“Your mother made me watch the FBI interview.” I wince my eyes and face; ouch, that had to hurt her. “Talk about a punch in the gut. I realized what an awesome guy you were, and that I threw it all away. That brought back a lot of pain for me. Once I woke up at the hospital, they told me enough about you that I knew I had lost you.
“That was the first step to my recovery. My disease is like alcoholism; there is no cure. You can lessen the symptoms; I am on some drugs to help, but one act of sex with a stranger, and I am right back. Yeah, that makes it hard to date. You and I both know why we’re here. Our mothers conspire for grandchildren.
“You have the whole world to pick from. I only have you. Anyone else, I might go back to that dark hole I was in. That will never happen. I understand your hate for me. I gave you a hundred reasons to hate me. Therefore, I won’t push you. I won’t beg or even suggest anything. I have done enough to you for a lifetime. I know that you still hurt; you’re not dating. I do hope that I can get you dating someone. You deserve a family and children. That’s it, that’s my story. Now, what did you want to ask?”
I sit stunned. What do you say to that? I mean, what the hell?
I do remember my question, “I was going to ask you, before that twenty-minute speech, do you still take a bit of cream in your coffee?”
She sits stunned, unable to speak. She nods her head yes.
I’m about to call Kim in, but she barges in with a cup of coffee for her. She is laughing her ass off.
I look at her with a confused expression.
She hands the coffee to Vickie, and she calms down before she can say, “You hit the comm button; I heard everything. I just thought it hilarious that after her long-winded apology, all you can do is ask if she still likes cream. I got her coffee last week, she does. Hit the button again, sweetie, and I will leave you all alone.”
Vickie looks at me, “I don’t understand at all what you did. How am I going to implement this on our side of the world?”
She is a client, I set her at ease, this is what I do well, “First, I am going to help. Do you understand what we are even doing?”
Vickie sighs, “Mom said that we combine groups, so it’s more efficient. The same work has to get done, so how can combining them help?”
This is going to be more complicated than I thought; she’s lost.
I start, “Ok, you have what, 160 companies, right?”
She corrects me, “173.”
I continue, “Every single company has an IT department. They have a CIO, a director for servers, software, networking, security, programmers, and other specialists like databases and storage. You have specific software, help desk software, Office, Exchange, and several others in that application group. Each of those has a manager and then workers that do stuff. Some people might support several pieces of software in a smaller company. With me?”
Vickie answers, “Yes. So far.”
I add, “Ok, I remove all 173 CIO’s and replace them with one. I replaced 173 server directors and replaced them with one. The guys doing the work, none of them get replaced. As you said, I still need them to do the work; I just need fewer managers.”
I see understanding in her eyes.
I continue, “Now, because we have fifty guys doing Exchange (email), they aren’t doing other things; they know it better and are more efficient. It’s like a factory; you simplify the work, and people are more productive.”
Vickie is frustrated, “It’s still the same amount of work, though.”
I reply, “Yes, but because they know the software better, they can solve the issues faster.”
She looks at me like a deer in headlights, “It’s still the same work.”
I stand up, “Leave your stuff here and follow me. You need a lesson in making cars.”
I almost laugh as she looks at me like I’m an alien. I take her hand and drag her through the office. Everyone stares at me. I don’t care. We are at the far northwest corner of our floor. They are redoing an old server room and making it into some offices and a conference room.
I announce, “I need some help. I need a nail, a standard screw, Phillips’s screw, and a star screw started in a 2×4. They need pilot holes so Vickie can finish the job. The foreman, Rick, comes over and does as I say. He drills four tiny holes, then starts a nail and three different screw head types.
I tell Vickie, “I want you to hammer the nail in, then use the same three screwdrivers he did to screw in those screws. I will time you.”
She misses the nail, hits it, bends it, straightens it, and then concentrates and hammers in the nail. Now she fumbles with the screwdrivers and screws in the, well, screws.
I say, “A minute thirty-two seconds.”
I tell Rick, “I need twenty nails pilot holed and started like you did the last one.”
He did as I requested.
I smile, “I want you to hammer the nails. No time limit.”
It takes a while, but she hammers in the nails. She got better at it.
I tell Rick, “This time, I need just four.”
He sets them up, and Vickie is smart enough to hammer in the four nails.
I look at her and smile, “Thirty-eight seconds. That’s almost a minute faster. Why? You had practice and did the same thing repetitively. If you did 1000 more, I bet you’re under ten seconds. At one time, cars were made by hand. All 10,000+ parts of a model-T were made by one person. You had just four; imagine 10,000. He made a factory so that he had hundreds of people, each doing one thing. Some things were purchased pre-assembled. Otherwise, he would have had 10,000 people working for him. Instead of taking months to make a car, they were cranking one out every 93 minutes.”
I take her hand, thank the guys, and guide her back to the office.
Vickie is flabbergasted, “I see it now. This is big. I mean, really big.”
I smile, “Yes, it is. It doesn’t matter what my mother is charging your mother; it’s a steal. She will easily recoup the savings in months and will be doing this for decades. So, you see why they are thinking of merging these two companies? Even more savings.”
Vickie asks, “So why the favorable business discounts? Why should we buy from you? Why should you buy from us?”
I reply with a smile, “I want to buy copper. I know of five vendors. One of them is your mother. Because there are so few sellers, the prices tend to be very competitive. It’s an essential commodity; your copper is no better or worse than your competitor. With our agreement, if everything else is equal, I will buy from you. That helps your company. Now one of your companies wants my laser jet toner cartridges. They’re the same price as the five others. You buy from us. We both paid a fair price, yet we both ended up with a sale that we might not have received before.
“If I am more expensive or my quality is inferior, you don’t buy from me. This might sound like baby carrots, but with the size of all our holding companies combined, that’s a lot of extra sales going to us and not our competitors.”
Vickie sits amazed, “How did you come up with this shit?”
I chuckle, “Mom. In my first year, she sent me out to whip our companies into shape. I went to each facility, looked around, asked questions, and looked at budgets. I noticed we spend a crap load of money on management. Adding efficiency worked wonders.”