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Bryce Dowell Named Partner
at the Meacham Group.
Drew fought to keep his face expressionless, but he knew his colleagues would see right through any attempt to hide his feelings. All but one of them had followed him from Meacham when he and his partners, B. J. Clark and Melissa Edwards, left to form Trident.
Drew closed the laptop and pushed it back toward Samantha. “Fuck Bryce and the rest of them,” he said.
“Fucking right,” Josh Hall said with a fist pump.
Trident’s director of planning and business development had been at the Meacham Group for three years already before Drew joined the hedge fund, and had remained in the same position the entire time. Like Drew, Josh knew what it was like to be screwed over by the boys in the corner offices.
“What’s going on back at that other firm in New York isn’t our concern,” Drew said. “Remember what Trident is about. Our work has a purpose. And one hundred percent of our focus must remain on Travis County Hospital.” He slapped the table. “Get some food in you, then we meet back here in fifteen to hash out what we’ve learned about the hospital operations so far.”
As the rest of the team fanned out, Drew reclaimed the chair at the head of the table and pulled up Google on his phone. He typed “Bryce Dowell” and “the Meacham Group” into the search bar. The article Samantha had been reading was the second hit, right behind the one about Bryce single-handedly reinventing one of the nation’s largest fast-food chains that had been on the brink of bankruptcy.
The same account Drew had brought to Meachamanddone most of the work on.
Just the sight of the top search result irritated him. He clicked on the second article and scanned the story. It was the typical rundown of Bryce’s educational background, his years at Meacham, and, of course, his being lauded as a rising star because of the account he’d stolen from Drew.
What pissed him off more than anything was that Meacham’s chief investment officer knew that Drew was the one who put in the work to lure that client to Meacham, and he’d said nothing. It hadn’t just pissed him off, it had hurt. He’d given so much of himself to the firm, and everyone just shrugged it off.
Bryce came from old money. His father and grandfather had both been prominent bankers, and the prestige a Dowell brought to the hedge fund was worth more to them than the years of hustling and the billions—fuckingbillions—of dollars Drew had brought in.
He should have left Meacham long before he did. Sure, he’d walked out of those glass doors with nearly a hundred million dollars in investments and cash, but he’d also left with a mountain of regret. Because he’d given Meacham something worth far more than the money he’d earned with them: his time. Time that should’ve been spent with his mother.
Precious time he would never get back.
Drew sucked in a deep breath and pushed away from the table. He went into the kitchen, grabbed a bottle of water from the refrigerator, and swallowed down half of it.
He refused to give energy to these dark thoughts—not with the important work facing him right now. To a certain extent, his mother was the reason he was here now, helping hospitals like County. If he’d known about her cancer in time, he could have brought in the best doctors in the world to treat her, but a person’s bank balance shouldn’t determine whether they lived or died.
And there came a time when a person needed to be known for more than just their ability to acquire wealth. He didn’t want that to be his sole legacy.
Drew could never make up for those priceless moments he’d lost with his mom, but he would do what he could to ensure others had more time with their loved ones, regardless of their ability to pay.
To accomplish that at County, he had to get the people working there to buy into the changes that would have to be made. That’s why he needed London to get on board. She had more clout with the staff than doctors who had been there for decades.
Drew finished his water on his way back to the makeshift conference room. As the team reassembled around the table, he unbuttoned his shirt at the wrists and rolled up his cuffs.
“I don’t have to reiterate the significance of the job that’s been put before us. I’m sure you all saw it at various times this week. Travis County Hospital serves a special purpose for many in this area. It’s vital that this community has a reliable source for their health care.
“Understand that there will be major pushback if privatization is even whispered about, but don’t allow those voices to knock you off track. Our goal is to find the best answer to this hospital’s financial and management issues.” Drew paused for a moment. He knew his next words would leave a foul taste in his mouth, but they needed to be said. “If our data findings suggest that County should no longer be publicly run, then that’s what we recommend. But we can’t get ahead of ourselves. We need to keep our biases out of this and go into this assessment with eyes wide open,” he added as much for himself as for the team.
He flipped over several of the pages he’d printed earlier. “I’ve already noticed a lot of fat that can be trimmed. Starting with discarding medical supplies. I questioned a nurse about why she was throwing out several boxes of sutures, and was told that they restock every six months, regardless of the expiration date on the items. But when I searched the policy and procedures manual, I saw nothing stating there should be a six-month overhaul of the surgical supplies.
“After investigating a bit further, I discovered the practice has been passed down by word of mouth over the years. No one knows when it started—it’s just part of the culture. Those sutures cost over four hundred dollars a box, and I personally saw her throw out at least seven of them. When you’re running at an eight-figure deficit, that doesn’t seem like a lot, but it adds up.”
“It’s so wasteful,” Samantha said. “Who did you say was doing this?”
“It doesn’t matterwho,” Drew pointed out. “We’re not here to blame any one person in particular. We’re focused on thesystemthat created the mindset that it’s okay to toss out thousands of dollars of medical supplies simply because someone said to do it years ago.”
Heads nodded around the table, and for the next two hours, the team methodically went through a list of obvious evidence of wastefulness. As they tallied up the expenditures, Drew’s earlier anger over news about Bryce Dowell’s partnership faded.
Not being made partner at the Meacham Group had made leaving that much easier. And he had no desire to go back.
What he was doing now saved lives. He and his team brought struggling health-care facilities back from the brink. If the small, rural hospital in his mother’s hometown had hired a company like Trident to help it run more efficiently, maybe it would have been able to afford more advanced technology that could have caught her cancer earlier. Maybe she would still be here.
He had not been able to save his own mother, but the work he was doing now could possibly save someone else’s. That would always mean more to him than a partnership.
