Who Is Susan Blake?

I'm glad you asked!  

Let me tell you about the 2 years I was me but not me.

9/11 put a very big crimp in my business.

So, after years of working for myself, I got a job with a promotional products company called Motivators, working for a man I had known for years.

I stayed for about four years.

And then I couldn't take it anymore.

So I quit.

There was just one small problem.

I had completely forgotten that I had signed a two-year non-compete.

My former boss, Ken, wasn't particularly worried about most of my accounts.

He was worried about CRU.

I had taken the account from about $10,000 to $250,000 in my first year, and Ken knew how close Louis and I were.

He also knew that if I left, Louis would want to go with me.

I tried to negotiate my way out of the non-compete.

At one point, I was sitting in my lawyer's office, on the phone with Ken.

He said:

"Why should I give you anything? I have everything. You have nothing."

And from there, it got ugly.

For six months, his lawyers hounded me.

I cried every day.

What made the timing particularly wonderful was that I had just moved to Florida to get away from all the drama in New Jersey.

Apparently the drama had my forwarding address.

I had also just had LASIK surgery and developed terrible light sensitivity. I couldn't leave the house without very dark sunglasses.

So there I was.

Newly arrived in Florida.

Being chased by lawyers.

Crying every day.

Wearing dark sunglasses everywhere I went.

And about to assume an alias.

In retrospect, it looked much more exciting than it actually was.

For the next two years, I worked through a friend's company as Susan Blake.

Susan answered emails.

Susan worked with clients.

Susan sold promotional products.

Susan apparently had quite a nice little career.

Meanwhile, Louis somehow managed to get CRU released from Motivators so that I could continue working with the account.

To this day, I'm not entirely sure how he pulled that off.

But he did.

Eventually, the two years were over.

The lawyers were gone.

The non-compete was finished.

And I could finally be Rhonda Blum again.

You would think that would be the end of the story.

It wasn't.

Years later, I was at a huge CRU event at CSU in Colorado.

There were about 5,000 Christians there.

And me.

At some point, I was talking to someone I had worked with during the Susan years.

We were having a perfectly normal conversation when he suddenly stopped.

"You sound a lot like Susan."

Uh-oh.

I looked at him.

"Do you want to hear a secret?"

He did.

"All Long Island Jews sound the same."

There is one more thing.

After all the lawyers, all the crying, the non-compete, the dark sunglasses, and two years of being Susan Blake, Ken called me.

He wanted to know if I wanted to come back to work for him.

Apparently he'd forgotten:

"I have everything. You have nothing."

I declined.

Perhaps the best review of the entire Susan Blake era came from a woman I really didn't like.

She told Louis she liked Susan better.