Sorry, this will be long, have to let it out. So I have been working in the company for four years. I am now the most senior person there since all my other colleagues, who were there from close to the beginning (company is only 5 years old), left. I have moved through all the aspects of the business, starting with customer service, back office, creating SOPs and procesess, onboarding suppliers, to now managing “IT projects” and tried to keep our stupid systems working as best as possible, despite all the horrendous IT development from our non-existant external non-dedicated programmers (like 4 external people putting in together only 40hours a week). We have increased the turnover and number of orders year to year (16times more from 2021 to 2022), without actually hiring more people. People just left all the time and we hired new ones. At this moment, we have I think two people more than at the start when we were doing basically nothing.
We have been onboarding new suppliers left and right, opening new marketplaces to sell on. Even with all the extra orders, we were not making profit. We were just doing more work for essentially the same profit/loss. Two years ago, me and couple of my former colleagues came to management to convince them to stop the development, stabilize our systems and start focusing our efforts on low amounts with quality instead of low quality with quantity being preferred. We were not heard. Two very capable colleagues left last year because of the poor management, bad development and simply not being able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. There have been many losses but these two were the most crucial I feel.
The company made loss year on year and now the investors who are paying for the company for three years now have lost their patience. Today, my two bosses presented a new plan for the company to me and my other colleague. One boss is leaving but still is partial owner and will be on the board of directors. The other boss wants us two to be the two heads running the company. We are supposed to scale back all our operations, terminate supplier contracts, reduce our orders by 60%, terminate the whole sales team and couple people from the backoffice team. One sales guy is being offered a position in the investor company, as he is a friend of a friend and younger, more capable people are being let go. They simply do not know the right people.
All this because they would not heed our advice two years ago. If they did, they would not need to fire anyone almost out of the blue and we would have had the chance to stabilize and do things properly. Also we would still have some capable employees. Me and my colleague are supposed to come back tomorrow with our two picks of who to terminate so we can further cut our costs.
But everything in the plan is built on me and my friend being the two heads and leading two parts of the business. Him being the HR, payroll, customer service lead and me leading all IT and logistics projects and stabilization of our systems. Such a big decision, we are supposed to play such integral roles in the new company structure and we were not consulted even once in this whole process of coming up with the plan. I guess they were sure that this part is a given.
That is however, not what is going to happen as I am putting in my notice tomorrow. I have already accepted an offer from one of the two former colleagues, who left last year. I was going to put the notice in only next month after having signed a contract with my new company, but me quitting now affects also my current colleagues who might get fired because of the restructuring process. So with me quitting now, there is a chance, one of my colleagues will be spared, as he has at least part of my knowledge as well, and therefore could help with covering my workload. Rest (read like 95%) of my duties however will be left to god knows who, as nobody has the comprehensive know-how of how our internal systems work other than me, if you do not count the programmers who were building it and changing it. However, they usually do not remember what they programmed last week. They do not remember old features and more importantly they do not know the actual process and how the system is used, as they never worked with it.
There is a two months notice period in my country though, so everyone will learn of the new plan on Friday and everyone is still going to be there until end of October. My decision should however change the plan a little I think. They will have only one day to come up with alternative plan or they will have to postpone firings for a month at least. I am very eager to see what will tomorrow look like, when I quit.