Chapter 4: Expansion

"OK Rick, start the meeting and tell me where we are going", I said looking around the table.

I knew everyone at the table except for one girl that was in her 30's, dressed in a nice business suit, she had a nice body.

"With our planned expansion in mind I have brought our new personnel Manager Julie Smyth, Julie has looked over all of our top people and has come up with 5 candidates that she feels would make good managers and I agree with her recommendations", Rick explained.

"Now of course the next step is to decide where we want to expand to and look at the competition we will have in these locations." Rick stated, "I feel that most of our work is going to start being in the OIL & GAS sector if we move north of here, I think this is what we should start to put our efforts into."

"How many branch offices are we talking about?", I asked.

"I was thinking that we would start by going north west of here, say one office in Edson, another in Whitecourt, maybe one in Grande Prairie, and a last one in either Hinton or High Level." He paused then added, "if we open an office in High Level then it will be so far away from our other offices that we would not be able to share personnel between offices as easily."

"So what can we do to fix that? What I mean is, if we need to open an office in High Level is there enough business there to warrant a branch office? How many people are we talking for each office?", I asked.

Rick looked thoughtful as he responded, "if we open an office in High Level we will have to hire at least 20 people for that office, all the other offices should only require 10 tradesmen each and for bigger jobs we can move people around as required. As for is there enough business yes we are always getting requests to send people to all of these locations."

"Shannon have you looked into property in these locations to see if it is feasible to open offices there?", I asked.

"Yes, all of these locations have either existing buildings we could purchase or lots that would be ideal for us", Shannon replied.

"OK, can we afford to do this?", I asked Jim, our accountant.

"Since I have been working for you I have been waiting for the day we would have to go to the bank and borrow money. We still have not reached that day. When Rick and Shannon brought their proposals to me I looked them over and sat down with all the books; although we would be using up 70% of our on-hand capitol we should not have a big problem", Jim smiled.

"I thought I had spent most of our on-hand capitol when I went into the real estate business?", I said to no one in particular.

"That was 6 months ago, since then you hired me. I moved some money around and invested into some of our customer's companies. That has been giving us a good return; as well the real estate portion of our business has been making huge profit. We own apartment buildings and industrial complexes all over the province; the real money though is still coming from Rick, he has been bringing in good profits on every project," Jim said.

I looked around the room. How could all this be happening without me knowing anything about it? Rick, Shannon and Jim just smiled, Julie looked at me questionably.

"Just how much money do we have?", I asked.

"We have...", Jim started.

"Whoa", Rick said, "I don't know if we should tell him. The last time we let him know how much we had, he tried to spend it all in one day."

Everyone started to laugh.

Jim continued, "we have 22 million in the bank as capitol, and another 58 million in investments as well as 160 million in assets in both divisions."

I whistled. "How in the world has my one man little company grown out of control like this. All I ever wanted was to make a living and maybe supply a living for a couple of helpers, now I have to worry about what, a hundred other people?"

"335 people now, we have been growing like a weed. We had to hire 10 more office staff just to keep up with payroll", Rick said.

"Where are they all? I haven't seen them around the office, I know I have been preoccupied with my house but I should have seen the office staff and it seems to me that there are less here than before", I asked.

"We had to open an office downtown to keep all of the office staff in, Shannon has been working out of that office and Julie has an office there as well with her staff", Rick said.

"Wow, we have an office downtown? That must be costing us a fortune in rent", I stated.

"No, it actually is making us money, we bought the building and we are renting all the other floors to other companies", Shannon said.

"Other floors? How many other floors do we have?"

"It is a 30 story building and we are only using the top 5 floors", Shannon stated.

"5 stories? Why do we need 5 stories? I thought we only had 10 office staff over there?", I asked astounded.

"The 25th story is our accounting department, that is where Jim's group works out of. The 26th story is personnel, that is Julie's group. The 27th story is the Realty Division, that is where Shannon's group is. The 28th floor is the Gym for all of our divisions. The 29th floor is empty for now but I am sure it will fill up and the 30th floor is presently being renovated but half of it has been designated as your office and the rest of it will be office space for whom-ever you wish."

"OK, I have had enough for one day. It would seem as though all of you are really doing a fantastic job. I am going to try and familiarize myself with what has been happening around here over the next week or so. Why didn't you tell me about all this before Rick?", I asked.

Rick grinned and said, "the first day I started working for you, you told me my job was to look after the running of the company and that you didn't want to be bothered with small details. That is what I have been doing, it just seems the small details of before have now become a lot smaller and the small details of today have gotten bigger."

With that I stood shook my head in wonder and walked to my office. I sat down and pondered what was next for me to do. Suddenly it all became very clear, we were a Mechanical company and the way to become bigger was to get into the electrical field, that way we could supply a one stop service. I decided I should talk to Shannon right away. I called Shannon into my office and told her that we would require double the space in each of the new locations and that the sites should all be side by side. I wanted the sites fenced and to look like two separate sites, I also informed her that we should not even look at existing buildings and should just have our own built. She said, "we should look at buying a small construction company to build all of the buildings." I told her that was a good idea and asked her to discuss it with Rick later.

I called Rick into my office and asked him how he could possibly keep up with everything going on and he informed me that he was managing but only just. I told him to hire a General Manager to look after John's Millwrighting as he was going to be moving downtown with me to become the president of John's Millwrighting. I also told him that he should start looking for a new name for the company as it was no longer John's Millwrighting if I wasn't really involved in the company much. Rick thanked me and told me he would talk to the others and decide on a selection of names, He would have a list for me shortly.