Chapter 35: Chapter 35: Difficulties
"A Hui, I’ve given it some thought. To help you get up to speed as quickly as possible, I’m going to personally take you on a few business runs. That way, you’ll learn the ropes faster!"
"That would be wonderful. Thank you, President Shan!"
"No need to thank me. When you do a good job, it reflects well on me, doesn’t it? Managing such a large team, I need your support too. It all comes down to everyone’s collective effort!"
Smiling, he realized President Shan was quite good at corporate-speak.
"Right now, the Airex brand has two main priorities. When you go back, I want you to think about them and come up with concrete plans. They need to be quantifiable, executable, and practical. No empty, grandiose ideas!
Airex’s recent performance has dropped sharply. We have a total of 35 stores for this brand across the province. At its peak, the average monthly sales per store were close to 300,000, but now it’s only 150,000. The sales volume has been cut in half.
This creates two problems. First, for our good stores, the malls want us to pull out or move to a worse location. Of course, we are firmly against this. Second, for our underperforming stores, the ones where we’re losing a lot of money, we want to close them down as soon as possible. These stores are usually in subpar malls, and those malls are under pressure to keep tenants, so they don’t want to let us leave.
It involves comprehensive partnerships. After all, in many of these malls, we have 7 to 10 of our brands operating. If they insist on not letting us close one, there’s not much we can do. We can’t just pull everything out, right? The other brands are profitable, and our overall business with them is profitable.
So, now that you’re here, you have two main focuses. One, you need to boost sales performance. Two, you need to maintain effective communication with the malls and close down those few loss-making stores as quickly as possible!"
Yang Hui nodded and raised a question, "President Shan, our Operations Department is primarily focused on sales. Shouldn’t store closures be handled by the Channel Development Department?"
President Shan laughed. "This is where we’re different from your previous company. You only had one brand before, but we have many. If the Channel Development Department handles the negotiations, they can easily be threatened. The mall will use our overall partnership as leverage, demanding that if we pull one brand, we have to pull them all, or if one stays, they all have to stay."
"But you’re different. You’re in charge of a single brand. Although they’ll still use this to pressure the company, it won’t affect your negotiations. Even if you do take some drastic action, it won’t impact the bigger picture of the partnership between our two companies!"
Yang Hui shook his head. ’Isn’t this just burying one’s head in the sand? This is a partnership between two companies, not individuals. If you can’t represent the company to negotiate a store closure, why would they even listen to you? And if you *are* representing the company, what does it matter to them if you’re in charge of one brand or many? They can still threaten the entire company just the same, can’t they?’
’This must be what a private enterprise is like,’ he thought. ’The division of labor isn’t that clear-cut. The boss just tells whoever comes to mind to handle it.’
Leaving President Shan’s office, he returned to his desk.
He checked his phone. Zhang Chun hadn’t replied yet. ’The meeting probably isn’t over. I’ll just have to wait for the reply.’
As he browsed through some company introductions and recent operational reports for Futong Commerce on his computer, he thought about how to integrate himself quickly.
Even though he didn’t plan on staying for long, he believed in leaving a mark. His personal reputation was extremely important to him, and he was determined to achieve solid results during his tenure.
The web version of WeChat showed a friend request: [Boss, this is Zhu Jing!]
He accepted the request. Zhu Jing sent him a smiley face emoji and then added him to an "Airex" work group chat. The group members were the few supervisors on his team.
As soon as he joined the group, he was flooded with all sorts of welcome messages!
"Welcome to the Airex family, boss!"
Below that was a flood of flower and applause emojis!
[Ji Kun: Now that our boss is here, we finally have hope!]
[Xu Guang: Under your leadership, sales will surely soar, and our bonuses will double!]
[Zhu Jing: Looking forward to you leading us to glory!]
[Xiang Ling: Looking forward to you leading us to glory!]
’Just a lazy copy-paste job.’ The last female supervisor, Han Ya, had also sent the exact same message.
’It seems Zhu Jing is influential in this team. Of course, it’s also possible the last two are just lazy and have no desire to make an impression on their new boss.’
[Yang Hui: Thanks, everyone. Glory is built on concrete actions. — @All Please submit your three biggest challenges with the current business by this Friday. We’ll start by solving problems.]
He had put an end to the useless flattery, simultaneously sending a message that he valued a hands-on spirit. By assigning a task, he could also use their feedback to better understand the team and the company’s situation.
May was almost over. Yang Hui looked at the performance data for the team and its individual members.
Time elapsed: 97%
Ji Kun: Same-store YoY growth: -30%. Sales target met: 72%.
Xu Guang: Same-store YoY growth: -35%. Sales target met: 67%.
Zhu Jing: Same-store YoY growth: -27%. Sales target met: 78%.
Xiang Ling: Same-store YoY growth: -33%. Sales target met: 74%.
Han Ya: Same-store YoY growth: -39%. Sales target met: 68%.
The numbers were shocking. He had also looked at the supervisors’ income structure that morning; it was mainly base salary plus performance bonuses. The store staff’s income was even more directly tied to sales performance.
If a store’s sales target achievement was below 80%, none of the sales associates would receive a commission bonus. For a salesperson, commissions could often be even more than their base salary.
It was already the end of May, with only today and tomorrow left. He pulled up the data for all the stores. At this rate, the sales associates in 80% of the stores wouldn’t be getting their commission bonuses this month. This was going to cause massive staff turnover.
"Boss, do you have a moment? I’d like to report on a few things."
"Have a seat."
This was the first person to proactively report to him. Yang Hui figured he was likely trying to show initiative and to get closer to the new boss. It was also possible he was sizing him up, trying to see if this new leader was competent and worth following.
Yang Hui noticed that as Ji Kun approached, the others, who appeared busy with their own work, were actually all paying attention to them.
"Boss, you just asked us in the group chat to give feedback on our problems. Actually, I’ve had a list prepared for a while. It’s all about work-related issues that I can’t solve on my own."
"Oh?"
’He came prepared. I like that.’
"My team has a problem right now—we’re severely understaffed. For the seven stores I manage, we’re supposed to have a headcount of 62, but we only have 48 people. And we might see a lot more of them leave soon."
Yang Hui nodded. ’Just as I expected. When employees don’t get their money, massive turnover is inevitable. Especially the frontline staff. They don’t feel much loyalty to the company to begin with, and it’s easy for them to find similar jobs. They’ll just go wherever the pay is better.’
"Last month, the employees at three of my stores were able to get their commission bonuses, but this month, it might only be one!"
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