Ruining a Business for Dummies

[baz67]

I work or soon to be used to work for a company that had a good ROR. It was around 20-30% on 5-10M is business when our VP of ops was in charge. However, his boss feels the need to take over. I work for a small corporation and this guy came from a huge coporation. He is your stereotypical large corportation lacky. Let's see how we can demolish this division in six short months.

He starts by firing the VP of ops on some lame excuse. It was basically a personallity conflict. Who gives a crap if the guy is rough. He produces, period. The problem is most of our client base came to us with him. He was forced to sign a non compete, but that does not mean a thing in our niche business. So business just fall off the map.

Then he puts person in charge that who is nowhere near ready for that position. This person has no idea how to run the outside projects and folds too easily in negotiations. So now instead of making a return we are in the red.

Now for the grand show of his genius. Our largest vender askes for an outrageous change order. They were owed some, but nowhere near what they were asking. Anyway they settle on a large six figure sum. Are you ready for the greatness of his wisdom? After they settle they decide to close the division. Why not keep the cash and tell the vender to pound sand? BTW, the vender is friends with the former VP of ops.

So the short story is I am soon to be out of a job. The good new is I saw this coming and planned for a plan B.

[Turbo67camaro]

That happened to me twice in my career. Both times after the founder of the company sold it. In comes the corporate bone heads who can't find their a$$, and both companies eventually went out of business. In both cases, I left shortly after the new owners took over. I hung around long enough to determine if they were idiots or not.

On a positive note, my current company was purchased by another recently, and in this case it has turned out to be a good thing, so far at least.

[LowBuckX]

I feel ya. Near future comes layoffs for me and a few coworkers because of what I see as stupid buisness /hireing practices. Tax breaks does not equal good employees.

[BonzoHansen]

Three cheers for proactive plan B

[Paul_J]

Sounds like this could have been a chapter right out of 'Atlas Shrugged' Sorry to hear the looters have hold of the company!

[BA.]

that sucks Brian......... I got to see similar workings at my old workplace as we hired on old AIG VP after AIG VP until there a couple dozen of them there at my old job. They pretty much ruined things and also couldn't make a sound IT decision to save their lives.....but they certainly drove home the bad practices.

I created/executed Plan B as well. Good luck man!

[baz67]

The funny thing is you can not even say the choices he made was to make the shareholders money on the backs of labor. There are only 6 shareholders in the company and they all lost.