Uncompromising (Age Gap, gxg)

Chapter 6

"Where do we stand on Jenkins?" I asked Clayton, one of my Senior Account Managers. We were on a zoom call on Monday afternoon so as to accommodate everyone's schedule.

My company, KTLO Consulting, had our main office on the north side of Tampa to cover the southeast, a virtual office in San Francisco where my best friend Harlow was that covered the west coast, and a third in Nashville that covered the Midwest and east where Clayton and Tori worked. We saved a little money during Covid by combining the east coast and Midwest offices, and it turned out that Clayton and Tori hit it off so well that they were engaged to be married next year. I'd love to take credit for that, but honestly, they'd been flirting over video calls before I ever made the decision to combine the offices, so odds are they would have been together anyway. Fuck it, I'll take the credit for moving them into the same office anyway.

Clayton managed the Midwest, and we had a touchy client out there in Jenkins Manufacturing, but it was hopefully worked out. "We're good now. They really wanted to cut costs by laying people off, but we were able to stop that. They would have paid out more in severance packages than they'd save, and by keeping the workforce and improving their processes, they can actually handle more business instead. Everyone wins."

I nodded happily, letting out a sigh. Jenkins had been determined to slash their budget as soon as they hired us, which I told them up front we would recommend against. Cutting the workforce was an unfortunate reality in many businesses, but we tried to make the companies more efficient so that the existing workforce would handle even more work and allow them to handle more clients themselves. It didn't hurt that we showed them the cost benefit analysis that showed how much it would cost them to train new employees while dealing with rookie mistakes, and how much their already trained people were saving them in the long run.

Our offices weren't big, since a lot of our workforce travelled a lot, and the majority of us could work from home on most projects. That was why Harlow's office in San Francisco was virtual, she didn't even need one and it saved a ton of overhead for us by having no commercial lease with California prices. It was company policy that everyone works from home on Fridays, and we were liberal in how often everyone else needed to be there. We didn't have huge offices in fancy skyscrapers, but smaller rented offices that saved us money on overhead, which was extremely important when some of our workers were between clients. A lot of consultants get laid off if the salesforce doesn't keep enough clients in the pipeline, but my job was to make sure that didn't happen. I never wanted to get rid of an employee unless they really messed up. In all the years that I'd been running it, I'd only had to let two people go, and both of those were because of the way they interacted with either a coworker or a client.

I hoped not to have that issue again.

"Harlow, are you doing good out there?" I wondered as she stifled a yawn.

She nodded wearily. "Yep. Khloe called from Singapore in the middle of the night and I'm regretting my life choices. Never agree to marry anyone working for an airline. I'll be okay as soon as I get a little more coffee." Harlow was my best friend, even if I'd only met her about twelve years ago through work. But we'd done several projects together and shared many bottles of wine. I'd never met her fiancé, a woman named Khloe who seemed to be travelling nonstop as a flight attendant, but she seemed stressed whenever she talked about her.

"Okay, well let me give you a little news before we wrap up." I'd saved a little bit of news from Friday that I wanted to tell them in person rather than over email. "We were asked to submit a bid at Telenor, a big telecommunications company with their Headquarters located in Norway, though they have operations in Asia too. If we get selected, we'll probably start there after the new year, but in the meantime, I'm going to be talking to their operations people to make sure we understand what they're looking for in the bid. I think we have a good chance at this one."