Eventually the report comes back:
The Good:
- HeadRoom has an amazingly strong position in its market.
- All payables, customer refunds, bank loans are current.
- Website traffic is stellar.
- Product is excellent and doesn't come back broke.
The Bad
- Payroll is too big.
- Manufacturing isn't efficient enough.
- Too much inventory, not enough cash in the bank.
- Not enough growth into broader markets
The Ugly
- Sales are 30% down, without much hope for an upturn.
- The company is far from sustainable with those numbers.
The good part about being the boss is you get to take credit for the successes, the bad part is you also get the credit for the failings.
...sigh...
So let's talk for a second: I'm pretty good at the marketing and product developement stuff. I've got a good head for people and how theey think, and I've got good, broad technical chops so I knoe what will work and what's possible to develop at a given level of resource availability. But I don't really know diddly when it comes to contribution margins, debt to equity ratios, and pinching pennies. When someone knows what to look for, in a company, my skills---and lack thereof---are apparent.
...sigh...
All that bad stuff really wasn't that bad though. For example the first 6 months of 2007 we made 3% net profit. We worked very hard on internal efficiencies and the first six months of 2008 we made 6% profit, which is decent, but then there's that ugly stuff.
By the time we got to the end of 2008 any moneys made in the first half was gone by years end. I don't have to tell you bad the economy is at the moment, the situation was as serious as it gets with a company before a complete implosion into bankruptcy, liquidation, or just death.
Time for a board meeting and some tough decisions.
.... sigh ....
Wonder what's going to happen? Here at HeadRoom we all wondered what's going to happen.
