Building Bridges

Today I had arranged to meet the EMEA Sales Exec at the nearest Circle of Hell to present our still unattractive numbers to a Business Unit Executive. The walk-through went reasonably well and after ninety minutes we closed down the call with a handful of actions to progress ...

... Basically we need to explain, or preferably remove, five or even six million pounds of cost and so we started to scratch our heads. We had already made a reasonable dent in this cost increase over the past two weeks but were still a couple of million quid short when I had a moment of realisation. The sun pierced the gloom as it dawned on me that it could be argued that the costs of supporting a recently acquired subsidiary company had not been fully costed in an earlier iteration of my solution but were so now.

We set to with a spreadsheet and a calculator and within a couple of hours had a much improved bridge to move from one set of costs to another. The only issue will be how much of this bullshit explanation the client will accept. Actually that is not the only issue. We know that I have a cost reduction from one element of my solution and an, as yet, unknown cost increase from another. We are currently guessing that these will give a further million pounds of cost increase to explain away.

I may have about seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds tucked away for this eventuality but, for the moment, I am keeping my gob shut.