With her usual quiet, orderly style, she brought the board meeting to a close shortly after noon. They had covered all the matters on their agenda, including Olivia’s concerns about some of the factories they were using in India and China. Phillip’s main concern was their bottom line, which was healthier than ever. The products they sold at incredibly low prices were making them a fortune and were being distributed by The Factory around the world.
Olivia always wanted to know that their factories’ practices were sound. And Phillip had assured them all again that morning that although they couldn’t know everything about their Asian factories, they were using a reliable industrial investigative firm, and all appeared to be in good order. And the prices they were paying were leaving them the profit margins they had benefited from for years. Theirs was a model that their competitors envied and never succeeded in matching. Olivia had a magic touch.
John had also introduced a series of new designs that morning that they all knew would be snapped up by their customers in the coming months. The Factory was ahead of every trend, with sure instincts about what would sell and what their customers wanted, even before they knew it themselves. John had an unfailing sense for shape, design, and color. The combination they offered of low prices and high design, for items their clients were begging for, was unbeatable. They created a need and then filled it. The Factory leaped ahead financially every year.
The empire Olivia had founded was rock solid. And she knew her late husband, Joe, would have been proud of her, just as he had been in his lifetime. He had been the perfect mate for her. And he hadn’t been surprised or critical when the business they grew together kept her from spending time with him or their children. They both knew it was inevitable that she’d be busy, especially when she was traveling, and even when she was at home. Joe had made up for it, with his more predictable schedule and less demanding financial duties in the firm. Trained as an accountant, he had been their chief financial officer until he died and Phillip stepped into his shoes. Olivia’s mother, Maribelle, had retired from the business to take care of Olivia’s children, shortly after Phillip was born, and that role suited her much better, and was less stressful for her. The business in Olivia and Joe’s hands had long since outgrown her by then. Olivia had been the driving force of The Factory, and shouldered the responsibility with ease, despite the time it ultimately cost her with her children. She had tried to make it up to them as she got older, particularly in the last fourteen years since her husband’s sudden death at sixty. He had died of a heart attack while she was away visiting new factories in the Philippines.
Joe’s death had been a terrible blow to Olivia and their children. Since then she had been more attentive to them, and made a point of taking her children and grandchildren on a vacation together every year. She loved them, and always had, and her husband, but she loved the business too. The Factory was her passion and her life. It was an all-consuming eternal flame that devoured her and sustained her. Joe had understood that and never minded, and her children also knew it, although some were more accepting of it than others.
Their senior house counsel, Peter Williams, had been at the board meeting that morning, to discuss some of the issues that Phillip had raised, about what the financial impact would be if they ever decided to shift from factories in Asia to different, more transparent ones in Europe. They all knew it could hit their bottom line unfavorably, and Phillip didn’t recommend it. Olivia had wanted their senior lawyer at the meeting. And Peter had voiced his usual carefully measured and wisely weighed opinions. She sought his advice on many subjects, and he always counseled her sagely. He was conservative by nature, but always practical in his suggestions, and he was creative in helping them find solutions to sometimes dicey legal issues. And inevitably there were some, in an enterprise as vast as theirs. He had enormous respect for Olivia, and had devoted the lion’s share of his time to The Factory for nearly twenty years. He never objected to the long hours he had to spend on it, the sacrifices he had