Well, here it goes. Most of the peeps I know are constantly asking about how my new company is going. I usually say "its going well!" and leave it at that but it occurred to my brother (for the sake of anonymity we'll call him "Nancy") that much time could be saved by simply directing people to a blog where I would chronicle the story of the new company. OK, fine. Of course once you begin a project like that, it kind of takes over and before you know it you are dealing with the next great American novel. The last thing I wanted to do was become an accomplished writer!
For those who know me, there will be certain terminology that may seem confusing. Because I am not sure that its a good idea to tell the full story of my new company including details about working for my LAST company I am going to change names, locations and most of the facts about where I used to work as I chronicle my story. For the sake of the blog I'll call the old company "MegaComm."
OK, so most of you know the first part. I was cheerily working as middle management for MegaComm after my former company, "Megalomegacomm" was purchased in January of '06. By March things looked fairly well tip top. I was being encouraged to pursue my business plan which involved utilizing some research monies to develop new products and I was considering how to expand my personnel in such a way that would be worthwhile rather than merely increasing the workforce. In other words I wanted to hire programmers to create more automation instead of skilled laborers so that my work force's effectiveness would multiply rather than merely increase in an additive fashion. Soon afterwards I was called up to company headquarters in "Pennsylginiaware" for a so called important meeting and some further orientation and leadership training. OK, fine.
The leadership training was actually useful. I wont go into it but I am glad for the increased knowledge. The important meeting was to let me know that it was the intention of our new company to reduce headcount in my department by at least three persons. Naturally this would cripple us. Since our headcount was only seven, all of whom routinely put in more than 40 hours per week it simply wasn't realistic to reduce headcount any further and I immediately began to consider my options.
I certainly argued the point. I illustrated that our revenues exceeded our costing by over 45% and that usually meant that we were doing well (sarcasm intended). To this point I was told that individual departments were not being examined but that Megalomegacomm was making reductions across the board and that nothing could be done. I perceived that there was new business and new products on the horizon and made a good faith effort to win over our new company to increase our headcount instead of reducing it but my heart wasn't really in it. By August I had managed to get my name on the redundancy list. They were reluctant to let me go as they correctly perceived that I was not only the leader of the department and the only managerial level person who understood the products but was the sole sales lead for the products as well. In the end they decided that it didn't matter if I left because they didn't find our business attractive. I'll be shocked if the department still exists in a year.
My main reasoning for leaving was that I had no interest in running a department with 40% of the personnel I needed and further to that point I didn't want to work for a company that made such poor business decisions. So I quietly started rumors around Megalocomm that I would be striking out on my own and laid the inroads to one day peddle my wares within Megalocomm and indeed outside of that same company which apparently was no longer interested in the business themselves.
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