“Brad.” Kelly wore only the most perfunctory of smiles. “Morgan here tells me you have some new thoughts on the product.”
“Just the people I wanted to see! You know the founders’ WhatsApp group I’m in?” Brad gave them a blinding smile without taking his feet off the desk.
Kelly nodded with a hint of weariness that suggested she had heard of the group far more than she had wanted to.
“Scuttlebutt is that quantum is out,” Brad continued. “So we’re going to need to strip that from all our materials. Don’t want to be yesterday’s news.”
“Including the presentation that’s in”—Kelly glanced at her phone—“three and a half hours?”
“Megan knows how to find and replace,” Brad waved away the objection.
“Replace with what, though?” Kelly asked. It was fascinating. Her face hadn’t changed at all, but Morgan could see the cord in her neck starting to stand out.
“Health and wellness is where all the money is at right now,” Brad assured them blithely. “It’s critical to really get employees personally invested.”
“Our product is a quantum-based hiring platform, though,” Carter said. He sounded like he was starting to hyperventilate a little.
“Quantum-based wellness,” Brad said. “It’s just a little jump.”
“We haven’t even been talking about quantum-based wellness for a week,” Carter said in a strangled voice.
“Then you don’t have much to undo!” Brad said. “That’s why we use agile methodologies.”
“That’s not what agile means,” Carter started to say.
“Great, great, can’t wait to see what you folks come up with,” Brad said, finally taking his feet off the desk.
“We haven’t come up with anything,” Carter tried to inject.
“Well, obviously, that’s why you need the big picture guy,” Brad said, physically ushering them out of his office. “Now all you have to do is fill in the little details. Lloyd here can help.”
“My name is Luke,” Luke said.
“Thanks, Leo,” Brad said. He shut the door on all of them.
Kelly rubbed the bridge of her nose. “OK. This is what we’re going to do. There’s no way to change the demo in time. Morgan, I need you to find the latest health and wellness studies—we’re going super-high-level. Again. Focus is on the addressable market, we’ll go light on details on what we’re actually doing.”
Morgan bit her lip. “What do we do with the Walmart case study?”
“Forget the case study. What are we going to do with the Walmart pilot program? They’re expecting a hiring platform, not a health and wellness platform.” Carter was taking deep breaths through his nose and Morgan wondered if he’d also watched meditation guides on YouTube.
“We’re going to keep moving forward with Walmart, and leave their logo on the slide,” Kelly said. “But kill the case study.”
Luke raised a hand tentatively. “I might be able to f—” he choked on the word ‘fake’. “Fix up something that’s wellnessthemed.”
Carter looked at him with narrowed eyes. Kelly raised an eyebrow. “In three hours.”
“I didn’t say it would work,” he said. “But I, uh—”
“What he’s too modest to say is that he did something similar for school last semester,” Morgan filled in for him. “He was showing it to me the other day. We can slap some new branding on it and make the links on the first screen of the demo go there.”
Kelly looked at them for a long moment. “I want to see what you’ve got in an hour and a half.”
“You got it,” Morgan said. She did not have it. At all. But she’d make do.
“Ronaldo,” Kelly called. “I need you to make a coffee run. Whatever Morgan and Luke want. It’s on my card.”
Morgan was not a big enough person not to revel in the dark look Ronaldo gave them at being forced to run their errands. Although whether adding caffeine on top of the adrenaline was a good idea was an open question.
