There were over 8 million people in the city. Even with the low infection rate, we still had over 160 thousand undead walking the streets. My little place was becoming very profitable and my investors very happy, but that is always when things start to go downhill. I enjoy working with the customers and I get my ideas from first-hand knowledge and seeing what is going on in the world, real time. My investors saw the good thing I had going and wanted to expand to cover the entire Zombie market before someone else did. A few people tried to start their own Zombie Hostel but our lawyers and a few “accidents” quickly got rid of the competition. They should have hired a good Zombie Security firm to protect their interest, like the one I helped my investors create. For the Zombie, by the Zombie and even partially staffed by Zombies. My first–hand knowledge of Zombie behavior made it easy to create procedures to herding and controlling Zombies. Being able to move them in groups without the groups getting out of control and becoming a flesh eating hoard was our specialty. My investors already had the marketing strategy and were selling “protection” long before the Zombie infection, just now it was considered mostly legitimate. I love business opportunity.
My place could easily feed and house 200 Zombies a night and clean 2000 a day. We were at 90% capacity and had not advertised or tried to hire Zombie Pied Pipers. Yes some people claimed to have the ability to get Zombies to dance, follow, and disperse through various methods. They made out like it was a magic power, but I think it is just people doing the obvious and trying to make a buck. That is fine as long as it is me and I am not paying someone else to do what I am perfectly capable of doing myself.
Many Zombies were being taken care of by their families. It became a big deal to tell your friends about how poor Uncle Fred was found on the street and how you helped him by taking him in. Of course people really wanted the slave labor. The Feds did not care about paying family members and people liked the free yard work, cleaning and babysitting the undead were capable of. But even with the family’s eating into my Hostel and restaurant profits, they saw the value in a cleaning service and would bring the undead in for a good cleaning at least once a week.
We projected the need for up to 80 combination Restaurant/ Hostel and Dry Cleaning establishments catering to the Zombie population, just in the city. My investors had offices in every major city in the world. This was going to be huge.
My investors liked using the Zombie labor for their trash collecting business. One wise guy could wrangle a dozen Zombies with only a weeks worth of training. I don’t know why the investors called them wise guys, most people could have learned all the tricks in a day, but go figure. The streets of the city were clean, bitings were down, Zombies were healthy and the profits rolling in. I should have seen the problems coming.
The unrest in Florida was growing and spreading. Atlanta as well as Tallahassee was hot and Zombies were having problem with the locals. From Little Rock, Wichita and even as far north as Columbus the Zombies had been managed badly and there was devastating consequences. Celebrities were putting out TV spots for people to report Zombie problems and let the police handle them. Bill Murray was particularly a friend to the Zombie and had a reality show dressed up as a Zombie and socializing with them.
It took about a month of working with the Process Systems Engineers my investors sent down to create a Franchise handbook. They focused on the design, operation, control, and optimization of chemical, physical, and biological processes. I thought I had read up on the world until I met these guys. There were not big on new ideas, but they could run with an existing concept and really squeeze every dime out of it. It was amazing. I did not much like them trying to tell me how to run my business, but we have to get along. I had managers doing most of the daily work now anyway. Let them deal with it. I was becoming a big wig, at least I thought so. I really should have had a good lawyer, if such a thing even exists.
You know you are in trouble when you are thinking about making your Zombie businesses ISO 9002 compliant and taking the idea international. You can document good Zombie practice, but you still need good common sense. The Engineers did not get that aspect of the business.
