The Falling Empire

It’s a beautiful last Thursday of the month and I’m a little anxious because I have a couple of minutes to get myself ready for a finance team meeting taking place in 10minutes’ time.

I get up from my desk, grab my diary and a pen for taking down notes, but first I will need a cup of coffee just next door. The office kitchen is beautiful, everything single component of the kitchen is a cut above the best.

Whoever was responsible really paid attention to details from the design, appliances and furniture. I walk towards the coffee machine and select a cappuccino with extra milk. Everything about this company is very impressive, the location for starters is at a very upmarket and the company owns the land and the property on which we are located as Head Office of the company.

I walk towards the glass sliding door to step outside to admire the beautiful view and to take in some fresh air coming from the huge dam, which is 5kms away. As I look around the surrounding business properties around our office, I see two international car dealerships across the road BMW and VW. This is where the who's who come to buy their luxury vehicles and there’s many of those around this neighborhood.

As I raise my eyeline just above the horizon of the high office buildings around our office, I can see the dam with boats and jet skiing of the elite Billionaires staying around the neighborhood. The dam is so huge, if you didn’t know you’ll mistaken it for a coastline because of the upmarket residential houses built around the edge of the dam. My Boss lives in the area and I was once invited to play at our corporate golf event inside their estate with some of our clients and his business associates.

Speaking of which, a black G63 Brabus Mercedes Benz top of the range pulls over the parking, branded with the company name and logo on the driver and passenger doors. It’s my Boss the CEO of the company and his wife the CFO.

I quickly grabbed my cup of cappuccino and made my way to the Boardroom.

“Good morning, everyone”, said the Boss Lady Yolanda, “Good morning mem”, answered the team.

The first thing that caught my attention is the beauty of the Boss lady, top to bottom she is on point and looking exquisite. Starting at the top, I didn’t help but to notice the beautiful and glossy black shoulder length straight Peruvian weave she was wearing, which contrast her beautiful light skin. She was wearing a baby blue Luis Vuitton corporate blouse with dark blue tight fit Luis Vuitton jeans, with light purple LV high hills shoes that match her LV handbag. She has a typical average body size of an African woman; I would say she is a size 32 if I was to estimate because my girlfriend is the same body size.

“Thank you all for coming, the reason for this meeting is to make you aware that as the CFO of this company, I am not happy with our Capex and Opex numbers for year-to-date. We are 60% over budget and we are only at the halfway point of our financial year, and I would like to know why?”.

Her phone went off with an incoming call.

“Please excuse me”, she got up and went outside the Boardroom.

There was complete silence in the Boardroom. I took a big sip on my cup of cappuccino. As I looked around the room, everybody was deep in thoughts digesting what we’ve just heard and present in the room was, 2 Accountants, 2 Chartered Accountants, payroll, admin and logistics.

As a Financial Analyst for the team, I couldn’t stop wondering as to how could something like this be possible because on paper our internal processes look good on paper, and we have just had an external audit by KPMG which is an international audit firm, and we got a clean audit.

The door opened and Boss lady walked in, “Sorry about that”, while taking a quick look at her phone one more time as to ensure that the phone call was terminated.

“I want all of you to double check our numbers because I am getting a big heat from Sepp (CEO and husband), asking me about how possible this is because our coal production output has not increased for year-to-date. We both don’t understand how are we over budget by such big margins.”

She took an all-round look at everyone seated on table.

“I want all of you guys to get on top of things because, we are now looking like we don’t know what we are doing”

The door opened, and Sepp picked inside and spoke

“Hello hello everyone”, before we could respond he said, “Yolanda, we going to be late”.

The Boss lady got up and said, “I have to go, meeting adjourn”.

Everybody in the room seemed semi paralyzed, judging by how difficult it was to get up.

The reason why this was hard for everybody in the room was because as the Finance department we have an oversight to the entire value chain of the company.

There is nothing as painful as being part of a losing team, the reason why people in general gravitate away from anybody experiencing hardships in their life, it’s because people turn to be close minded about certain things. Remember the saying ‘when days are dark friends are few’, this is usually true because nobody wants to be part of a losing team.

This is primarily because this time requires one to self-reflect and every time anybody introspects, chances are that people will have to make changes and change is painful, transformation of any kind is not comfortable. This was part of what was ahead of us. There is nothing uncomfortable as looking at the person in the mirror and question that person and ask that person difficult questions and they must be honest.