RSSThe demise of my dream job
Apr 22
Work bankruptcy, job, misled, Work 1 Comment
Good pay, good benefits, good boss, good coworkers, career path and objectives, work that I was proud of, etc. I thought I had found it all neatly packaged up here, my dream job. Things were peachy.
In October the news started to roll in. My company was not doing well overall as a company. Our contract was doing well, but not enough to buoy such a massive company. With the way the economy was heading nothing seemed that alarming.
Then November rolls around and the news that my company was going to be delisted from the NYSE, and do a 1:50 reverse stock split. This raised some red flags as I’ve been through this before with previous companies. Again nothing that we couldn’t come out of, but something that I should have paid more attention to.
Then we find out in February/March time frame that my company (corporate) is going to be filing chapter 11 bankruptcy. With the economy the way it is going and the climate in which we are operating in, this seemed like a good idea. Or at least that’s what our Managing Director (MD) painted it as. Lots of other companies are doing it right now, and the stigma of filing it would be mitigated somewhat because of the amount of companies doing it. A little restructuring of our debt….in and out in a couple of months…no problem. This is where I feel that I drank the Kool-aid so to speak. I didn’t get that alarmed because the MD kept reassuring us that we wouldn’t have any problems winning the rebid on the State portal contract (our money maker), and that we would actually come out of chapter 11 a stronger company and better positioned. It all sounded good, it all made sense. We were even reassured that we had contingency plans in place.
Then the big bombs started dropping. We were told that my company was going to be selling off Public Services, of which the state portal contract is a part of, to a huge auditing/consulting company. This would have been great for us. A large stable company that was trying to grow in the government consulting space. But lo and behold the buyer has an auditing business. Come to find out, they can’t actually own our contract because of the auditing conflicts with our mutual clients. So we aren’t really sure how this is going to play out. Are contingency plans going to kick in, is my company going to sell us to someone else, is the state going to step in, etc. A little noticed point in all of this was that my company sure looked to be positioning themselves for chapter 7 bankruptcy as opposed to the chapter 11 they filed. They started selling off their core assests/business units.
So at this point we have yet another company meeting and we are again reassured that we have contingency plans in place and that we would start trying to get the ball rolling on those. Again, sounds good, made sense at the time, but what was downplayed was the inconceivable scenario where we don’t actually win the state portal contract rebid. Again another Kool-aid moment.
So the biggest of bombs is dropped on us Tuesday morning. We received a letter from the State’s contract department, basically stating that we were no longer in the running for the state portal contract rebid. So all of the reassuring that had been given to us was in fact in error. Right now the State can’t tell us anything about the bid process because they are still in the procurement process for the rebid, but there is a lot of educated speculation as to why we weren’t invited to continue in the process. It’s assumed that the State’s contract department couldn’t justify giving the contract to a company who essentially didn’t have any financial backing what so ever. Leading up the meeting we found out that our so called “contingency plan” was a no go, because the SEC had some issues with some of my companies accounting practices for the state portal contract. Way to do due diligence!
And even during this meeting the MD is trying to mitigate how bad this really is. For 3 company meetings straight now, he’s mitigated the downside of the scenarios. And after all 3 meetings the worst case scenario has happened. I’m not putting much stock into the rosy picture that he’s trying to paint. Also this meeting is the first time that he directly mentions that my company (corporate) will more than likely be filing chapter 7 bankruptcy. Again, he tried to reassure us that we as the state portal contract team would be purchased by someone else by the time they file that. (Yeah, and I’ve got a bridge in Arizona to sell you.)
So now it appears that my dream job has just disappeared from underneath my feet. I’m now starting a job search not of my own choosing, in a horrible economic climate. Yeah me! The only glimmer of hope is that I’ll have a small amount of job security while we transition our work over to the new TOL contract owner. But that is a fleeting amount of security at best.
My head is spinning with all the things that are going on and I’m still trying to figure out which way is up. I hope that I can just land on my feet.