8 Years, 7 Months, 1 Day - Democratic Underground

Xithras

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Mon Feb-02-09 05:23 PM
Original message

8 Years, 7 Months, 1 Day

I came into my office today to pay the bills. I paid the rent on the office, my electric bill, the gas bill, and the water bill. I wrote paychecks for my eight employees, cut a check for the premiums for our employee insurance policies, and made sure that our D&D coverage was square. It was a beginning of the month day like any other. Except it wasn't.

Into my utility bills I included letters requesting that service to my office be terminated as of the 6th. Into my rent bill I included the contractually mandated 30-day notice that I would be leaving. Into my employee insurance policy bill I included notices of termination, informing them that each employees company paid coverage will end as of March 1.

As for the employees, none were shocked. Business has been down since July of last year, and we haven't pulled in any new contracts since November. By mid December, most of our longer term contracts had been "frozen" or cancelled outright. By mid January, I realized that I'm paying programmers nearly $100k a year to wash windows and work on open source projects to keep themselves busy. They realized the same thing. They knew what we tried everything. We tried to get customers to sign deferred contracts to show future revenue that would qualify the company for loans. We cut rates by 60% and the programmers offered to work for a 50% pay cut. When our secretary left in November, we didn't refill her position. When the contracts for our contract programmers ran out in August, we didn't extend them. We even cancelled the bottled water service. They knew the bank accounts were empty.

There weren't any tears when I handed each of them their paychecks with their legally required notice of termination. They technically work here until the end of the month, but they know that there will be no more paychecks. There were few smiles when I revealed that our disaster account had $11,000 left in it after the bills were paid, and I handed each a $1,000 termination check. Nobody was sad, but nobody could find any happiness at that moment either.

I invited the employees to come back later this week if they wanted. If anyone wanted to help pack up the offices, I offered to let them keep their old computers as compensation (no small offer since we just swapped all of our PC's out for top-of-the-line gear last year). There were no takers...everyone just wanted to leave. By noon they had. I guess I'll post everything on CraigsList.

This office was once a hub of creativity. At its height, 16 programmers, graphic artists, salespeople, and project managers came together to come up with creative solutions to problems facing small businesses. We helped those family-run operations become more efficient, improve inventory flow, sell across the Internet, and market to wider audiences. We worked hard to try and improve the lives of people like ourselves, and for the most part we were successful at it.

8 years, 7 months, and 1 day ago I walked into an office with a plan to start a business that would be everything that my previous dotcom employers hadn't been. We'd have a good business plan, we'd be fair and generous with our employees, we'd be honest with our customers. It was me, a friend, a dream, and a rattling A/C vent that I swore I'd have fixed in a week.

Today, it's just me and that still-rattling vent. I think I'll fix it before I leave.