Claude’s stubborn streak wasn’t necessarily a negative. Fact is he was demanding and got a lot out of people. If you spent a day with Claude you were exhausted by the end of the day because he pushed your mind until you had nothing left to give. I was showing up every morning at 7am with the armed guards opening up the marketing office and sticking around till late in the afternoon and early evenings and I would be spent cause Claude would mentally exhaust me and that I appreciated.
We ended up getting on the air after I gave Claude my guarantee that the creative would work and it did. Claude would always try to put everyone else on the line when it came to taking risks. It was his way to make you pay if it didn’t because he didn’t want to part with a penny even if the business was making tons of money. While at BOS for me it was all risk no reward which is not a good position to conduct business.
Another major problem arose prior to the kick-off of the college games in late August when the phone company was threatening to shut down the phones for non-payment. Claude was in Florida seeing his doctor and left Shaun and Geraldine in charge. Luckily there were some very professional people at BOS that continued to get results while Claude was gone but there were also others that felt it was play time led by Shaun and Geraldine. Gaynor although CEO in title was still down the food chain and not allowed to make decisions. He was the puppet that was going to get BOS to go public where Claude would have hundreds of millions of dollars at his disposal. Which I guess he would eventually dispose as much of those funds as possible into his personal bank accounts or buy gold bars to hide throughout the world. I always thought he would make a commitment to be the best once he got those public funds but something must have been wrong because he wanted to win and once he got the dollars the company didn’t improve.
Well Shaun and Geraldine sweated-out this decision on whether to pay the phone bill or not to the very last minute. I recall the cousins talking about this in the VIP room while in a meeting with Shaun. They finally did it, made a decision without Claude and the phones would be free to ring that weekend. The sales office was pulling in about 2000 new customers a day to the tune of approximately $600,000 plus in initial sign up money a day.
When Claude came back there I was in the VIP room with Shaun and Geraldine who were both retreating fast to his tyrannical yelling. He blasted them, why did they paid the phone bill! It was obvious so gamblers could call in for the weekend games otherwise the phone company would shut the phones down and that was the simple answer. Claude went into a tirade and said these words that I will never forget “You never! Never! Ever! Pay anyone in full!” That blew my mind, with the phone company threatening to shut the phones off for non-payment and with the money that was being sent in on a daily basis why try to call the phone company on a bluff? That was Claude though thinking his money was worth more than the $5 bettor just because he touched it and he treated everyone that way. His money was too good for CBS Radio, too good for Clear Channel, too good for Fox. Earth to Claude these are major global media companies that are worth plenty more than BOS. He never could see it that way. Never respected the media the way they should have been respected and when I would end up resigning within the next 9 months he would regret it eventually as the media companies would stop defending the great offender of airwaves that would consistently be late on payments.
When I first went into dealings with the media companies they wanted all money up front. This was standard. I ended up presenting Shaun K’s argument to the media that they would get all their money up front but not the entire schedule up front. As long as we stayed three weeks ahead in payments they would always be getting their money up front and companies like Infinity Broadcasting with the counsel of CBS legal set the standard of getting paid two weeks in advance. Over at Premiere Radio and the Jim Rome Show we were obligated to pay 3 weeks out and Claude more than a few times was late on that where I would have to plead with him to approve the payment because no money was ever sent out without his approval. Shaun, Gaynor, nor anyone else had the right to have money paid out.
Claude balking with Premiere Radio really pissed me off because here we were getting new sign-ups from the Jim Rome Show at 25% of the cost of other media and instead of paying them on time and building up a great relationship he was demanding free spots and delaying payments by telling me to come back another day to ask for payments which embarrassed me when speaking with Premiere. Furthermore Premiere would never give in under normal circumstances considering we were paying less than their rate card and they had advertisers lining up, even turning away all others in online gaming after I secured a contract for BOS. If Claude ran Premiere I imagine he would have got payment than tore up the contract and sold the spots to another advertiser. Premiere showed a lot of class with BOS and the mis-treatment of the media by BOS didn’t earn them any allies. I am sure media companies ended up helping out the Department of Justice in lining up happy to testify witnesses who were subject to consistent abuse from BOS.
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