“Are you insane?” one of the managers called out. “Do you know the scale of the problem?”

“Forget the scale of the problem,” I said. “And forget about Wall Street. Let’s just look at each of the divisions, one by one, and see if we can make money. Let’s start with the worst money bleeder, the Internet business.

“Fish,” I said, “supposing we just cut the advertising to zero. You wouldn’t need forty telemarketers then.”

“True,” our most senior manager, Michael Fischberger, replied.

“And how much tech support is going to support those new sales?”

“More than half,” he responded. “We could probably eliminate sixty positions there without the new sign-up,” he added, now clearly getting it.

“And how much more would we lose if we did it?”

“Very little. Most of the new sign-ups are quitting anyway because we can’t service them properly. In fact, if we didn’t have to worry about so much new business, we could probably take better care of our regular accounts, and they’d stay with us forever. Not only that, but we could cut hundreds of thousands in connectivity costs we’re paying to hook up new cities where we have almost no clients now and just service our top twenty markets. This would cut our tech cost as well.”

“It looks to me,” I said, “like if we do this we could go from negative a million a month to positive a million in a month.”

The finance guys had out their calculators now. “Well, positive half a million looks more like it,” they said. “And with the severance cuts and such, you’re looking at closer to two or three months.”

“Let’s not quibble over details,” I said. “A million, half a million; one month, two months. The point is we’d be making money. Even our worst loser would be a cash cow.

“Now look at the telecom side. We’re already making money, but there’s surely plenty of fat.”



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