Between 1978, when I graduated with my shiny MBA, and 2008 when the American economy melted down the business landscape changed. The immense frauds perpetrated by Enron and WorldCom, the stock option backdating scandals of Silicon Valley, and the subsequent collapse of Arthur Anderson, a Big 8 CPA firm, brought more and more government intervention. American business executives became nervous and in addition to the MBA, they added a CPA requirement to work in their accounting and finance departments. When I graduated the only people who needed a CPA were those that wanted to work in a public accounting firm. Public accountants do audits and prepare tax returns. They don’t actually manage a business. That’s what I wanted to do.
The implosion of the American economy in August 2008 was the final blow to the career I had been trying to restart as my children were entering high school. The bankruptcy of Arthur Anderson threw literally thousands of Arthur Anderson partners out of work. I was now competing with people half my age who had less experience but had the requisite certifications. Certifications that weren’t needed for success when I was started out in 1978.
The other change in the American business landscape was globalization and the advent of the Internet Age. American companies were moving their so-called “back office functions” off shore to China and India where the cost of labor is less.
So how did I come to be sitting in the new VP of Operations office that August morning being told I was a poor fit? I had followed a professional contact and friend. I hadn’t done any checking on the company but the opportunity sounded fabulous. My kids were finishing middle school and we wanted to remodel our house to make it more welcoming to high schoolers.
The company was on the cutting edge of the new business model of “software as a service” or “SaaS”. It was an outsource accounting firm, with staff in India and a software system in the early stages of what would be eventually called “the cloud”. The staff in India would do the posting of accounting transactions in the evening while I was sleeping. I could log in from home in the morning and review the financial statements. I could give instructions to pay bills, to receive payments and do banking and I would only come in to the office for meetings. Perfect.
Except the early stage technology wasn’t keeping up with the vision. Data bandwidth was a bugaboo. The capacity of the Internet providers was being taxed and the servers overloaded and would routinely crash. The Indian staff wasn’t trained to American standards and would stop work whenever something was not exactly fitting into the “box”. Management would be on the phone training at all hours of the night. Clients were unhappy with the quality of our work as we missed deadlines. Our customer service sucked.
The work was straightforward but it was complicated by a byzantine, slow as molasses software package that ended in everything taking much longer than necessary. Every transaction and client interaction had to be documented in order to meet government regulations. We had to have an “auditable” trail in the system.
I knew the model wasn’t working even though I knew intellectually that it should. I especially didn’t like the fact that I spent all day on the computer struggling with software that didn’t work as advertised.
And then there were the clients.
As a start up ourselves, we took every client who came knocking. We didn’t qualify anyone to make sure they could pay our bills or make sure they understood how our business model worked. And it is a truism that those who could least afford us were the ones who made the most work and complained the loudest.
I was assigned the worst clients because my reputation was for handling difficult clients. Difficult clients are like spoiled children; they need patience and a firm hand. I could handle difficult clients but I didn’t want to handle all of them. They made my days miserable from start to finish.
I discovered that the founder was not to be trusted and senior management was a revolving door. The staff burned out trying to meet client and management demands and government regulations. The turnover was almost 100 percent in 6 months. My friend, who was the operations vice president, left after a year. A month later her replacement started cleaning house. Everyone who had been hired by my friend was on the chopping block. Only I wasn’t seeing it.
I stayed partly out of loyalty to my friend and to the friends I made at the company. The job paid well and we had used a construction loan to finish remodeling our house and needed my income to qualify for a new mortgage. Even then, before the 2008 crash, in Silicon Valley, the signs were there that it was going to increasingly difficult to get a mortgage. I had to stay with my employer for at least a year for us to qualify.
At the same time my young teenage daughter developed some psychological difficulties that made it necessary for me to be available when she needed me. My job was flexible enough that I could be there for her and that was more important than whether I liked the work.
I was careless and a bit lazy, too. I needed to find another job after the previous company I worked for was sold and my department was eliminated. My friend invited me to join her at a new start up. It sounded like a dream come true and I trusted my friend so I didn’t do any checking, what's called “due diligence" in finacial circles. I believed I was going to be part of the new way of doing things in Finance.
But then my friend left the company (a “mutual parting”). I was uneasy but sure I could work with the new VP, a friend of the founder. I thought I was being called in to discuss the changes happening in the department that morning. The new VP was much younger than me but I didn’t think anything of it because I had never considered my age to be a barrier to any position I’d held. I was good and I had an excellent reputation as a manager. It took a few moments for me to understand what was happening. The words initially weren’t making any sense. I had made a joke about not being a “natural accountant” to a colleague. I meant that I didn’t have an instinct for numbers that made it easy to do math in my head. I always used a calculator. Someone repeated it to the VP. Well, if I wasn’t an accountant, she said, then I wasn’t suited for the job and the direction the company was headed. I was too shocked hearing my words being used as justification for letting me go to try to explain. Clearly, this organization had issues that I didn’t want to deal with. I didn’t argue to keep my job. Instead I agreed it was a very poor fit. There must have been a twinge of guilt somewhere in the VP. I didn’t get severance but human resources would help me apply for unemployment benefits. I thanked them for that and said I didn’t think I would need it for too long.
I cleaned out my little cubicle packing a cardboard box with the few personal items I kept in the space. I reassured several colleagues who watched me and walked out of the building. It was a sunny California morning. I stood on the sidewalk and assessed what I was feeling. I was relieved and sad at the same time. What I wasn’t was, was worried.
I didn’t like the company or the work so it was a good thing to be let go. I would move on. At least, that’s what I thought.
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