“History is merely a list of surprises.”                 –Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

This March, The Wall Street Journal Blog, “Laid Off and Looking” ended. They had followed out-of-work professionals and their struggles to move on. Their readers, a fraternity of survivors, were bummed. “Do not shut this sucker down” was one response. “Pls do not shut this blog down. I need it.” What’s the WSJ missing?

Then a couple of weeks ago, The Vault discontinued their blog, Pink Slipped, which gave job leads and tips for Pink Slippers.  They stated:

“The economic conditions that served as the founding raison d’etre … increasingly seem to be waning.”

I tentatively agreed. The headlines didn’t blare business obituaries like last year. Sure, there are substantial companies like Goldman and Ernst & Young that are facing the big bad wolf, but collapse seems unlikely.

So I was surprised when I started updating The Memorial Garden, our list of dead companies. The number of newly closed companies is mind boggling.

Have corporate failures become second page news? If you’re among the 2010 company bankruptcies, liquidations or flat out busts, what is your story?

Laurie Phillips writes for and about businesses. She is a multi-time member of The Dead Company Club.

cool and creative photo courtesy of flikr.com/bensonkua

Post from: The Dead Company Club The Dead Company Club is a hobby of the writers at Sundance Research. Sometimes they just need to write about their own stuff.

Surprise! Companies Are Still Closing!

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So your company closed. When this happened to me, I felt despondent, betrayed, victimized and generally worthless, angry and shattered.

Yet, I had to admit there was a silver lining. I didn’t want to acknowledge it because I wanted to be mad, but it was there. Maybe not one that gave me my economic stability and self-confidence back, but still…

Let’s face it. Have you ever been at work and:

• Wore out your watch by staring at it?
• Spiked your anxiety-ridden manager’s coffee with Valium?
• Kept your fingers crossed that the moron wouldn’t speak up and drag the meeting out purposelessly for another hour?
• Worried that the job would outlive you?

It’s a bummer to lose your job and your company with no chance of being hired back. But it gives you the opportunity that lets you get a new start, find new opportunities, even explore new careers. Admit it. There’s a silver lining there.

Have you found your silver lining yet?

Laurie Phillips is an expert at working for companies that vanish. She is the President of Sundance Research and no longer worries about the job outliving her.

Muchas gracias to flikr.com/tanakawho for the photo.

Post from: The Dead Company Club The Dead Company Club is a hobby of the writers at Sundance Research. Sometimes they just need to write about their own stuff.

Have You Found Your Silver Lining?

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“Do you want to know a secret? Do you promise not to tell?”                                                                                                   – Snow White

Have you ever worked for a moron? Thief? Leech? Welcome to the club. If your company is dead there was a stinker somewhere, maybe even a full-blown level 5 toxic environment. Here’s the Seven Dwarfs Standard, developed when I had the misfortune of working for all of them at once. See which fairy tale character you worked for.

Happy: Optimistic beyond reason, only pays attention to good news. Blissfully unaware.

Nosy: Wants to know all the gossip. Calls meetings to brainstorm what other gossip-worthy things might be happening.

Stinky: Always kissing ass, will follow any order no matter how destructive it is.

Sleazy: Sells anything to anyone whether the customer needs it or not. Dodges phone calls from irate clients.

Bossy: Arrogant and derogatory. Doesn’t want anyone else’s opinion. Is often wrong.

Snoozy: Oblivious but pleasant. Employees envy him because they want to be like him.

Piggy: Power hungry, fills up at the expense of co-workers. Sucks the corporate teat until it’s dry.

How it works

The Seven Dwarfs dynamic is predictable. It goes like this.

1. Bossy: “The economy isn’t soft. That’s a bunch of crap. We’re going to build a huge office complex and Snoozy, you find out how to finance it.”

2. Nosy corners Bossy and asks who will be in charge. He then spends speeds through the office telling everyone and talking about why Bossy is an idiot for making his choice.

3. Sleazy goes to Salesforce.com and figures out who he can sucker into renting space in the new complex at a ridiculous rate.

4. Happy emails everyone the news, complete with smiley emoticons. Ignores the absurdity of the idea.

5. Piggy takes credit for the idea and schedules a boondoggle to Costa Rica and Riyad to check out similar complexes.

6. Stinky comes to Bossy’s office and tells him repeatedly what a great idea this is.

7. Nothing ever happens because Snoozy goes back to watching YouTube.

Repeat.

OK, which ones did you work for?

Post from: The Dead Company Club The Dead Company Club is a hobby of the writers at Sundance Research. Sometimes they just need to write about their own stuff.

Fairy Tale Bosses

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YIKES. This was the prescient license plate of a former investment broker who can’t afford the car anymore. It’s my G-rated exclamation when I read about the growing stacks of worthless stock certificates, old employee IDs and the latest additions to the club.

American pastimes closed indefinitely

Closings have gone way beyond what you read in the headlines. Our pastimes and culture- loosely defined – are getting hammered. Across the country bookstores, opera houses, gyms, race tracks, daycare centers, even museums are getting whacked. Gone. It’s a true Catch-22. These businesses exist on discretionary income. But if your company closes, you don’t have discretionary income which causes these companies to close.

“Discretionary” redefined

And what the hell is happening to state and local government jobs? Schools are closing. DMV offices – yes, the quick service centers in New York – are closed. Prisons! Freakin’ prisons! And how about this one: Virginia closed 18 highway rest areas in the midst of summer travel. Only 19 are still open. The average distance between rest stops now: 120 miles.  The new state motto ought to be “Virginia is for lovers (and people with strong bladders, parents be strongly advised.)” Are these really discretionary services?

Get a GPS

If you’re thinking “Oh, I’ll just stop at the next exit,” let me share some experience. The facilities at fast food stops and convenience stores aren’t designed for summer travel volume. You’ll need a GPS to find your way to the nearest library or state park to use their services – if they haven’t cut back their hours. At least Garmin, the GPS leader, will still thrive. Ironic that their stuff is manufactured in Taiwan. Now that’s a pisser.

Post from: The Dead Company Club The Dead Company Club is a hobby of the writers at Sundance Research. Sometimes they just need to write about their own stuff.

What Could Possibly Close Next?

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“Life’s a fragile thing Harry… One minute you’re chewin on a burger, the next minute you’re dead meat.”                                                                                                                –Jim Carey in “Dumb and Dumber”

Logic That Defies Logic

There’s death and then there’s senseless death. Last year Heller Ehrman was a top-50 law firm with revenues over $500 million. Now they’re dead. I’ve been trying to ignore this story but I can’t get over one fact: Heller filed bankruptcy to avoid paying what they owed their landlord, screwing their own employees as a result. And their logic? They did it because of the “fiduciary obligations to their creditors,” which include both the landlord and their employees.

Heller and Escher or Escher and Heller?

Escher drawings are endlessly complex and confusing, rarely what they seem to be at first glance. Heller’s end was pretty much the same. The landlord twitched, the court agreed, the banks balked, clients pounced and partners bolted, all scrambling for their own best interests. Heller hasn’t missed the chance to point fingers. “It’s unfortunate that the landlord filed…the partners hurt us when they defected…the bank didn’t have to blah blah blah.” Those actions were all contractually legal. And Heller’s response screwed their employees.

Would Management Please Show Some Backbone

Let’s be blunt. Firm management botched their jobs. Blaming anyone else is an academic argument for a lunch reunion of unemployed lawyers. The dominos fell like this: inept management, partner defections, decreased revenue, unpaid bills, malpractice awards, collection lawsuits, credit defaults, bankruptcy.

Big Legal Fees Result from Not Enough Money

Other firms’ litigation businesses have bloomed from the bankruptcy, filing suit against Heller on behalf of ex-employees. Clients are suing for breach of contract and ignoring their unpaid invoices from the firm. Heller has sued their banks. Former partners are being sued to return their capital they took when they left the firm. The Dissolution Committee has to collect enough money to pay the creditors. Meanwhile, the lawsuits pad other attorneys’ pockets.

What about the Employees?

Hey! Wait a minute – look over here! There are 1,000+ people who lost their jobs and are struggling to recover. Ex-employees haven’t gotten wages due or accrued vacation pay and don’t have COBRA benefits. Because the firm didn’t give WARN’s 60 day notice employees are also due penalty payments. But that’s no consolation when litigation and bankruptcy court stands between you and your money. How do you pay living expenses or hold off mortgage collectors today? Good luck getting a job: the legal industry isn’t hiring. There are hundreds still looking for jobs eight months after D-day. It sucks to be ex-Heller.

Checkmate

Eventually Heller will be just another failed law firm, a footnote in legal history. Other than those who went through the trauma, few will think about them again. Still it’s hard to ignore the irony: Heller got checkmated by their own legal contracts.

Heller employees have set up an informative support network at Heller Highwater.

How long did you wait to get paid what you were owed after your company filed bankruptcy?

Post from: The Dead Company Club The Dead Company Club is a hobby of the writers at Sundance Research. Sometimes they just need to write about their own stuff.

Hell or Heller Ehrman?

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“Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.”                                       — Warren Buffett

From heyday to…

Would you like to take home $1.3 million? That’s the average profits-per-partner in the top 100 law firms as of 2008.  Law firms have laughed all the way to the bank for years, enjoying 160% growth in the last 10 years and obese paydays. Even fresh-faced graduates couldn’t stop grinning with their $175,000 starting salaries.

…no payday at Big Law

But the last year has been a disaster for law firms. Heller Ehrman was in the top 50 just a year ago. Now it’s dissolved. 75% of the top 50 firms have had layoffs. The rest of them have cut salaries or delayed start dates for new attorneys, sort of a pre-employment layoff. Some firms are even paying new hires to not work. Does anyone follow that logic?

Rotting from within

Pop culture has compared law firms to rodent dens, like dumpsters but better organized. Given that lawyers will bare their fangs and litigate almost anything — suing McDonald’s because their hot coffee is … hot? — how can their businesses possibly be dying? Most of the dead were well established firms, appearing to be successful. Like other private businesses, you can’t see the rot within until it topples.

It’s Not the Economy

The economy is only partly to blame. There are three main reasons behind recent failures:

• Leadership doesn’t lead
• Someone in a position of authority goes over to the dark side
• Mergers – intended to build strength in numbers – fail

The crappy economy only highlights shortcomings, it doesn’t cause them. And because of that, the problems aren’t going to go away when the economy turns around.

So Sue Me

A few law firms have closed quietly. But others have had ugly implosions where former employees find themselves in the unsecured creditors’ line, hoping to get at least part of a paycheck. Laid-off attorneys and staff are suing their former employers.  There’s a dangerous mix of well-tuned argumentative aggression and animosity brewing.

Meanwhile, there are a lot of very smart, well-trained professionals who are looking for jobs in a troubled, shrinking industry. The tide is going out. Let’s see who’s still wearing a suit.

Are you one of the frustrated laid-off attorneys or support staff? What have your last few months been like?

After consulting to law firms for 15 years, Laurie Phillips took a break for a few years and then all hell broke loose. Read more about her work at Sundance Research.

Post from: The Dead Company Club The Dead Company Club is a hobby of the writers at Sundance Research. Sometimes they just need to write about their own stuff.

What’s With the Law Firms?

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“Sometimes I lie awake at night and ask ‘Where have I gone wrong?’ Then a voice says to me, ‘This is going to take more than one night.’”                             – Charles M. Schulz

Prime Parking Available

I was just in time today to see absolutely nothing happen at Circuit City’s headquarters. The parking lot didn’t look this massive when it actually had cars.  For anyone unaware of Circuit City’s demise, the management of this old, established electronics retailer propelled the company nose first into the ground. Their competitors hardly had to break a sweat to overtake them and while leadership rubbed their chins and pondered, The City became a ghost town.

Christmas Lite

Because I live a few miles from HQ I’ve seen former employees’ pain firsthand. The 2008 holidays were not very happy. One thing is clear: Circuit City had a lot of loyal employees. They stayed and worked through the holidays, through their own hardships, and took a load of crap from shoppers. Most didn’t bolt to find another job while there were still jobs to find. They stayed until it hurt, and then some. Consider this:

Employees that lost their jobs: 34,000
Severance: none
Accrued vacation pay: none
Bonuses to associates: promised but not delivered
WARN compliance (60 days notice before layoffs): incomplete (class action pending)
COBRA health insurance plan: none

Suckerfish and Scum Sucking Bottom Dwellers

Bonus bait was used to keep managers and employees in the stores until they were empty. The managers got a bonus. Their employees got nada. Close your eyes and thing about the last time you were a sucker. Stings, doesn’t it?

This bonus thing is a big issue. The same inept corporate management that killed the business will get bonuses to shut down the company. Ironic? They shut down the company without bonuses! 14 “essential employees” will get an average of $116,000 each, and another 135 will get $17,500. 33,850 former employees get no bonus, no severance, no insurance, and get cheated out of pay.

Customer Spittle

Income and benefits weren’t the only disaster. Plenty of customers were truly nasty as stores were liquidated. Employees got comments such as:

Quiz: Who Were The Huns?

I want to believe that most Circuit City employees – I’m excluding management – were good people in a bad situation, not Huns that pillaged the castle. Did you get this kind of abuse? How does your situation compare?

“So You Think You Have It Bad” is a series that profiles a company’s demise  and how it treated its employees. I vote that Circuit City gets an F. What do you think?

Laurie Phillips writes for businesses who want to focus their energy on making money. You can read more about her at Sundance Research.

Post from: The Dead Company Club The Dead Company Club is a hobby of the writers at Sundance Research. Sometimes they just need to write about their own stuff.

So You Think You Have It Bad? The Circuit City Story

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“The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”     Oscar Wilde

In case you weren’t sure, the neighbors are buzzing about you. Your company is gone and they know it. While you’d like to pretend nothing happened to you, face it. Your job is gone. The neighbors want to know what happened to you so they can gossip with authority. So go ahead – give them something to talk about.

Tell them you are:

And your company:

Or you are part of a corporate study on:

Finally, if you want to be perfectly clear, you can tell them the traditional answers. You were:

Ultimately your neighbors want to know enough to gossip about how much your self-esteem has been crushed. And the answer to that, my friend, is up to you.

Laurie Phillips is a business writer who has found the term “freelancing” very effective in deflecting nosy acquaintances. Read more about her “freelancing” here.

Post from: The Dead Company Club The Dead Company Club is a hobby of the writers at Sundance Research. Sometimes they just need to write about their own stuff.

Gossip Zappers

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“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”   C.S. Lewis

I was shocked and saddened by the number of companies I added to the Memorial Garden (below) during routine blog maintenance today. What has happened to all these former employees? What about their families? Their sanity? Mortgage payments? Health insurance? The extent of pain is hard to fathom.

There are some characteristics that members of The Dead Company Club share. You’ve become involuntarily unemployed. Your pride and self-esteem is bruised, if not battered. Your job search is stressful. You probably don’t have enough money to live worry-free for an indefinite period. And your financial cut-backs are going to hurt others, either directly or indirectly. From the local newspaper publisher to your lawn service to the family that you move in with again, everyone is going to suffer.

Company failures hurt. I don’t want to keep adding to the Memorial Garden. But if your company’s name belongs there, you can find safe haven here.

The Dead Company Club is here for the sole purpose of providing support to anyone whose company has crashed and burned, whether it happened last week or a long time ago.

Post from: The Dead Company Club The Dead Company Club is a hobby of the writers at Sundance Research. Sometimes they just need to write about their own stuff.

Too Many Members

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You’ve seen the TV show. Throw a piece of meat overboard and the sharks attack. They don’t care what they’re eating: they just tear it to bits, thrashing violently until it’s gone. Nothing will distract them.

Sharks are smarter than the media: they leave when the meat is gone. Your former company is the dead meat, yet once it’s gone, the media hovers and postulates “Was there criminal activity? Did the company commit fraud? Will there be more?” It doesn’t matter if the same journalists heaped praise a year ago when your ex-employer was named a “Best Company to Work For.”

My heart sank when I saw my company’s name in the headlines, accompanied by a photo of our CEO looking uncomfortable – the media’s word for this is “guilty” – at a Congressional hearing. The pain was doubled when the story included statements about ridiculous bonuses, greed and corruption. If this happens to you, don’t take it personally. This is a standard paragraph that the press adds to stories about every failed company.

Here’s some breaking news: the media never, ever gets it right. They “get it” the way it makes a good story. In a recent article Philip Delves Broughton, a writer for Forbes says:

“It is simply beyond the resources and capabilities of most news organizations, and perhaps against their commercial interests, to offer more than commentary. They can, however, bring fresh oxygen to already burning fires.”

With that admission, I’m not sure what – or who – they’re good for.

On the bright side, new meat will come along and when that happens, you’ll be old news. Until then, here are some tricks to help survive the media with your dignity intact.

1. Go cold turkey. Stop reading the news. You’re going to have to change your habits: no sneaking peeks at the headlines at the corner news dispenser. No more thumbing through news magazines in the grocery checkout line. It will be a painful break at first but remember: don’t feed the enemy.

2. Go offline. Cancel your news feeds and online subscriptions. Following links can cause serious depression. Disable the Google text alerts that used to tell you when your former company made the news. And for God’s sake, stop adding anonymous contrarian comments on blogs that lambast your dead company. If you slip and do this, block yourself from the site so you can’t return to read the responses.

3. Dangle some flesh out there. The beauty of this approach is that the press can’t publish the photos. Former Enron employees left Houston “with all their worldly possessions.” (Warning: adult material, don’t open the link if you can’t take it for the joke that it is). If you’re really entrepreneurial, book a club, charge admission and don’t give out any freebie press passes.

4. Leave them speechless. Several overwhelmed Lehman Brothers ex-employees did exactly this with a show-stealing act in London.

5. Use parental controls. Limit yourself to children’s channels on TV. Turn off the 24 hour news, talk shows, business commentary and especially Saturday Night Live. Really.

Has the media been good to you during your corporate breakup? Did they show any empathy for the human tragedy, or do they continue gnaw and circle? Tell us about it.

Laurie Phillips writes for businesses, not against them. She is not a member of the press, never has been, and probably won’t ever be after this post. Get the real scoop at Sundance Research.

Post from: The Dead Company Club The Dead Company Club is a hobby of the writers at Sundance Research. Sometimes they just need to write about their own stuff.

The Media Sucks!

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