It's kind of a long story but I'll try to condense it a little. Here is the short, short version for the TL;DR crowd. A business decision was made and my boss, his boss and his boss's boss have all lost their job along with many others.
And now the rest of the story.
The company I work for is run by a family in Houston. They are hugely successful in that region. About ten or so years ago they decided to try and open new markets throughout the bulk of the rest of the country. They set up a company to support all these markets and hired a COO to manage that side of the company. Initially they had some good success in most areas, some markets never where profitable and they where axed years ago. Well, for the last three or four years most of these markets have just been bleeding money, ours included. I came into this mess about two and a half years ago. The GM at that time had just completed his masters degree and basically was just biding his time until he landed the job he wanted. They let him linger on for a while but about a year and a half ago they had no choice but to do something with him because he was basically content in letting our market fade away. This is where my current boss, we'll call him JB comes in. In the last half of last year we were able to stop the bleeding (losing around 4k per month) and ended up the year breaking even. This is the first year in five years our market has turned a profit. And that was with spending $40k on keeping our fleet of four late model piece of E36 M3 Ford trucks on the road. (Seriously the Ford Motor Company can kiss my hairy ass. And every on of them still need work.)
So yesterday JB calls us all into his office and tells us the family has decided to cut the company back down, close most of the markets outside of their core region and liquidate all the assets. Because we are profitable our market has been saved however JB's position has been eliminated and we are going to be run remotely from another market. This Friday is his last day.
Now, I understand it's a business decision and the name of the game is to make money. But why eliminate the position of someone who has proven himself and has a drive and a vision?
We had a plan in place to make 2014 a great year, we were going to try and aggressively grow our market share and hopefully aggressively grow our revenue now that we have the basics in order and a good team in place. This came completely out of left field. The COO is gone , the DVP's are gone and the entire support company they set up is gone except for three people.
I don't know what this is going to mean for us, how the day to day stuff is going to work. I don't know how they can expect to run an office remotely. I am very concerned about job security. Actually that's putting it mildly, I'm pretty much berkeleying gutted.
On a personal level JB is the only real friend I have here. I've worked with him for six+ years including the previous job. We don't agree on much of anything besides fast cars and bikes and frequently argue over politics and the like because we have such different world views. But he is one of very few people in this world I consider a true friend. The good news for him is they want him in the company. They want him to move and take over a troubled market out there. They have offered him butt loads of money to make the move (his words). Less than a month ago his dad just moved back to town after 7 years of living in Hawaii. He doesn't want to move and he is looking at an opportunity with the company we used to work for, that's if they don't fight him too hard over the non compete agreement. If he stay's I'm sure he'll do everything in his power to put the final nail in our coffin and run this company out of town. And with him on board I have no doubt they'll be able to do that. He'll land on his feet but man it just sucks.
JB was our pitbull, He fought hard for us and our guy's. He battled day after day to get them to let us have the flexibility that we need to become a viable market. He is the one that made us profitable by sticking his neck out there and going against the failed business model they wanted us to follow.
Tomorrow he is going to try and cram as much information down my throat as possible in preparation for our meeting Friday with our new GM. I have no idea how it's going to be structured, how we are going to handle vendors and inventory and all the little emergency's that pop up day to day when I'm out on a job. Because as of Friday it's just me one supervisor, a salesman and four crew-members.
Anyway I feel like a rug was just pulled out from under me. I still haven't got my head wrapped around it.
I hope your New Year is starting out better than mine.
Edit; this throws a entirely new kink into this post I made a while ago,http://grassrootsmotorsports.com/forum/off-topic-discussion/should-i-stay-or-should-i-go-work-issues/75920/page1/
Meet the new boss tomorrow, hopefully it's informative.
