Seems the long-awaited sackful of folding stuff is conditional on there being some kind of sustainable business to put the money into.  They were advised this would mean the loss of the charity tax status of the ‘investment’, but they were adamant. Specifically, they want running costs cut fairly dramatically, to somewhere approaching the ‘revenue’ figures they’ve been given. This isn’t the sort of linkage our financial boys are used to, but we do need this cash.

Now, this isn’t my decision, thankfully, but if it were I’d have to consider:

• rental for the vast amount of allegedly-managed-service office space we currently (partially) occupy – regrettably tied to a cunningly negotiated lease with a get-out clause somewhere around the time of the London Olympics;
• cutting development funding still further from the three-men-and-a-dog in their distant (and cheap) locale, thereby saving maybe 2% of overall costs and further endangering our ability to deliver code that doesn’t fall over in the first month;
• reducing salaries of UK staff who might in other times have accepted a cut but are all still hanging out for overdue salaries, commissions, etc.; or
• cutting the number of people in the UK office.

Funnily enough its the last option that looks most attractive.  Trouble is saying farewell means paying the overdues and in most cases (not mine, sadly) some form of redundancy.  Which is where the mystery investors can help out.  But they won’t invest until costs are cut.

Round and round we go.  Meanwhile a new software fix came out yesterday which looks the standard ‘addresses some known issues’ upgrade, but hidden in the fine text is the ‘data loss could result’ warning.  Questions are being asked as to how such things could slip through our rigorous testing and quality management process.  Not by anyone on the inside, mind you, we’re all stunned there haven’t been more and worse, given that the rigorous quality management process got cut in the last round (lucky bugger).

So I’ve been told my services will no longer be required (how sad!) once the investment comes in and they can pay me what I’m owed (how wonderful!).  Tried to act surprised and keep the smile off my face, which was easy when I realised that we’re still talking ifs and maybes here – the sackful of readies now not likely before Christmas.

I was also too timid to do my rant about the failures of management, but avoided making a complete arse of myself and thereby kept the pay-out promise on the table.  Like Christmas this year, a case of chicken rather than turkey.

Meeting with major client to discuss modifications to software promised some time back for which we now have an agreed, do it by then or its all over, delivery date.  I’m told by our dev guys we’ll crack this easily (mind you they said that about the first date too).  Met with channel guys in cafe across the road beforehand.

Cafe is next to pile of wreaths commemorating victims of recent terrorist bombing which is by way of reminder that things could be worse no matter how badly this meeting goes.  Am reminded of this later when I catch myself wishing for a bombing or similar to set off alarms and terminate meeting.

Me, two representatives of channel and three client people, so we stand a chance of tying any votes if it comes to that.  I have three carefully prepared documents to table and all three stay in my bag throughout, as it quickly becomes apparent that Senthil, the client’s ops manager, will only be happy with documents he’s prepared or at least severely edited.  We spend the first hour arguing over whether our stating the technological background to what we’re endeavouring to produce is our sneaky way of avoiding meeting his requirements.  Initially I see his point, then I progressively come to realise that every time one of us agrees with him he moves his viewpoint further out to ensure argument.

Senthil is short, fat, bald and heavily bearded.  His smart suit, fat watch and bling cufflinks contrast with my usual scruffiness, but luckily the channel guys are reasonably turned out.  Whether his need for conflict is the classic short-guy syndrome is debatable, but he has a reputation for enjoying beating up suppliers which I’d heard but not entirely given credence to.  He is uniquely nasty in my experience, though he mostly does it with a smile on his face.  A smug, self-satisfied, you’re not going to enjoy this but you have to put up with it cos I’m the buyer smile.

Having finally worn us down on the definitions of what we were going to deliver (and changed pretty much nothing, but spent signficant time and energy doing so), we moved on to dates for delivery.  The date for delivery of software, as stated, was fixed a while back having moved once, and we knew we’d no chance of moving it again.  But having got the software in you have to implement it and let it do its thing.  Its thing last time took two weeks to do, so the channel guy was saying allowing two weeks again this time (even though we’d hope this time to be a lot faster) was prudent. 

Senthil rounded on this and started a major rant on slippage, not respecting committed dates, trying it on etc.  The channel guy patiently explained again this was not any change, simply adding on the necessary implementation time to the date we’ve committed to deliver the tools to do the job.  They might as well have been speaking different languages.

After a couple more to-ings and fro-ings the channel guy lost it.

‘If there’s not basic trust around this table I think we might as well call the whole thing off!’

I misread this slightly and started packing my bag.  Conscious of eyes on me, I noticed that everyone else had read this correctly as some steam being released which then led to a general rapprochement whereby we could all agree next steps.

Senthil had several more digs but fortunately his boss, Trevor, also present, is a reasonable human being who intervened as required (though a little slower than I’d have liked) to get basic agreements in place.  We left just under two hours after we’d arrived, having agreed to the things we’d already agreed to before we’d come in.

Which is as close to an achievement as I can register for this week.

Anyway, disruptive having become our little corporate buzz-word some time back it might be worthwhile defining what we mean by it.  Well, I’d like to know, for a start.

Initially I assumed it meant disrupting the market, i.e. surprising the incumbent solution providers and becoming a solution of choice for the entire world.  Obviously this was mostly going to be by word of mouth given a marketing spend which wouldn’t keep us thirst free in the pub for more than an afternoon.  Nevertheless ultimately the world beats a path to our door, Microsoft, Symantec and Google all make outlandish bids for our stock that make Skype look like a steal, we all live happily ever after in a life of untold luxury, and Coventry win the Premier League in 2007.  Thus is the market extant ‘disrupted’, but all obviously for the common good.

Alternatively, the technology is so wonderful that another organisation spots what we’re up to, employs half a dozen teenage programmers in Bangalore to copy the concept, releases into an unsuspecting world (bearing in mind we still have to spell out our company name to each and every prospect, such is our presence) accompanied by advertising and marketing spend (which I think we’d describe as ‘cheating’), and everyone beats a path to their door, thereby leading once again to a disrupted market with the slight difference that we all end up selling Big Issues and collecting cardboard for bedding materials, muttering ‘unfair’ and ‘if only’ into our dotage.

The third way, however, is that the technology itself does the disrupting.  In this scenario we pretend to be protecting infrastructure and data but there are elements of the code which make subtle improvements to the client’s so-called ‘information’ over an extended period of time, until they can no longer function.  The trick of course being they don’t discover this until its way too late to do anything about it other than sue us and our channels for damages.  Disruption here is limited to Loftex and its channels and customers, who, fortunately perhaps, number but a few.
There are moments when I suspect we’re going the third way.  I hope I’m wrong.

Perhaps a disappointment but possibly a blessing in disguise is that we no longer have a system to record our miserable performance on, the supplier having finally had enough of unsigned or post-dated cheques and pulled the plug, ‘temporarily’. In the meantime we’re recording deals won while its unavailable on a yellow post-it note. Well we will when we have some.

Not getting paid hardly ranks as a disappointment as its so normal. After the shock of the early salary round expectations rose ever so slightly but the normal despondency has resumed in spades. There are super-secret meetings daily between those tasked with Corporate Finance and Overall Management Responsibility, neither of which term has had any significant meaning in recent months. Why the meetings guys? What’s to decide? If someone is offering to pay for a share of this debacle at any valuation our answer has got to be yes, unqualified, no ifs buts or maybes, you can put your drug-addled retarded teenage son in charge (that’s sort of what the last guy did), and we’ll all dress as maids and sing Gilbert and Sullivan medleys – if that’s what it takes (Finglass, please send me the name of your Octoberfest supplier, we may need costumes in a bit of a hurry if they read this). Just give us the money, please!

But there’s disappointments even for the gifted few. I didn’t witness but can well imagine the disappointment when the email announcing the Marketwatch Editors CEO of the Year 2005 was opened on a certain PC. Ed Zander of Motorola? What’s he had to contend with? Call that a disruptive technology?

Started tonight. Because of the relatives on the other side of the globe we need to kick this off early, though we never beat the wee girls in my daughter’s social circle who exchange about 50 of the smallest (but cutest!) cards each and therefore have to start in November as their writing isn’t otherwise going to be fast enough to complete the task by boxing day.

I always write the same crap cliche sentences, no matter what my intentions for the rest of the year. This is simply because when confronted with a blank card all parts of the English language bar ‘Hope all is well with you. We are all fine though S continues to grow and amaze us all ….’ disappear from the brain. I find myself creating material I too guffawed at when Simon Hoggart collated it in his books and columns on Christmas round robin letters.

But this year of course the sin is compounded by it being a lie! Things aren’t fine with us! I’m trapped in the last days of a criminal conspiracy which threatens to destroy me professionally and financially! I want to kill certain individuals and toss their entrails to the festive Christmas vultures!
Its traditional of course not to use that kind of language in cards which may be why the brain screens it out when you’re writing them.

Meanwhile Roger’s given us all cards in the office to send to all our clients and channels. Again, we’re all poised, pen in hand, wondering what to write.

‘Goodbye, sorry about the mess, love from all the gang at Loftex4′?

‘We know you’re a charity supporter as you sent us an Oxfam card last year – please send money to the Save Loftex4 Appeal this year’?

‘Aaaaaaaaarrrrrggggghhhhhh’?

Suggestions on a (Christmas) card please.

3. Phone round your channels trying to establish whether they have (a) jobs for the likes of you or (b) money to buy out the likes of your so-called management team. Tricky to pull off without giving the game away, so you defer for another day. While they have even a small chance of (c) the huge deal that changes the whole shooting match, you have to carry on as if everything is OK. One day, though, the pleading call is going to give the game away, totally.

4. Do some web research on the symptoms of depression, stress, gastric ulcers, and various syndromes you think this gig might have given you. Locate and identify with various forms of psychosis. Identify most others with your work-mates. Send anonymous emails to the CEO labelled ‘Munchausen’ with no other words. Somehow feel better for that.

5. Check eBay for prices on remaining assets in the office. This doesn’t take long, so check history on other items that don’t belong to us but that the managed-service office company might take a few days to miss. Ascertain that total fire-sale will realise enough for about an eighth of your personal debt. Plot method for pulling off sale solo without any of your colleagues catching on until too late.

6. Seek the magical external funds required. All other avenues having (allegedly) been explored, you’re now limited to vegaspoker360.com or the Albanian state lottery. Fail the former’s credit check, the latter technically illegal in states banning pyramid selling. Draft the email for a 419 scam while you try and work out how the scam actually works once you have the bank details etc.

7. Weep. Not terribly useful but can be cathartic provided you keep the tears off your keyboard.

8. Swear and throw things. Again, not terribly useful and may further decrement asset base. Can feel damn good though, especially if breakages can involve electrical explosions.

9. Go through the mental rosary you’ve been going through these last few weeks – ‘Sue them, county court judgment, call in the fraud police, call the other shareholders, sue them , county….’ etc. etc. Like a lot of religious ritual, not one piece of it actually will fix anything but the fact of its repetition, and the other adherents repeating it, somehow seems to have a mystic power that may lead to fundamental change. OK, not really.

10. Blog. Actually, add to this one. New items for the list gratefully accepted. Come on, its not like you have anything useful to do, is it?

Meanwhile, the emailed orders are flooding in.  OK, I’m overexcited, but there have been a lot of them.  Well quite a few. All for rather small amounts, but more than in the last few days than for the same number of weeks before.  And none of the biggies is coming in.  But there’s sufficient to believe that one of the monsters must also fall, soon.

This self-delusion is an aspect of my Loftex brain-washing I’m not at all happy about.  When I started here I could tell you that 10 licences at £500 each was £5000.  These days when asked what my 10-licence order amounts to I’m more likely to round it up to £10k.  Our erstwhile CEO would have rounded still further and by the time you heard it back from the other offices you’d scored a £90k deal with potential for a further million.

If my brain hadn’t been washed I wouldn’t be so happy getting my pitiful salary 7 days early, which is (bizzarely) what’s happened.  I’m still owed mega-oodles in commissions etc., so why am I feeling grateful?  And why have they paid it early?

Meanwhile chasing the channels that haven’t paid up continues.  I’ve done debt chasing before, but usually for larger corporates and usually for debt that’s over a month late.  Once the scheduled payment date is past, one of us is on the phone, and when the amount is less than £200 its starting to become obvious we’re in fairly desperate straits.  All in the cause, of course, and if I had any confidence some of it would find its way to paying something other than the bare minimum I’d have more enthusiasm.

So if you’re reading this, Mr. Foreign Channel that owes me/us $973.27 (and you know who you are), pay up now so we can buy our children Christmas presents.

Please!

Right at the point that it looked like we might have to re-shrink the office, a stroke of luck. The managed-service-office people got evicted. Turns out they were in their turn renting what they rented to us, and their landlord (a state-owned enterprise of some infamy) had decided they needed the space for their own expanding workforce, having only lost £200 million in the preceding financial year and needing to staff up to get government’s attention (which they duly did, but that’s another tale). Now this was lucky for every tenant of the managed-service office company because (and who’d have believed it of the legal profession) their lawyers had screwed up and failed to notice a fine detail of their lease. Namely, the 30 days notice period.

This was some 60 days shorter than the notice period their own tenants had. So some humble pleading began, based on a need to relocate all tenants to one of their other fine facilities, none of which was central. Because if a tenant refused to budge a costly and embarrassing legal battle could be guaranteed to hit the papers (at least, the local ones).

So we were showed a series of offices, each grander and more remote than the last. And a deal was struck. Our man in charge of such things, Roger, did his best disgruntled terrier impersonation and got us twice the previous office space for half the going rate. Better, we needed a space they didn’t actually have, so ended up with a space way larger than we needed with a promise not to use the desks in half of it. Which we didn’t, much. Same as we only ever used the internet one at a time so only paid for one ‘live’ port with all the rest just for intra-office communications (these people were even slower than BT to realise what a router could do).

Life went on, the commute from the centre an irritation but the expanded space (including our own ‘boardroom’ should we ever appoint a board) pleasant enough internally. The surrounding wasteland took some getting used to (but saved the wallet from the deprivations of shops, sandwich bars and pubs) but the views of traffic queues and delayed trains were small compensations. We grew to fill the space, almost. We grew beyond our ability to pay the ‘burn’. We grew angry and mutinous.

In months when there was no guarantee of salaries being met, brochures for newer, bigger, fancier offices were spotted floating around the desks of key individuals. This is where my lack of financial nous comes up again. Apparently if you do deals where the first year’s rental is deferred this can make an apparently more expensive office cheaper. Obviously we’d have to spend our office hours sitting on beer-crates until furniture was made affordable (who knows, IKEA might have a ‘pay nothing till 2007′ offer any day now) and there might be small inconveniences in the target offices being in a village without public transport to speak of, but the overall benefit of having our name on a lease and being able to buy our own coffee out-weighed these considerations.

Perhaps unluckily, the opportunity to move evaporated when a bunch of asylum seekers with cash gazumped us, so we stayed put. Well, almost. Again the managed-service office people made us another offer we couldn’t refuse, so we moved again, this time within the building. Even bigger, yes, and definitely grander for the Politburo side of the office. Once again parts of it aren’t strictly ours so we pretend not to use them. Aside from one instance of an entire live server-rack being accidentally left in a ‘spare’ office, we’ve not been caught doing so yet, either.

Without naming rights for the building we still have unfulfilled ambitions in the real-estate aspects of our corporate existence, but at least now visiting clients get a better sense of what Loftex is all about.

The key to this of course is that the size and physical separation of our offices is such that from the meeting rooms, the wailings of the staff are inaudible.

Even as I write that I find it hard to explain or understand.  If its a technology, surely the techies would be involved in examining it, trying it out, making sure it performed, before we even talked about what it might be worth?

Apparently I’m naive in these things, because its not at all necessary.  A disruptive technology doesn’t necessarily involve anything tangible, like code.  So it should have come as no surprise when the key element that we all understood to be the guts of IDspare turned out not to belong to the people we were buying IDspare from.  It was (and is) rented from a couple of guys working out of a garage in South London.  Good code, works as it says on the tin, but not for sale.  They’ve written a song and want their 2p every time it gets played.

Which of course is going to be a gazillion times if the business model informing our modest multi-billion dollar valuation is anything to go by.  Which perhaps it isn’t, but thats another story.

So what were we buying?  Turns out to be a concept.  Now anyone who’s read anything about the dotcom bubble knows that concepts can be worth billions.  Or, after a pause for reflection, not.

Now we own a concept, which to be worth anything to our clients is going to have to be used to aggregate technologies, some of which we own and some of which we have to buy as we use.  Which means we no longer have the problem of being solely reliant on our own small team of developers.  We’re also now additionally dependent on an even smaller team of developers, and an implementation team owned by the erstwhile IDspare owners.

One of my larger former employers made a lot of play about its ‘Methodologies’.  I used to be very skeptical about the value of these, given they were largely concepts with fancy logos and a lot of management consultancy words.  I now see that they had quite a lot of value.  We need to get some logos done and a CD made, sharpish.

Seems there’s an investor.  With money.  And a willingness to spend some, now.  

Seems there’s hope.

But we’ve been here soooooo many times before, and the source of all these rays of hope?  Oh yes, the man they couldn’t hang.  So I’ve taken the projected cash input, divided by ten, taken the announced likely input date and added three months, and even then this isn’t total disaster – a very unpleasant Christmas, for sure, but possible survival beyond for some (probably not me, but some).  And if its true as related….  But no, it can’t be, it never has been so far.

I hope I’m really wrong about this.  But if I am, you’re going to assume I’ve borrowed a plotline from Dallas where all the characters come back to life cos it was all a bad dream.

Maybe I have.  Maybe it is all a bad dream.  Bloody hard to wake up just now, though.