Spring 2012 and I was looking for consulting projects. Keli, a gal who used to work for me called saying she was going on maternity leave from her post at a
leading toy manufacturer and would I be interested in filling in for four months? It was a very interesting concept as I had never done any toy marketing
before. What a great chance for me to grow my skill-set and Rolodex into a new
category. We chatted details, I met her boss Maxine and even though I
was very careful to make sure everyone knew I had no toy background, they
thought my years of management experience coupled with Maxine’s help on the toy
side was just what they were looking for to oversee the Disney Princess and
Disney Fairies lines of dresses, wands, shoes, makeup and kitchen sets.
Wheeeeeeeeeee.
The plan was to start two weeks before Keli disappeared on
maternity leave so she could help get the ball moving in the right
direction and show me how to navigate the "craziness" as she put it. Sounded great, and while I was nervous I felt confident that with a little guidance, I’d have my feet under me quickly. The night before I
start Maxine emails me saying that Keli had gone into early labor and
that unfortunately there would be no transition period, but that she was
confident I’d be just fine on my own…oh and PS she was on her way to
Europe for two weeks and she’d be in touch from the road.
Shit.
Day one is lots of HR business, paperwork and meeting my
team of 5 all with varying degrees of toy experience and none of whom have been
at the company for more than six months. What does not happen that day is
the issuance of a computer, network access or an email address. Who needs those
anyway? I had a desk and some post-its, so I suppose I was set. On
day two when no computer or network access was on the horizon, I started
receiving emails on my personal gmail account. The first being a note from
Maxine that went a little something like this:
“The TLP for 2012 and 2013 are due in 48 hours, please
confirm that you have this under control and that it will be in my inbox Friday
morning first thing.”
My first thought, “What the frig is a TLP?” My second “I’m
having my very own Office Space
moment.”
Shit.
Day three, I receive a
computer and determine that there is exactly one sane human being in the
building. Bill works in finance and I pounce first thing in the morning,
his coffee not yet poured. “Bill I’m supposed to do the TLP for Princess and
Fairies, first of all can you tell me what that means?”
He chuckles. “You? They asked YOU to do the TLP? That’s
hilarious.”
“What’s so funny” I’m both offended and confused.
Turns out the TLP or Toy Line Projection is an annual line
item forecast and P/L. Bill then explains that no one in the history of the
company has ever been able to complete one for the Princess line. There are 750
individual items that need to be forecasted and for each item there are 46
columns of data that need to be figured out and calculated. And while I know my
way around a P/L I’m left wondering why in the middle of the year the
numbers need to urgently be completed by someone who:
1) Knows
nothing about toys
2) Has less than 20 hours of on-the-job experience
I dive in anyway. Painstakingly I pull the item forecast from the network, all 750 of them, then I beg, plead and
bribe (with daily pastries) the finance team to help me unearth the data for each of these 750 items.
For anything I can’t get my hands on, I start making numbers up working
backwards from the bottom so that my forecast rolls up to a unit value and
revenue value I’d heard bandied about in the hallway. “Princess should be a $90
Million dollar business” said someone not doing the forecast. So $90 Mill it was. Check.
After 2 weeks of struggling, I hit send on the file and
pray that what I’ve provided is accurate enough to get this friggin “to-do” off
my list even if it was a week and a half late.
By now Maxine is back in the office, I give her a day to decompress from the trip and I pop her a quick note asking if she
wants to review the TLP. “Yes, Yes, Yes, I need to get to that, I’ll set
something up for tomorrow” she says every day for the next 2 weeks. Finally Friday afternoon she tells me to swing by so we can review the
TLP. Great, let’s get this over with wondering how she’s going to review a
spreadsheet with 35,000 bits of information on it.
After a twelve second glance she says “These Cinderella
figures look on the low side, where did you get this data?”
“I pulled it from the sales forecast tool off the intranet.”
“Hmm well sometimes sales puts their forecast in the gross
revenue database, you actually don’t have access to it, so I’m
going to write IT an email saying you need urgent access, then
what I want you to do is pull line item forecasts from both places for each product and
then determine which looks more accurate. These numbers are two weeks old at
this point so makes sense to redo them anyway.”
“Uh huh” 2 sets of numbers for 750 items, I've got nothing but time.
“Great and I’m going to go ahead and ask you to have this to
me by Monday morning first thing, mmmkaaay?”
Sure thing, I’ll have them to you right after my meeting with “the Bobs”. As I left the office that night humming a favorite tune, I knew I wouldn’t be back
come Monday.
Love it, I hope you wore your pants low with a crop top and a condom in one eye.
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