As he continued to think it over on his drive back home, Lucina called him on his cell phone.

“So, what do you think about the bigger crowd?” she asked him.

“It’s much bigger money,” Ivan answered immediately.

“That’s what I already know. And we made a lot of big noise tonight, I-van,” she told him. “So now it will be ea-sier to throw more parties. Al-ready I have cli-ents li-ning up.”

Ivan jumped on that and said, “Hey, before you lock up more of these deals, you need to talk to me about the payouts first. Because these football players didn’t need to make back forty thousand dollars. They already got money.”

He thought the return was a stretch when she first told him about it. But now that he saw forty thousand dollars walk back out the door, it made the point even more evident. They needed the lion’s share of the money for doing the lion’s share of the work.

Lucina responded, “I-van, if you want more of the money, then you put up your own money. That’s the way it goes. But I am not in this biz-ness to risk my own money if I don’t have to.”

Ivan began to calculate immediately. If he put the twelve thousand he had just made into another major event, and made at least sixty-two, he could walk away with fifty thousand dollars instead of sixteen. Or if he split the deal down the middle with Lucina at six thousand apiece, they could each make twenty-five thousand off of their six.

In the middle of Ivan’s thoughts, Lucina told him, “I-van, please don’t get ahead of your-self. You have to re-mem-ber that this was a Chargers par-ty, and al-though people did come to dance and to have a good time, they still came to par-ty with the stars of the field. Otherwise they would not have paid twenty-five dollars and left their usual downtown clubs. O-kay? So, unless you have a celebrity showcase like we had to-night, please don’t think you can draw the same crowd and make the same money.”

She continued, “That is why I worked so hard to have this par-ty du-ring football season when the Chargers are the spot-light of the city.”

After Ivan listened to her explain things for a while, Lucina’s accent became normal to him. And she made good business sense. So Ivan nodded and reminded himself, Trust your partner.

He said, “So it’s all about having a celebrity draw?”

“Yes. Definitely,” she told him. “And celebrities cost money. That is why you use other people’s money and take less of a risk. And yes, you may earn less for yourself, but in the meantime, you lose less or nothing.”

Ivan chuckled and said, “Yeah, you lose all that setup time and effort, that’s what you lose.”