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When Lord Astor found himself on the sinking Titanic, he was offered a seat in a lifeboat along with the women and children on account of his prestigious status as the richest person on the ship. He declined, saying apocryphally, “At this point, I have seen it all.”

Sometimes, I feel the same (though I still think I would have got in the lifeboat). I have been a management consultant at three different firms (M&A-focused, operational, strategic); an investment banker; an engineer; a marketer; an executive at multi-billion dollar corporations (at least three); a private-equity-owned company CEO, and a public company CEO. I have worked in petrochemical engineering, telecom, financial services, education, technology, consumer retail, manufacturing, the government, and the museum sector. And once upon a time, I worked at a turnaround company.

Many years ago, a large electronics company (let’s call it “Electro”) had recently been bought by private equity. A Big Six consulting firm had produced a slide with the list of their own 10 biggest clients. Electro was number three. I had never heard of this multi-billion-dollar company before. I used all the products they produced (various electrical appliances), just under competitor brands. However, I thought that any company that could afford to spend several million dollars in systems consulting from a Big Six accounting firm could surely afford to pay me, so I did some background research to learn more.

I found that Electro had completed a massive rationalization program, going from 15 to four factories in a matter of months, without decreasing their annual revenue. I was intrigued. For some reason, the famous name of the CEO never came up in my research.

A few days later, I sent in a resume to the Human Resources Manager. To my surprise, the vice president of marketing called me – on a Sunday at 9 a.m.

“Did I wake you?” asked Kevin, politely.

“Not at all,” I lied, in as lively a manner as I could muster at that time of the morning on a Sunday, when I had just leapt out of bed to answer the ringing phone. The company must be in dire straits if they needed me badly enough to call me at this time, I thought. Either that, or they are all workaholics.

On the following Thursday, I went to the headquarters for a full day of interviews with various marketing and product heads. One interview was with the COO. He made it clear that I was joining a team – a takeover team. “We go in and sort out a company and then we move on,” he said, “Else it gets boring.” By the end of the day, I was offered a job as assistant product manager for a major product division.

My future boss, the actual product manager, was not present in the office unfortunately. She was a bit miffed that I had been offered a position in her group without her approval. So, I went back to headquarters again, and had another two-hour interview with her. Then, she formally offered me the job that I had been verbally offered the week before, but not before telling me that she had been hoping for a man. 

“Well, I can’t do anything about that,” I replied.

One of Kevin’s first questions had been my expected salary level. I told him a number a little less than I had made in my last job. 

“I think we can manage that,” he replied.

It was therefore somewhat of a surprise to receive the offer letter and find that he was offering me a slightly lower amount. I was given 24 hours to accept the offer. They hadn’t even asked for references.

When I joined, the CEO had been in place for about eight months, fresh from his victory in another industry, where he had turned around a company and then sold it to their strategic competitor for a massive profit. Before I started work, I had read his best-selling book. It seemed the basic strategy for success was to halve a company’s costs while maintaining its revenues. He was seeking to have a new word created in the English language based on his last name, and meaning “to turn a company around at lightning speed, to protect and enhance shareholder value”. He wrote it as a verb in his business lexicon, but I did not find it either in the Oxford English Dictionary or Webster’s. 

The whole office was in awe of the CEO, speaking of him in hushed tones. “I would not like to be in their shoes when he bawls somebody out,” one employee told me, while glancing furtively behind him. I was looking forward to finally meeting the great man. Eventually, I did, at a management party. I watched him talking with his exec team, waited for a good moment, and then I went right up to him and introduced myself. He had a big smile and a deep tan. His hair was almost peroxide blond. I had a copy of his book and asked him to sign it. I said that like him, I had also studied engineering at university.

“I bet I was a worse engineer than you were,” he said, charmingly.

“I don’t think that’s even possible!” I replied, cheekily.

Before we could have a laugh or chat further, one of his staffers whisked him away. 

When I joined, I found out the real nature of the company’s financial position. It had extremely aggressive predictions for its end-of-year sales. These were entirely based on the sales force’s predictions, so the company felt justified announcing these expanding sales to Wall Street. What no one cared to mention was that the sales force were told that if they did not increase their sales forecasts by 10 percent or more, they would be fired; and that if they did not then meet these forecasts, they would find themselves joining the 6,000 others on the recent ex-employee list.

So many people had recently been let go, I found it almost unbelievable. For example, in cost accounting, there used to be 24 people. By the time I joined, there were three: the head guy, one assistant, and one more junior fellow. Everyone I met at the company had been there seven months or less. After a week, I was almost an old timer.

“This CEO is going to turn the business around and make everyone rich in the process through stock options,” I was told. “He really knows how to run a business and talk up the stock price.” Indeed, in my first week, the CEO spent three days in Manhattan doing just that, and the share price went up two bucks, or 6 percent. No one mentioned what a nice fellow he was. Then again, in his book, he wrote, “You’re not in business to be liked. Neither am I. We’re here to succeed. If you want a friend, get a dog.”

We had very intense security systems, especially for those times, but even for today. We had hand monitors that matched your fingerprints to allow access to headquarters. The CEO had a bodyguard that travelled with him at all times. Given it had taken the CEO only 18 months to turn around his previous venture, I figured within two years, the company would be sold, I would be out of a job, but I would be rich – or at least, well off. So, I thought I had the next couple of years sorted. How wrong I was.

The head of marketing for one major division had just “miraculously” managed to sell tons of products to a big retailer at a time of year when, traditionally, retailers did not buy them. Everyone was hailing that as huge win, “opening the closed sales window”. This had been done by offering the product at knock-down prices. It was reported later that the retailer was simply taking advantage of an opportunity to buy goods now at very cheap prices, store them in a large warehouse, and sell them as needed in their shops over the next few years. However, this made Electro look good as it could report higher sales numbers. 

My job was simply to aid in the marketing of outdoor products. I went to retailers and researched competitors. One retailer carried huge quantities of our competitor’s products. Another hardware store had a lousy display, and a high-end product store didn’t carry our stuff at all. We had a long way to go.

My faith in the company kept swinging back and forth.

“We have a completely new product range. We’re going to wipe the floor with our competitors as well as reduce our costs,” said Marketing. Hooray! Visions of shares skyrocketing upwards towards the moon filled my head.

“We have no way of making our targets this quarter. We’ve missed them every month so far,” said Finance.

“Our product ships with parts missing, and we have no quality control,” said Engineering. 

Thoughts of no bonus and worthless shares clouded my view.

I discussed our product strategy with my boss, the marketing manager. Being a former consultant, I was given several lectures by the team on how I must be sure I am collaborative and a true team member, as they had used consultants before and consultants were awful and think they are too good for anybody. This was the same lowly view as the CEO. On the first page of his book, under the heading “Why you should listen to me,” he had written: “I’m not an academic or consultant making a living just by studying problems. Neither am I an MBA from some fancy high-priced school, who was anointed into the corporate elite.” I was glad that, when I had met him, I had not mentioned my work experience or business school, even though Electro was now paying millions to different kinds of consultants to help the company improve.

The CEO wanted all employees to purchase stock, “even if you have to get into debt to do so”. There were posters throughout the building giving information on the Employee Stock Option Purchase Plan. I didn’t have any money. I hoped the CEO would not demand I invest over and above my signing-on stock option deal. I couldn’t afford to make a lot of money right then. Anyway, I was just a stupid consultant. What did I know? If the company’s turnaround didn’t succeed, it would surely be because the CEO had employed too many consultants throughout the organization.

My job was being continuously redefined, even in week three. Nothing was being changed in the job description, but new activities were being added all the time. My job now included forecasting company sales, designing next year’s product line, producing our catalog, managing our relationship with the marketing organization that ran our focus groups and consumer service hotlines, and solving production problems in the factory. Not bad for someone who had never worked in a corporation before and was just a stupid uncollaborative former consultant.

My colleagues were extremely dynamic. Everyone talked fast, thought fast and worked through lunch breaks. Either that or they ate fast, too – so fast that I did not even notice. I hoped my boss had got over the fact I was not a man. I wore trousers to work a lot to make the acceptance process easier for her.

I loved our product line. The low-end product looked fabulous at point of sale. Even I wanted to buy one. If only the ignitor worked and the paint didn’t peel off in the first year of use. Since most of the senior executives, like my boss, came from consumer-packaged goods companies, the plan was to market the hell out of the products and thus create a pull consumer demand that would force retailers to stock loads of our products. To that end, we spent more than twice as much on marketing and advertising as our nearest competitor.

We employed a market research company to report on the strengths and weaknesses in our current packaging. Their study consisted of going into a few hardware stores and looking at the set-ups on the retail floor, and the quality of the packaging on the shelves. Products were missing parts, packages were seriously slashed and ripped. We all agreed that this was terrible and all damaged cartons should be immediately removed from the stores, and floor samples with missing parts should be replaced. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

I was given the task of telling our head salesman for one of our major clients. I had forgotten the expression “Don’t shoot the messenger” before I made the call.

“We need to remove all damaged or incomplete products from all stores at once,” I said excitedly. “Our company represents quality. We must have a quality display.”

He set me straight: “What you request is quite impossible.” He pointed out that, in every store, customers would take bits off floor samples and replacing them would be a costly and repetitive task. Whatever we did, parts would still be removed by customers who needed spare parts because their product had arrived without some components due to the quality control issues described earlier. Replacing all damaged cartons would also cost a fortune.

“So, what do you want me to do?” he asked.

“Curl up and cry in a corner,” did not seem to be the appropriate response. I meekly told him that I would leave it to his discretion as I handed him our list of recommendations, which had words like “remove” and “replace” in capital letters in all Action Item spaces. Being a product manager was not as easy as I had thought.

In my fourth week, I went to visit our manufacturing plant in another state. I was learning the real technical problems of running the business. Engineering wanted (and needed) to limit the number of SKUs to keep costs down. Marketing wouldn’t agree, arguing that they needed variety in order to sell product – many retailers wanted a unique line to aid them in avoiding price wars on identical products with their competitors. I tried to persuade our sales head to agree to minimize casting sizes through adding other easy-to-manufacture and assemble pieces. It was a long and painful meeting. I was happy to get him down from 24 SKUs in castings in our current line to only eight for the new range.

“Why haven’t you got it down to three as we agreed?” my demanding boss asked me, when I spoke to her on the phone.

While at the plant, I was excited to get to make a real decision all by myself. Kurt was shipping one of our new product lines. He dashed into the conference room where I was sitting and told me he had a problem. One of the side tables did not sit horizontally, but rather tilted downwards at a slight angle. After discovering a protractor, we went to the item in question and calculated the downward angle and verified its tilt.

“What should I do?” Kurt asked anxiously. “I need to make a decision today because production wants to run the line in order to meet shipping deadlines.”

I didn’t have a clue. I had no experience in what to do in these situations, and equally little briefing by my colleagues.

The resident engineer pointed out that the side table was still fully functional.

“What did we do in the past in this kind of a situation?” I asked him. This was probably a bad question as the CEO says in his book, “I don’t care what happened last year. I care about where we are going to go tomorrow.”

“Oh, we shipped it,” said the engineer.

“What does this product retail for anyway?” I asked Kurt.

“Thirty dollars.” It was the lowest-priced product in our range.

“Well, ship it then. What does a $30 customer expect? They’ll probably just think that they didn’t assemble it quite right anyway.” I felt no guilt. Sure, it would be better to have perfect manufacturing, but no customer had ever complained about side-table-tilt before so it couldn’t have been a big issue.

My second major decision came only a few minutes later. Ted in Packaging had a problem. Our new smoker box packaging design meant the smoker now fitted in a box two inches shorter than our past boxes for this product. The graphics with our logo and information would no longer fit on the outside of the smaller box.

“Should we tell our graphics designers to build a new printing mold so that if we get an order in for these smokers, we can deliver it without a delay?” asked Ted. 

“Can’t we just add cardboard to the base of our current box to fill the extra two inches?” I asked.

“That would be Plan B,” said Ted. “What is Plan A?”

“How many of these smokers do we sell?”

“When do you mean?”

“In the last quarter.”

“We haven’t sold any in the last 12 months,” said Keith, a sales guy who had been moved into customer service with all the recent employee changes, but happened to be in the conference room at the time Ted came in. “And this smoker dates back a decade and is exactly the same as one that we sell regularly today, except for the logo.”

“OK,” I decided, “The decision is to stick to the current packaging, and in the unlikely event that we get a customer call asking for a 10-year-old smoker for the first time, we will offer them the identical newer product. If they have a problem with that, tell them to call me.”

Ted left looking relieved.

Two problems solved in one day. I hadn’t solved this many problems in a year in consulting.

Back in headquarters, we started to receive a lot of memos about costs such as: eliminate all travel whenever possible (I didn’t mind, I didn’t want to be in the middle of nowhere at a factory again); pay your own lunches when you travel; curtail the purchase of office supplies; conserve energy – turn off the lights in your office and turn off your computer when you leave for the day; and “all expenses over $1,000 are to be considered capital, all capital must be charged to an Appropriations Report and approved by the Chairman of the corporation.” My airfare to the factory cost $1,200. I couldn’t imagine going to the CEO with my plane receipt in my hand, asking for his approval.

A company meeting was called to explain the reason for the clamp-down on costs. Kevin asked us what would happen to our share price if the company as a whole managed to save an extra million dollars. Therein followed a fiasco of miscalculations. Finally, we got to the calculation: after tax dollars divided by issued shares multiplied by 20 (the current P/E multiple that the company was trading at, which was a bit low for our industry segment).

Kevin demanded a calculator. I just had to show off. “It would go up about 15 cents,” I yelled out.

“Fourteen cents,” said a woman with a calculator. I impressed quite a few people that day. I couldn’t resist muttering, “Thank you, Wharton Business School,” under my breath. It was a pity that the CEO was not in the meeting, given what he thought of prestigious schools.

“That is 15 cents added to the current predicted EPS of $1.50 at year end,” continued Kevin. “How much extra does that put in our pockets?” The average person at my level got 10,000 share options and thus would gain an additional $0.15 x 10,000 = $1,500. If I was given free lunch on the company every day, at an average of $8 per time, I would save $8 x 5 x 50 = $2,000. That would be 600 more dollars to me by not following the austerity measures. 

One week, I met with a major supplier. We were hoping to cut down our huge castings cost (the most expensive product part) by a factor of two. When the CEO started, he had told all suppliers to reduce their prices by 10 percent or lose all their contracts. This was a very fast way for the company to reduce costs. However, this supplier had refused. We had still stuck with them as after looking around for a cheaper company, we had not been able to find one. 

In my sixth or seventh week, we had a big strategy meeting. As I waited for the COO to come in, I told my boss’s boss that I had not found our factory in Missouri to be as backward technologically as all the employees at headquarters had been warning me. A few moments later, the COO walked in and told everyone how antiquated he thought that factory was. In the meeting, he also gave me a big fright by describing the product as “crap.”

I remembered the famous occasion in England when the chairman of Ratners, one of the biggest chains of jewelry stores in the country, described his products by the exact same word in a board meeting. Somebody leaked this to the press. Customers disappeared in droves. No man wanted to be caught dead giving his girlfriend “crap” for their birthday. Ratners’ share price collapsed. The company was taken over, and the “Ratners” brand name disappeared forever. I wanted to warn the COO. Luckily, he described most of our competitors’ products in the same way.

We then learned about all the consultants we were using in detail. I found this confusing as I knew from his book that the CEO hated consultants. We had a presentation from Market Research and Competitive Behavior consultants. Then a presentation by our Packaging Redesign consultants. And then finally a presentation by our Consumer Research consultants. The first presentation showed how few employees we had in each area compared to our competitors. That is what happens when you downsize the workforce by over 50 percent. This was used as rationale to say we needed to rehire many more employees in order to have enough resources (e.g. sales force) to compete effectively with other manufacturers. I was even more confused. We had just fired a lot of people. Now we were going to rehire them? 

To understand any necessary improvement in safety features as we laid out our new designs, I had a quick visit with our safety consultant, Bill. It was a difficult conversation as, for legal reasons, Bill could not admit that any of our products could possibly ever cause damage to an individual, even if they chose to walk across the hot coals at the base of the burners. He replied to most of my comments with, “I would argue with you but I’m not disagreeing with you.” When I finally asked him what exactly it was that he did at the company, he replied, “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.” What a great job to have! We never mentioned the word “safety” in our meetings, the very idea that a product could ever be unsafe being unacceptable. 

In my eighth week, the CEO was featured in the local magazine, dressed as a warrior. He was due to go off on a book tour the next week, which made us all happy as whenever he met people externally, our share price went up.  I was off on a trip of my own the next week, back to the factory, to put together a plan for the capital finance that we needed in order to buy new tooling so we could manufacture our new designs, which I would then present to the leadership team. But, as it turned out, I was not going on a trip at all.

That Thursday, a memo went out titled “Salaried Hiring Freeze” which was exactly what it sounds like. No more offers of employment. “What about the 50 percent more we need to add in sales according to the consultants’ presentation?” I wanted to ask.

The next day, I was called into the office of the COO. He told me that the company was actually doing very badly and not meeting required profits, so all the assistant managers were being let go, effective immediately. Well, that was my title, so bye-bye me. At least, they let me keep my stock options. They weren’t worth much at all then, but the company was about to experience a small run up and my luck was in (if you can indeed be lucky when you have just lost your job).

I sold my shares six months later when the world thought an acquisition was coming so the share price had rocketed up. I made a year’s salary. Not bad for six weeks’ work. A few days later, when it was announced that the acquisition would not actually happen, the share price crashed. 

The end of the company was nigh. This is what Wikipedia now says of the CEO:

“He is best known as a turnaround specialist and professional downsizer, although it was later discovered that his reputed turnarounds were elaborate frauds. The ruthless methods he employed to streamline failing companies … won him the nicknames. … However, his career was effectively ended after he engineered a massive accounting scandal at “Electro” that ultimately cost that company its independence. He is barred from serving as an officer of a publicly traded corporation in the United States. His widespread layoffs and accounting frauds have put him on several lists of worst CEOs.”

The company ended up filing for bankruptcy four years after I left. It had been an extraordinary experience for me in the literal sense of the word – there was nothing at all ordinary about those eight weeks.

Janet Lewis Matricciani is a two-time CEO who has worked all over the world and is multilingual, now sharing her business lessons publicly. She can be reached at [email protected].