A Tale of Two Brokerages (free drama!)

The fires have died down enough now that I can relate the rather boring tale of how myself and most of the brokers of CAPLF WH Sales parted ways with the Taggart bunch. I suppose I'll start with how I began the whole business years ago and we'll go from there.

In 2011 I was leading Taggart Transdimensional (TTI). Taggart is an ancient corp that had began in null years ago, been kicked out, and then settled into C5 wormhole space where it would slowly become a small group of inactive carebears. When Kushan passed the torch to me, I started lighting fires under asses and going crazy with recruitment and generally rocking the boat. For the first time in years, Taggart had a CEO who played EVE, for better or worse. This upset the status quo and the delicate egos of many old Taggart personalities. This wasn't much of an obstacle because most of those bittervets didn't actually play EVE. Redslay, an odd carebear hermit, in particular was miffed, especially because he had been passed over for CEO by a complete n00b. When Kush had offered me the position, and I asked why Redslay had been passed, he answered that Redslay becoming CEO was the worst thing that could happen to the corp and he wasn't ready to doom it quite yet. You know things are depressing when the n00b takes over. Redslay and myself had begun our strained relationship a few months before, when I'd moved into his wormhole and then exited after one week because his leadership was just so fail. Micromanaging, flip-flopping, browbeating, and the other hallmarks of people who do not know how to lead people.

I was CEO for a year or so and Taggart began to rebuild. We were still carebears, but at least we were active carebears. In zooming around w-space we noticed a lot of empty wormholes, and like many optimistic entrepreneurs we posted many of them on the EVE-O sell orders forum, hoping to sell them for a quick buck. We sold quite a few and noticed a glaring hole in the process. There were no brokers. To quote the wonderful film Lord of War: "Selling a [wormhole] for the first time is a lot like having sex for the first time. You're excited but you don't really know what the hell you're doing. And some way, one way or another, it's over too fast." And so I whipped up a quick mailing list and started a forum post to advertise it. Customers trickled in at first, but after a few commendatory posts, they started to flock in. Business was brisk. So that I would not get overwhelmed with evemails and convo requests, I decided to open up the brokerage to the corp at large, and it was called "Taggart WH Sales". Even after hiring and training a half-dozen brokers, we still couldn't meet demand, a problem which persists to this day.

I would eventually resign from my position as CEO due to RL issues, and active management of the corporation and brokerage fell upon Stealthgogi, an excellent Taggart and close friend of mine. In my absence he upgraded the business from the mailing list to a website, webmastered by Jbmidnite. While the site is not perfect (notably it is more vulnerable to scamming than the mailing list, and therefore has to be policed more closely), it works very well for our purposes.

Last year I returned to EVE, started a new corp and a new wormhole, and resumed management of the brokerage business. This was not a problem, because as usual most of Taggart was inactive. Redslay had finally been promoted to CEO while I was away, and this time only because Gogi literally had no one else he could hand it over to when he needed to step down. Redslay had attempted to subsume the brokerage business into Taggart as a whole, even going so far as to stack his board of directors (all inactive) as directors of the brokerage. Most of these people had no idea how the business operated.

None of this was really a problem until I made a business decision that Redslay disagreed with. A rival broker (yes, a few of those pop up from time to time) was using our site to advertise his own services. I shut that down and admonished him via email, and he wrote back a rather angry, spergy response about this and that. I informed him that the business was mine to run as I saw fit, and he whined about it to the other brokers. Redslay then informed me that he disagreed with my decision because said rival broker was an officer in a large, scary wormhole corp and he feared eviction. Holy carebear - were we really going to make business decisions based on an ephemeral, non-existent threat of violence?

Then the real drama began. I booted all of the Taggart brokers out of the in-game sales channel, and Gogi responded by booting me back (I had forgotten that he had created the channel lol) and declaring that the brokerage was in fact owned by Taggart, even though I had created the business and had owned it since its inception. Smelling a scammy scam, I then took the nuclear option and walked away with the webmaster, my forum post (now filled with many pages of recommendations), and the majority of the active brokers. Taggart sent me a weakly apologetic evemail in an attempt to reconcile, but the damage was done. They had tried to steal my business, old-fashioned EVE style. And that was that. All I had to do was get a new channel (CAPLF WH Sales in-game), rewrite our FAQ, and we continued business as usual. Customers were confused at first but they got the hang of it. Taggart helped by being completely inactive as usual.

So now we continue on, selling wormholes. Of course, now that CAPLF is disbanding and I'm moving on, it is no longer a requirement that all of my brokers be in my corp. I must either know them personally or they agree to go through a training program. This will hopefully allow us to solve our chronic staffing issues. I believe Taggart wrote up a forum post advertising their new brokerage, but I cannot seem to find the post, and their brokers are even harder to find than mine. Their forum and website also seem to have lapsed as well. I strongly recommend you do not do business with them - they are not above a good scam.