Rule 34 - Charles Stross [32]
There are numerous obstacles to progress.
Your predecessor in Scotland, the man who established the Operation’s subsidiary in that country, died unexpectedly two years ago—of high blood pressure, not low treachery. He was a knuckle-dragging gangster of the old school, a veteran of the underground wars that thrashed the siloviki revenants out of the EU a decade ago. A street warrior, not a theoretician, in other words—and his business philosophy reflected his background. But he understood the basics.
All the Operation’s subsidiaries and start-ups operate on the principle of making dreams come true: recondite or frightening and illegal dreams, true, but dreams nonetheless. They require a marketing operation to bring the wares to the attention of the buying public, a fulfilment arm to get the goods to the punters, and a collection arm to pay for it all. So far, so good.
Violence is a regrettable but necessary overhead on the balance sheets of the Operation’s start-ups. Like any enterprise that operates beyond the boundaries delineated by governments—with their self-proclaimed monopoly on the use of violence and their hypocritical attitude towards the legitimacy of certain markets—they must provide for their own defence. To the Operation’s way of thinking, there is much to be said for the rule of fist and baseball bat: By keeping the beatings sub-lethal, costs are constrained—and the threat of escalation remains in reserve. Blood is a big expense, as the man said. Bodies are costly, warfare is capital-intensive, and if you have to dig out the machine-guns and start hiring soldiers, your profit margin is about to go into a power dive.
Your predecessor, despite resembling a rabid silverback gorilla in both physical appearance and personal hygiene, understood this instinctively: He ran a tight ship and maintained credit control in a drastically hands-on manner. He had a rep for tittering unnervingly as he stroked his baseball bat and stared at his debtors’ knee-caps. Almost everybody paid up on the spot: Nobody wanted to find out just what he was laughing at.
Unfortunately you lack the physical presence and instinctive sense of the theatrical to make this strategy work. Moreover, since the Gorilla went to monkey heaven, the franchisees and street-level clients have become unduly frisky. Getting a handle on the major defaulters is proving tedious although there are plenty of small fry to make an example of and opportunities for profit along the way: Thanks to the Organization, you are in a position to outsource enforcement to contractors in the budget-medical-supplies business.
But you don’t want to waste your time playing hands-on godfather to a slumful of nitwitted glue sniffers. It’s a lousy business model, with no scope for exponential scaling and monetization of the sweat equity you’re going to have to inject to make any headway. The outputs from the Gorilla’s franchise scale linearly with the human inputs, because criminal retailing is labour-intensive. And while the Gorilla was content to weed his patch in person, you have higher ambitions than a lifetime of stoop labour.
The first thing they teach you in VC school is to pick a business model with scope for non-linear growth. Consequently, you have concluded that it would be far better to trash the Gorilla’s operation completely and establish a new one of your own design (“leveraging best-practice agile methodologies to maximize return on stakeholder investment in accordance with the Operation’s total start-up commitment protocols,” as your funding pitch puts it) than to try to nurse the emphysemic mafia