Page 29 of Finance Bros

“For night shifters,” I add. “Midnight dog walking. We recruit some college kids or whatever, run some online ads, then scale up.”

“Dog walking, huh? Where’d you come up with that?” he asks, his voice low and suspicious.

I give him a flat stare. “Why?”

“Sounds like something I’ve heard before. Let me ask youthis: what would you say to turning over some vintage t-shirts and scaling up into limited edition sneakers?”

I’d say I don’t usually blush, but I might now. Fucking ChatGPT.

Bailey speaks up, “How much could we make doing that? And how fast?”

“We’re not doing that,” Ryan says. “It was a joke.”

Haha.

“It doesn’t suck,” she says.

“No, but unless you have a ton of time to go thrifting and manage online sales, it’s not viable for our timetable.”

I’ve gotta say, I remember Ryan being smart and good at math, but I don’t remember him being this quick. It’s…impressive. Cynical, but still impressive.

“Well, what’s your best idea?” Bailey asks, leaning back in her chair and folding her arms over her chest to look at him.

“I’m not sure it’s the best I’ve had, and I haven’t put much thought into it, but at the gym tonight, I thought about maybe like a financial advice YouTube channel? We do a small ad buy and once we have a following we start a subscription tier?”

“Is that how YouTube works?” she asks.

“I think so,” he says. “I’m not sure. I didn’t say it was a good idea.”

“I’m not doing videos,” she says.

Ryan sighs. “We’ve got three hundred dollars?—”

“Two fifty,” I interrupt him.

He glares at me. “Great. Perfect. Two hundred and fifty dollars. We need something scaleable at a rapid rate, and I think the cheapest, easiest way to do that is by utilizing social media. It would take some luck, though.”

“I’m not sure about that,” Bailey says. “Influencing is a business—it can’t beallluck.”

A moment of silence passes while we digest this. Neither ofthem are wrong, but I’m running a little short on luck these days. Bailey asks, “How would we stand out? There’s literally millions of people trying and failing at going viral daily. What do we have that they don’t?”

Stephanie finally manages to find her courage and leaps onto my lap. Once she’s on firm footing, she keeps climbing. She lands on my laptop and raises herself up on her hind legs, her little paws clawing the air for my attention—the signal that she wants to be held—not that it’s subtle. I grab her and tuck her under my arm before she gets any more embarrassing.

“Is she always like that?” Bailey asks, clearly amused.

“I told you,” I mumble.

She sits back and appraises me. While she’s doing that, I glance at Ryan, and he looks away, turning to look at Bailey.

“You know,” she says to Ryan like I’m not here. “If he took off his shirt…”

“He’s not interesting enough,” Ryan says shortly.

I whip my head over to look at him. “Not—what? I’m not enoughwhat?”

“No offense,Malcolm, but you’re too uptight to be a TikTok thirst trap.”

“Aw, give him a chance,” Bailey says then gestures. “The dog? Come on. You’ve gotta see it.”

---