I wasn’t going to speak openly about this, but I feel like I need to be transparent. The surfboard company is about to go belly up, all because Brentley couldn’t let go of his corn cobs.
Corn cob fibre, that is. Brentley has been pushing the idea of using this material for our boards from the start. Despite not really being on the same page, Brett and I have let him present his ideas to the investors, and it’s all spiralled from there. It’s not that they’re against the idea, per se – they don’t know corn cob fibre from coconut husk fibre, or from fibreglass for that matter. It’s more about the way in which Brentley went about pitching the idea.
See, Brentley has this thing about refusing to compromise his ‘true self’ for anyone or anything, ever. It makes him kind of hard to work with, to be honest, because his true self doesn’t seem to have a whole lot of flexibility built into it. So if he feels like spending 90% of his allocated presentation time going on about how his mate just got the best tattoo Brisbane has ever seen, that’s what he’ll do, thank you very much.
It was especially awkward how he sandwiched the info about the advantages of corn cob fibre in between praise for the tattooer’s meticulous shading skills and brutal dismissal of the other tattoo shops around Surfers Paradise. I suspect he had some half-baked notion about how this was going to flow together, but bungled it by getting too deep into the shading thing. It’s something he’s particularly nerdy about – high quality tattoo shading – and he just lost the thread.
The thing is, he should have talked to Brett and I first about this whole tactic of spinning a yarn about tattoos. We could have told him that the investors are not exactly tattoo aficionados themselves, and are really just interest in, well… investing. I wouldn’t be so bummed about if the corn cob fibre thing was actually a good idea, but we’ve basically put our investors offside for no good reason.