A Business Deal That Starts With 'I Do'

Part 11 - Chapter 10

CH. 10 Monday morning finally arrived and Savannah had butterflies in her stomach. Today was the day that she got to present her idea. She had worked almost non-stop since the last meeting, but she had put a lot of time and heart into this presentation. She had wanted to run it by Axel first and get his opinion, but it had not worked out. She actually had felt bad the night before when she retired back to their suite at nine pm.

She slept in the guest room again, not because she and Axel were fighting, but because she was exhausted and wanted a good night's sleep. She fell asleep the second her head hit the pillow, but she was shocked when Axel came in close to midnight. He was up again with her at five am and they were at work by six am. Savannah was barely keeping up and Axel was keeping longer hours than she was. Savannah wasn't even sure how he was doing it, but she was impressed.

The meeting wasn't until nine am, but she was nervous. She paced around her office and went over the presentation several times, just to iron out any last kinks. She also checked on their out of town guests, who were with a good group of employees. Now that she knew there was no relationship between Axel and Leslie, Savannah was feeling charitable and could maybe even give Leslie a shot. By the time eight-thirty arrived, Savanah was wound like a top.

Axel was going to speak first, as well as one of their financial officers. Savannah was momentarily distracted when she realized their stock had gone down more and the company was losing more money. It had not even been a week, but Savannah was extremely nervous. There was a lot of pressure on her and Axel to keep this company alive and unfortunately, it seemed like they were not only going to have to make money, but now also dig the company out of a hole. Finally it was Savannah's turn.

There had been several ideas from other employees and Savannah mentioned those first, circulating a survey to the group of key employees to see if they thought any of those ideas should be implemented. Savannah was actually impressed with a few of them and thought the company could use those ideas too, but they were not grand, like Savannah's breakthrough idea. Now it was the time to introduce her idea.

"That gets us to the idea we will be implementing, although, this is the raw idea and I am hoping we can spend the next month refining it. I would like to have it up and running within a month, two tops. I call it the 'Luxury Bucks' program. Now, we've all heard of timeshare, right? What's the problem with timeshare?"

At first there was dead silence and Savannah got nervous. She remembered from one of her school courses that interactive meetings were much more successful because people felt like they were part of the creation and involved, therefore took responsibility from the end result. Savannah was relieved when Axel spoke up.

"Location, fees, and the system itself."

Savannah flashed him a big smile.

"Excellent Mr. Scott," she said and most of the room chuckled, "you are right, though. The location is difficult because if you are not everywhere, people have no interest. They hate the fees and taxes, and depending on how many people you have employed to set up their exchange, that can become a very negative process. So let's scrap that and move on to a points system. This system is better and many hotels today now have moved on to this process, right? What is the negative with this process?"

She waited again, but this time people started immediately chiming in and giving their two cents. Savannah was elated the presentation was progressing well now, really moving along.

"Again location," someone said.

"The bank, or system," someone else chimed in.

"All right, similar issues, although, overall it works better, but what if we instead used a money system," Savannah suggested.