friend for as long as he could remember. The ladies of this town had always been so good to him and Misty. He was very thankful for their help, and there was no reason to turn her down. She always fed a crowd, and made great food. As had become tradition, he’d make a batch of fresh deviled eggs to take over. Those six laying hens of his, Henny, Penny, Jenny, Oprah Henfrey, Sophia Lor-Hen, and Eggatha Christie, kept Mike in more than enough brown eggs for all of his friends and neighbors.
CHAPTER FOUR
It had been one long day, and Vanessa was glad to just go to bed and be done with it.
She rubbed lotion between her hands, then smoothed it along her arms and legs before drawing back the white sheets to snuggle with her laptop and the Porter’s files for a little nighttime reading.
This ought to put me to sleep.
She read through the dashboard, and the summary page of the most recent P and L. Surprisingly, Porter’s wasn’t in that bad a standing. In fact, if it weren’t for the outrageous size of their footprint they were calculating the profit against, they’d be in really good shape. They turned a decent profit, considering the number of employees. And if you rolled in the fact that they were producing fruitcake, it was an amazing amount of revenue. A surprise, because really who intentionally bought fruitcake? She’d always thought of the bricklike concoction as a gag gift. But how many gag gifts can you sell to the same customers year after year? Eventually the humor in that wears off.
The turnover of employees was almost nonexistent. She’d wondered if the small town would be able to handle a larger workforce. If they could reskill some of the staff, then there shouldn’t be much of a problem.
She tried to remember all the talk about this buyout when it happened. It had been a while back. She flipped through the past few years’ numbers. They’d been consistent. The box indicating that the venture was initiated by the customer was checked. She wondered what had made Porter’s approach AGC in the first place. Financially, they’d been pretty strong. At least on paper. Of course, things weren’t always as they seemed on paper.
She flipped to the contract and terms. AGC paid handsomely for Porter’s. Micky was usually good at negotiations, known for practically stealing companies, but this had been a very fair deal for Porter’s, which made her more interested in seeing this for herself.
It wasn’t a typical AGC buy. She couldn’t find anything in the file explaining the motivation for the original purchase. Then again … it was fruitcake.
How does someone decide to open a fruitcake factory in the first place?
She was pretty certain she’d never even tried the only cake with a bad reputation, but the thought of the dense, sticky cake made her stomach go all queasy. Do I really need to try fruitcake to know I’m not a fan?
She put the paperwork aside and shook her head. No. She would make it through the next five weeks without even a nibble. She hoped it at least smelled good in the factory.
Kendra had already sent her a new project template. As they continued to refine the tool for each project, she made the plan even more robust based on lessons learned.
When Vanessa opened the template, she smiled. Kendra had even updated the colors to a Christmas theme.
Basically, she had five weeks to shut down the factory and clear out the warehouse space. They could probably run the excess inventory through the storefront through middle to late January if needed, since that wasn’t needed for the transition.
She made clearing the warehouse space the priority, and filled in some of the preliminary assessments she’d need to complete next week.
A second email from Kendra included the building layout and inventory of the factory.
It didn’t look like there was much big equipment to clear. The ovens were all commercial, but not huge. The number of pieces to auction or sell off wasn’t that great either. Probably a one-day sale, if properly advertised, would do the trick.
Of course, those pieces would sell low. They always did. Someone would be having a merry Christmas even if it wasn’t the people in Fraser Hills.
She dimmed her bedside lamp and slunk beneath the covers praying the next big project was going to be amazing, because this job was not going to leave her joyful. One more “paying my dues” project.
But