The Department Store: Episode One

Charles pulled his aging Audi into the parking garage of the historic building of stone. The sign over the large double doors of the building read, “Hayden co.” The iconic store had stood in that spot since its opening in 1913. The show room was brightly lit and while it looked like a normal store, the iconic brand had gone in an e-commerce direction led by the wonderkind currently parking in this assigned space.

A few brave people walked up and down the steep hills as he turned into the garage. The city was having a sun break, portending the spring to come. Clouds hovered overhead, reminding everyone of the 39 inches of rain that fell not the Emerald city every year.

The engine of his car roared as it pulled up the rise in the floor of the parking garage. He wrapped the car around the concrete pillars until he found the spots designated for his company. He pulled into his numbered stall and shut the car off. Taking a deep breath, he opened the door, letting it fall close with the familiar soft, efficient, Germanic thunk.

He pulled his messenger bag out of the trunk, the worn leather draped over his shoulder, and started for the elevators. His phone buzzed in his pocket so much for these last few moments of solace before the day began. He usually woke up to several dozen emails and that was just to start the day. Never mind the phone calls, texts, and many Slack notifications. Today was already going to be stressful enough with a senior staff meeting to start off the day.

He stepped aboard the elevator and pressed his badge against the flat panel for secure floors. The elevator rose and transported him to the 43rd floor. The doors opened and James, his clean and efficient assistant was standing at the doors waiting for him. His slim-fit outfit left little of his tight body to the imagination. His blonde hair was spiked up.

“Good morning Mr. Dakaris,” James greeted him with his usual uptalk, “Do you want coffee?” If cotton candy was a person, it would be James Marsavian. He was the type of young man that people would say was “cute.” Charles knew that grandma’s loved him, including the older ladies he had on staff. He was everything a good assistant could be, nice, professional, mostly on time, attentive, and enthusiastic.

Charles gave a knowing smile and slipped his phone out of his pocket, “Yeah, coffee is fine, when’s that staff meeting?”

“It’s at 9, so you have a few minutes, there’s some office phone calls already, and I’m working on the morning brief.”

“Anything important?” Charles asked this question often, but James knew his code. Important was anything incredibly urgent that had to be dealt with at that precise moment. At this time of the day, it was emergencies only.

“Yes, Jackie wanted a few minutes.”

Charles looked up from his phone. It’s rarely a good thing when a chief financial officer wants a meeting first thing on a Tuesday.

“Did she say why?”

“No, she just wanted a few minutes before senior staff.”

“Are you sure?”

James fell silent and looked down like a naught puppy dog, “Jackie said it was about a line of credit but told me not to say anything about it.”

Charles let his arm fall to his side and tilted his head toward James, “Don’t bury the lede like that, James. That’s more than important.”

“I’ll call Jackie for you?”

“Yes, send her into my office.”

Charles’ office was on the top floor of the old department store building. It was the same office as the original president of the department store, Howard Underhay. Charles had taken great pains to preserve the history of the store. The office sported a curved wall that lead to a corner of glass that gave Charles 270 degree views of downtown Seattle and the Puget Sound beyond. On a clear day, if you tilted your head in the right direction, you could even see a little peak of Mt. Rainier.

Charles had filled the space with mid-century modern furniture. The sedate but elegant styling of the couch and chairs facing opposite his expansive desk recalled the hey-day of the iconic shopping brand.

Charles looked at his phone as James scurried away to get Jackie on the phone. Charles quickly looked over the CNBC app on his phone for an update on the markets. An angry red notification symbol reminded of his need to do email. Could he fit in emails before the meeting?

James interrupted his thought process, “Jackie is on her way over.”

“Right now?”

“She said it was important.”

Charles shot James a look of frustration, “Alright.”

James left his office. Charles popped open his laptop and tapped on the keys. He didn’t touch his main inbox, that was for James, they had a special folder of the things James thought he needed to read. His eyes drifted over to the exec team slack, it had notifications too. He would die by notifications.

“Jackie is here,” James said, standing in the office doorway.

“Send her in,” Charles said, blinking his eyes, he leaned back in his chair at a steep angle, his feet dangled in the air.

“Charlie?” Jackie said, walking into the room.

Charles let his feet back down the ground, suddenly self-conscious about how it looked, “Yeah, you said it was important?”

“We have a problem,” Jackie began, “We’re running out of money.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, we’re running low on cash, we’ve burned through almost 2/3 of our last fundraising round and while revenues are up, we’re still posting a small loss every quarter and that adds up.”

“Alright, that’s a problem, how long do we have?”

“I’d say we have 4 months operating before we’re totally out of cash, it’s not really enough time to do another round of fundraising.”

Charles nodded his head in agreement. He played with a fidget toy in his lap, “How about this, we have that $100 million credit line, right? Let’s use that to buy some time and get ready to do a fourth round.”

“That would work, for sure, do you want me to get investor relations in here to write up an announcement?”

“I don’t need to meet with them, have them draw up the announcement, and I’ll review a draft after it’s done and sign it.”

Jackie nodded as she took notes, “Then we need to set up a meeting for the fourth fundraise then and plan that out.”

“Coordinate with James on that, he does my calendar,”

“Alright, great, thank you, I’ll send a Slack chat if anything comes up. I’m going to get on the phone with the bank.”

Charles smiled as Jackie walked out of his office, phone balanced in one hand, notes on the other arm, “Another crisis solved, at least for now.”

Charles focused on his screen again until James knocked on the door.

“It’s Senior staff meeting,” James said, “Sorry to interrupt.”

Charles shook his head as if to shake out his thoughts, “Yeah, fine, do you have my iPad?”

“It’s right there,” James pointed at the desk. Charles picked it up and followed James to the meeting.

The glass conference room refracted the light from the efficient fixtures around the room. The chairs circled the conference table. Suzanne Moore, was still slender in her early 70s. Coffee cup in hand, and a pad tucked under her arm, she was the first to arrive at the meeting. She was fine-boned in the face but wore large accessories and speciality glasses. Her hair had not changed style since the Carter administration, and yet somehow she remained incredibly chic.

“It’s nice to be in person again,” she said under her breath. Fastidiously on-time, she was disappointed that she seemed to be the only one to take the timeliness of the meeting seriously. She seated herself to wait.

The glass door swung open with a push from Jacob Laughlin, affectionally referred to as Jake. Jake’s dark skin and close-cropped hair shuffled into view. Slightly overweight, he held an AirPod to his ear.

“Yes, yeah, that’s right. And call web services and find out why. 99% uptime my ass,” Jake stuffed his phone in his pocket. He pulled out two other phones and set them on the table. He balanced his Starbucks against his wrist.

“Morning, Suzanne, how are you?” Jake asked.

“Fine, it appears we are the only two who care about being on time, at least somewhat anyway.”

“Oh yeah, sorry about that, long morning with IT and this cloud service stuff. One of the kids is home from school sick and my wife has been blowing up my phone.”

Suzanne let a wry smile cross her face, “I remember those days all too well.”

Jake chuckled as he scrolled through his phone and sat down in his chair, leaning it all the way back to a precarious angle.

The glass door swung open again to accept Nick Ramirez into the conference room. Short, as men go, he had classic Iberian features.

“Hey everybody, I’m feeling good today, had a solid CrossFit sesh this morning. Feeling good,” Nick said. He strode into the room with athletic confidence with a mixer bottle in of some liquid in his hand, “You working out bro?” Nick asked Jake.

Jake looked up from his phone and gave a blank stare before responding, “No, yeah, no, not in a while, I need to though.”

“Crossfit, I’m telling you, essential.”

“It’s our fearless leader,” Suzanne remarked as Charles entered the room, “And only 15 minutes after the hour.”

“I’m sorry everyone, I had an early meeting with finance. Where is Jenn?” Charles asked.”

“Well, Jennifer is always late, perpetually,” Suzanne shot back.

“And Mel?”

“Here!” Melissa Kimberly walked into the room, her stride was awkward despite her sensible shoes. Her modest skirt and top were accented with chunky jewelry. In many ways, a younger Suzanne, or at least someone who aspired to the mature and refined look. Her arms were filled with an iPad and papers.

“I’m just here, there was traffic.”

Michael Campbell followed Mel in behind. The firm’s legal beagle was responsible for navigating the complicated world of compliance, patents, and everything else that could get anyone arrested at the company. It wasn’t often forced to come to actual meetings like this but the once-a-week senior staff was not to be missed.

“And now just Jenn,” Charles said, tapping his pen against the epoxy finish of the custom waterfall conference room table.

They didn’t have to wait long, at 20 past the hour, Jennifer Paulson finally deigned to arrive. Her body was covered in a tight bandage dress with cap sleeves. Her hair was neatly styled with her face accented with a bright red lip. She pushed open the door with her slight frame.

“I’m here,” she said holding a coffee cup whose plastic lid was already stained with her lip color. She sat down at the final seat.

Charles leaned on the table, “Good morning everyone, thank you for coming. We have a big week coming up. Can we get the agenda?”

James fiddled with a laptop and the large screens on the walls of the room blinked to life. First they displayed The Department Store logo and then flashed to an agenda document. It was a typical round-table of everyone’s specific areas.

Charles said, “Alright, first up is product, Suzanne, we are launching some new in-house brand products?”

Suzanne smiled as she spoke, “Yes, that’s right, we have the whole new Spring collection coming in, it’s around 2000 items. I’m still waiting on word about photography and graphics for listings, Mel?”

Melissa Kimberly cut right in, “Yes, that’s end of week, no sooner.”

Charles pivoted his chair, “Alright, Jake, are we ready to get all those listings online?”

Jake laid back in his chair and twirled his phone,“We’re having server up-time issues with the new cloud service, theoretically, yes, but I need to check in with IT again and talk to the web devs because we’re getting errors on some things still and it’s mired with inventory at the warehouse network, it’s a bit of a mess.”

“Alright, Mel is going to buy you time, if we can’t start making listings until later this week, that means you have a few days to work out the pipes. Suzanne, that mean’s we’re already set for the upcoming holidays, which would be St. Patrick’s Day mostly?”

Suzanne nodded, “Yes, she replied, and we are already shopping and designing for fall, I’ll set up a time to do a presentation on the vision for fall across our product lines.”

“Jennifer, marketing, let’s talk numbers, top line today please.”

Jennifer leaned on the side of her chair, “Um, ok, right, so I do have some great numbers on customer growth, next slide, please. But the real excitement is about our new branding partnership with Paula the Midwestern Mom, she’s huge on Tik Tok and thanks to Suzanne’s hard work with product, we’re doing a entire collection and that’s really going to bump up Q3 numbers. Advertising clicks was flat but we saw user growth from social, especially Tik Tok, and we saw a nice bump in emails too.”

“Nick, let’s talk operations, fulfillment, is Jake’s IT issues still holding you up?”

“Yeah, we’re definitely having connectivity issues in the warehouse, systems being offline, some folks get stuck standing around, I’ve been just sending stuff out to our 3rd party warehouses, but that’s causing inventory issues and back orders. I really need IT to get it together.”

Jake smiled and shook his head, “Yeah, yeah I know.”

Charles turned toward Jake, “Isn’t your Jira close rate still coming up a bit?”

Jake leaned back, “Yeah, we’re working through all the tickets, but there is a massive backlog on stuff, and we’re still bringing some new systems online, and we’re mired in cloud computing stuff too. We’re working on it.”

Alright, good stuff, let’s go team, and we’ll status things through the week, “Jake, please let me know what you need to get this solved, we can’t be having these delays.”

Jake puffed out his cheeks and let out a long exhale, “I mean, get HR to hire some folks.”

Charles nodded, “Get a meeting with them, please let me know how it goes, I’ll address as needed. Let’s get to it.”

Everyone stood up and gathered their devices and papers and filed out of the room.

Confessional

September 8th, 2021

From: Charles Dakaris

To: Mentor Jack

Subject: Exec team

It’s been a tough week, but I’m glad to check in with you again. Thanks for reading this. We have a little financial issue and had to pull on some credit, but our revenue is strong we’re just still losing money and there are so many things to work on. I’ll admit it, our exec team could use some work. But these people have a good foundation. They got us to where we are. I feel like we just need to tighten things up a bit. I thought the hardest part about taking over an iconic brand would be customer expectations but operations, on this side of e-commerce, is so much harder than running a simple 7 figure situation out of a warehouse. It’s a bigger operation and there are just so many areas for failure. I think we are under head count as well. Do you have any handy advice for fixing operations? As it turns out, everything hinges on that and I try not to focus on that because I need to raise money and focus on strategy but it is dragging the brand down and it is dragging me down from a time perspective.

Thanks for asking about Kerri, she is doing good. I think she is planning to go to another music festival, but she hasn’t been out of the house much since Coachella. Karen is super busy at her new law firm and with the kids, the new nanny seems nice enough. How was your week with the grandkids?

Talk soon,

Charles