer’s price for it. So we signed a licensing agreement. The company could use my software for as long as I was employed there. If my employment ended, the license ended thirty days later.
Craig had signed it without reading past the first page. He’d told me at the time, “Fine, whatever, it’s your little program.”
My little program now ran every delivery, every shift and every invoice for a company with two hundred employees.
And the $9 million client, Harbor Foods, hadn’t cancelled because of the software. They had cancelled because of me. Their contract included a key-person clause that I had negotiated with their CEO eight years earlier. If I stopped being their account lead, they could walk away without a penalty. Craig had signed that page too.
“Craig fired the one person named in both contracts,” the lawyer said quietly. “In fifteen minutes.”
Craig got back on the phone. He offered me my job back. Then he offered me a raise. Then a vice president title. His voice got higher with every offer.
I told him I needed time to think, and I hung up.
I called the CEO of Harbor Foods instead. She had already heard. “If you start your own company,” she said, “we’ll sign with you tomorrow.”
Two other clients called that week with the same offer. Four of my former coworkers, the ones I’d trained, asked if they could come with me.
Three months later I opened Morgan Logistics in a small office with six desks. My software runs it. Harbor Foods was our first client.
Craig offered to buy a permanent license to my system for half a million dollars. My lawyer and I negotiated it up to eight hundred thousand. I accepted. It paid for my office lease, my team’s salaries for the first year, and my retirement fund.
At the end of our meeting, Craig said, “I really did think you were just an old lady who’d been here too long.”
I told him that’s exactly the problem. He never once read what I wrote.
