TeamQuest What you read here is true Clear Lake Iowa

It’s actually a little more diabolic than this.  Since you are clearly an insider and know about this company, I’ll tell you what happened.  The problem is the way Renee and her pet James booked the deal.  James was promoted last year in 2012 to lead the sales group, and failed miserably.  He couldn’t lead, couldn’t manage and commanded no respect. He was the most hated sales manager they had.  He was hated so much, I think the sales team was going push him off a boat in Clear Lake.   Any other sales manager would have been sent packing but rather than firing him, Renee had the brain-fart to demote him back to sales, and give him an amazing book of business and some plum accounts to “get him jump started.”   All that showed is nepotism and sent the message that when you fail, you get rewarded . 

No one in the sales group liked this, but he is Renee’s pet.  It’s weird.  They vacation together and do “couples” things with each other’s spouse.  They are always on the phone and texting each other like they’re in high school. In meetings they’re passing notes and IMing.  It’s all very strange.  You tell me what VP of sales, vacations with their failure-of-a-sales-manager?   And HR allowed this?  The leadership team allowed this?    Only at TeamQuest.

James landed a renewal in Q1.  I think it was Citibank.  As you know, if you land a 3 year/3 million dollar deal in software, you book it as $1 million in year one, $1 million in year two, $1 million in year three.  YOU DON’T book it as a $3 million dollar deal in year one.  This is what Enron would do.  This is SOP at every software and services company and follows GAP (general accounting principles.)  

Well James and Renee booked the renewal as $3 million in Q1, throwing the numbers off.  The CFO caught it, but only after Q1 had ended (I think the deal came in and was booked around March 30/31^st) with no checks and balances on the booking, except ex post facto from the CFO.  So while I understand your comment that the “buck stops with the CFO” I think he did his job and caught it and made the fix.  Sales screwed this up.  Renee let it happen and let her former sales manager book a deal, the wrong way. 

James and (possibly) Renee should have been sacked over Citibank.  But for some reason, Renee won’t fire James, even after all his failures and cataclysmic ineptitude.  Jerred has no t**s to do anything, except have his boring meetings, let alone fire Renee.  I heard Renee hired an outsider to fix sales, but they were quickly let go.  I heard they were onto what was going on and wanted James fired, but that’s only a rumor.  Like most outsiders s/he was going to bring in their own team and replace about ½ of them, but I don’t think many liked that.   Outsiders come in, tell them what’s wrong and they don’t want to hear it.  I know there is some guy in England who is a sales consultant and trainer, but even with him telling them what’s wrong, and all the training, they still fail.  What’s that saying about making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear?

CFO is definitely vying to be CEO.  But who else is there?  They are cozy with the local bank and with McGladry, but its small town BS.  Don’t you remember on Little House on the Prairie, Olsen Mercantile and the Lumber yard WAS the whole town?  Same applies here.   Don’t you remember the big annual event is Jerred bringing in his steam engines to cook sweet corn?  They talk about it all year as their annual event.

Everything is else is correct.  The profit sharing is as clear as mud. I could never understand the calculations.   HR does nothing, many sick life-long people there.  An engineering company, hiring a bunch of engineers and the parade has passed these guys by.  The office is dead quite.  It’s like going into an office on a Saturday.  I know they are hurting. They have no job postings and everyone there sticks it out for the benefits and like the original poster said, there’s no other place to work in Clear Lake.  The area has such a bad drug/meth problem (go figure, I wanted to kill myself just getting off the Clear Lake exit, one can’t imagine living there and growing up there), people are just happy to have a job.