Scott was reading through a set of Articles of Organization. They had formed two more companies. Consumer Products and now Transportation. Transportation had spun off from the mining company, so they transferred the submarine designs in exchange for some ownership of the new company. The largest shareholder was Zaliha, who Melinda decided was most qualified to lead the design teams. Scott, Matt, Barry and Meinda had shares, and some more was reserved for whoever they picked as CEO.
Melinda seemed to be enjoying being an owner and not a CEO for the new companies. Now they had money and resources, they didn’t need to recruit from homeless shelters or prisons, but the best candidates were found from a variety of countries. In this case, the CEO they picked was a retired Japanese guy named Hisashi Kitano. He suffered from severe arthritis, which Melinda promised they could fix in exchange for him skipping salary for the first year. He still was given some equity to sweeten the deal, and he would start working in about a month.
While Hisashi was going through some treatments in Dr. Chaikhot’s lab, Melinda was acting as interim CEO. She had hired an aerospace engineer and some contractors to set up a new office. They had acquired a few acres of land about 30 miles inland from their main base. The two newest companies would be sharing the space, which would have some large metal buildings and a rail spur added to connect to the Ferrocarril de Chiapas y Mayab.
Trinidad Franco was currently going on a tour of their facilities. Scott could not really tell his age, but he was energetic and intense. When talking with someone, they would have his full attention, he seemed to take in every detail. He supposedly did not understand English, but Scott believed Franco would not just spot any lies; he was probably dissecting your underlying motivations.
Trinidad gave off an aura of diligence. Everyone in the room would feel the need to be really focused on whatever they were supposed to work on once his gaze swept over them. Maybe it was how his gaze would stick on the task or window they should be focusing on. He had observed the robotics lab with keen interest. His translator indicated to Matt that he was very impressed, then proceeded to make a couple suggestions about their floor layout and robot design that would improve efficiency by about 15%.
After the tour, Trinidad had also been very complimentary to Scott about the Glitch_HR system. Scott was already getting used to looking at Trinidad while he talked and listening to his translator.
“Simply the most amazing software I have ever used.” Trinidad said with enthusiasm.
“Thanks, I had a lot of help building it.”
“Yes, I think the main area it needs improvement is in the skill training.”
“Say what now?” Scott asked. The skill training section was amazing.
“The content is excellent, but I feel the algorithm is guiding people without giving them a clear idea of their career path.” Trinidad continued. “For example, you are clearly more skilled than almost any Junior programmer I could hire, but it has not pushed you to try and advance to a more suitable position. Your goal in the next few years should not be just to be the best Junior programmer in the world. It might not even be possible to achieve.”
Huh, “That’s a good point. I’ve actually been spending more time on combat training than computer skills, which could be a sign I’ve stagnated in my current position.” Scott admitted.
“Well, I have to say your fitness regimen is working well for you!” Trinidad said agreeably. Melinda had not allowed him to tour the biotech floor, so Trinidad was not in the loop about why the security guards all looked like action figures or why the girls had odd hair colors.
“Um thanks.” Scott did not feel the need to whine about being an unwilling participant. He had mostly forgiven Melinda by now.
“So, I will send you a list of some suggestions on what I’d like to see in the career path module, and you can work on it when you have time.” Trinidad said.
Despite the casual way he made the comment, Scott felt compelled to make this a top priority. He would be interested to see what career path options Glitch_HR would choose for him and his friends. Scott had made a lot of minor changes to the software, and it often felt like the training recommendations gave him ideas for features to add. Sometimes it felt like the software was guiding him, which was kind of a scary thought. This was one of the few times a person was requesting a change. The paranoid voice in the back of Scott’s mind noticed the suggestion was coming from a person the software had recommended.
After the tour, Trinidad Franco had claimed a room to use as an office and had been a whirlwind of activity. He hired a local man who was experienced in industrial process optimization, and some contractors to start adding buildings.
Within a few weeks they had some sparsely furnished offices on site and were nearly constantly installing equipment in a large metal building that had been quickly assembled. Matt had been very busy with his team getting the robotics set up, and there were a steady stream of vans and small trucks navigating undeveloped roads between their facilities carrying raw materials from the mining operation.
By comparison, the transportation company that would share the property was lagging far behind. Melinda had been acting as interim CEO, but a fraction of her time and focus could not match Trinidad Franco’s focused intensity. They had started to install electrical, HVAC and plumbing in a set of offices and the future factory was little more than a large metal barn. Zaliha, who was still working from the mining base, had come up with an initial design for an air-truck but was hashing out details with an aerospace engineer they had hired. They had not even started building a prototype.
Scott had been trying to implement the career path module. Franco had sent him detailed notes and sketches on a potential user interface, and Scott had built the basic framework in code. He was currently struggling to understand some of the code in the Skill Training modules to leverage how it ranked people for various professions and training machine learning modules to build potential career paths. He could get the basics working and generate a lot of potential paths but determining what was a good fit for a specific person was a little beyond him. After a couple of days failing to come up with a solution, Scott decided to try and farm the problem out to contractors including the Algerian job-stealer, Theofanis Zervou.
Trinidad Franco and Melinda had agreed on how they would split the cost of this between various companies. Scott had heard Melinda cursing frequently during her negotiations with Mr. Franco. He was worried that the two alpha dogs would not be able to play nice.
“Everything OK?” Scott asked. “Every third word I heard in here was a curse.”
Melinda’s voice came over the intercom, while he heard her spewing obscenities mixed in with her babbling voice.
“Oh, hello dear. Lovely to see you.” Her words were pleasant, but her tone suggested Melinda was angry.
“Is everything OK between you and Mr. Franco?” Scott asked, concerned. He had been impressed with Trinidad Franco, but if they had to throw down, he was firmly on team Melinda.
“Oh yes, I just get a little hot and bothered talking to that delicious man.” Melinda said, her tone changing drastically. “He is infuriating but brilliant! Trinidad saw through every trick and managed to get a fair cost split for the feature he requested. He even tried to get me to pay for the whole thing since it was his idea, and it would benefit us more as owners of the software. I had to get nasty with threats to order your boys not to help him, and even hinted that I’d get my security people to rough him up before he agreed to a cost split. I am certain it was exactly what he wanted from the start!”
“Do you think it’s wise to threaten our allies with physical violence?” Scott asked nervously.
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
“Oh please, Trinidad is not a baby! He knows I wouldn’t use force unless we couldn’t reach a mutually beneficial business deal. If you aren’t willing to draw a line of acceptable behavior and back it up with force, people will walk all over you.” Melinda said. “I can assure you that someday soon the Russians will learn that they should have tried a more peaceful approach.”
After that disturbing conversation, Scott learned that he had been granted a generous budget to hire contractors to help finish his project. Theofanis had been charging a lot more recently, so Scott only used him for coding some of the core AI heuristics and found others to handle the bulk of testing, refining the UI, data structures and data mining. The remainder of the project was finished in about 10 days.
According to the new Career Path screen, Scott was long overdue a promotion to HR Technology Specialist, and nearly qualified for HR Technology Manager. Melinda smirked when she approved his promotion.
“Long overdue, but I’d be a fool to just hand out raises if people were happy without them!” she had cackled.
Scott encouraged his friends to check out the new section, and they were granted new titles before the day was over. Franco had been quite pleased with the work and only requested some minor changes which Scott would be able to implement personally. Scott was proud he had finished the project using only about 70% of the budget granted.
With his new role, Scott started getting more training suggestions about managing people and basic leadership skills. He wasn’t excited about this but couldn’t deny he had been leaning heavily on Melinda for this kind of thing in the past.
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It had been three weeks since Trinidad arrived, so Scott decided to visit the new factory with Melinda. They were joined in the van by Carl and Sergio for security. This particular van had extra armor and some heavy weaponry that could be pulled out quickly if needed. Carl had insisted on participating in the construction, even though it was not really in his skill set. Carl was a big fan of a cheesy eighties TV show called “The A-Team”, so he couldn’t pass up on his lifelong dream of adding armor and weapons to an ordinary van.
The ride past undeveloped Mexican jungle was uneventful, much to Carl’s disappointment. There were a lot of vehicles parked near the new factory, but most of the workers seemed to be focused on the new offices and building assigned to the Transportation company.
Melinda nodded to a couple of people working, then proceeded into Trinidad Franco’s consumer goods factory. The sweltering heat of Southern Mexico in June had them all eager to get into the air-conditioned buildings.
Inside there was a very modern looking factory with conveyor belts feeding in a stream of raw materials which were pressed, molded, extruded, rolled or cut into different shapes. A swarm of robot arms would grab parts and quickly assemble various lighting and plumbing fixtures, door handles, drawer pulls, electrical switches or lighting. There were at least a dozen different processes running in parallel, including packing the finished products into boxes and attaching pre-printed labels.
All the activity was overwhelming, and it took several minutes for Scott to get his bearings and admire all the different moving parts. Melinda and Trinidad were busily talking - neither one of them were understandable to an observer. Scott could understand Trinidad’s side of the conversation, as his translator was speaking in English.
“Yes, the cardboard is sourced in Merida. If you start producing pulp from algae, we can cut that expense further.” Scott overheard.
…
“No, we’ll be scheduling some events to launch the brand next month, but we have different packaging for the multi-unit contracts. The product is exactly the same, it doesn’t save any money to make a low-end version.” Franco’s translator seemed to be struggling to keep up with the conversation between the two CEOs.
A little while later, a man identified as the industrial optimization specialist showed them how all the systems worked together and could shift to produce over a hundred different SKUs. Some changes required manually switching out molds or re-routing some workflows, but they planned to run in a specific configuration then run tests and make changes at the end of each shift. The factory required about three people per shift to monitor and handle routine operation, plus a small on-call crew to handle maintenance issues.
Scott called Melinda. He felt more comfortable asking her questions than Trinidad, who he did not know very well.
“Hi Melinda, I overheard some of what you were saying. This is all pretty amazing, but could you fill us in on how we are selling these products.”
“Sure, I’ll conference in the other owners, so I don’t have to repeat myself.” Melinda added Barry, Matt, Angela Stein and Trinidad’s translator, Lydia, to the call.
“Congratulations Trinidad on getting this factory running in just under a month!” Melinda started, “I wanted to update the other the owners on what our plans are.”
“With the economy in a deep recession, we were able to pick up a lot of industrial machinery at a discount and deliver it here on the Dark Siren, which usually has its hold empty on the return trips. Some we had to repair or modify and other machines we mostly built from scratch, but it was quite an accomplishment.” Melinda explained.
“Thanks for the help I got from all of you.” Trinidad announced.
“I can’t believe there are now two CEOs who ridiculously over perform.” Angela Stein announced. ”With Melinda involved, I figured you guys might start shipping products in about 3 months, but this is almost unbelievable! I’ve seen the marketing materials and I think there will be some interest. Despite the economy, there are still rich people who are renovating or building homes and want a fresh new look.”
“Right, so as some of you know, we are demonstrating several product lines in design centers at major cities and some of the trade shows that are still planned. It has been easy to get booth space; a lot of the manufacturers are slashing production and firing most of their workers. It’s not all good news, since demand will also be way down.” Melinda added.
“Excuse me, this is my company.” Lydia interrupted, translating for Trinidad. Mr. Franco was at a bit of a disadvantage in a phone conference, having to go through his translator and without the benefit of his imposing personal impact. Barry giggled.
“Right, so on that front, I don’t expect a huge response from the trade shows, but several high-end builders will be installing our product in new houses that were in progress when the economy crashed. That program of Scott’s picked up some very innovative salespeople. We sold at cost, so the builders were quite happy to make the change and the home buyers were persuaded they were getting a free upgrade due to opportunities in the current economy” Mr. Franco’s translator finished.
“Exactly, so there is some awareness of the product as people have seen it going into some of the nicest new home builds,” Melinda continued. “While almost everyone else is dropping prices, we are going with a high price point. We use very high quality and even somewhat exotic materials, and the designs are fresh. Our research is indicating that the demand will be strong.”
“That’s great, but what is this I heard about three large orders at a lower price point.” Angela interrupted.
“Yes, Trinidad and I negotiated several ongoing arrangements as part of our deal. He gets a favorable price on metals, energy and robotics work, and we get to buy his goods at a fixed markup in bulk for various projects. Also, all the production companies will get favorable terms on facility space in the new habitat. We spent about two days hammering out the numbers of who gets what discount. I’ll send you the details, but I believe it will be beneficial for all 5 companies involved. We will be using a lot of his products as we finish up the first section of the habitat, but we also have landed three government contracts for Adriana’s construction company.” Melinda said.
“Nice, our little chat at the party paid off!” Angela said.
“Yes, so we are building three subsidized housing projects. Jacksonville, Philadelphia and Baltimore. They will have from 60, 80 and 160 apartment units respectively. They have easy access to ports for us to supply materials, and it should help us streamline the processes for living units in the Proteus Hab.” Melinda explained.
“Wait, I heard Baltimore was under martial law right now.” Matt interrupted.
“Yes, that is a complication since it will limit the hours our work crews can be active.” Melinda admitted.
“I mean, is it safe?” Matt asked.
“Of course. That’s what martial law is for.” Melinda said, apparently without much sympathy. “Last I heard, there are about six major cities in the U.S. under martial law, and it put a stop to the near constant rioting and looting that was happening.”
“Yeah, that is a pretty bad situation for the people living there, but I guess it’s better the government stepped in.” Matt said.
“Right, well businesses are fleeing those cities, and I’m sure a lot of people will leave too. Our project housing has some nice security features in the design, which probably helped us win the bid. Well also because there were so many projects up for grabs the big construction companies couldn’t handle them all, and we bid on the low end.” Melinda said.
“Speaking of that, I don’t have a stake in your construction company, but do you feel like sharing what the economics of the project look like?” Angela asked.
“Right, so our bids were averaging about $200k per unit. With economy of scale and some shared infrastructure, I’m hoping to build them for a little over $50k each.” Melinda said smugly. Angela gave a low whistle.
“I guess Adriana will be getting one of those big dividend checks soon.” Scott said.