It died alone, broke and will be missed by noone

If you follow this blog you probably have understood that I work within the consulting industry. One of the key areas in which we operate is to help companies understand the market and devise the optimal strategy to enter the market enabling the maximum potential for their business. This is what we do and many companies are ready to pay up the big bucks for us to do this for them.

So far so good, however, about a year ago our own little company branched out into a new field. A separate company was created to break into this new lucrative business area, ripe for the plucking as some people seemed to believe. Mr. Chin was hand-picked to lead this new endeavor and Captain Britain was also thrown aboard this great new venture which was going to create further success to our little company and make us larger and more profitable. The opening of this new business was celebrated with champagne and festivities, the phrase "great opportunities" was used a great number of times. Most of us people in the core company remained pretty skeptical towards the whole endeavor but since it really didn't concern us directly we didn't care that much and didn't get caught up in the enthusiasm.

What made me most shocked is that we spend so much time convincing companies to understand the market and have a strategy based on evidence before they enter the market, but our company, who lives on strategic consulting, didn't do any kind of research at all, we just threw ourselves into this completely new area where we had no real experience, and the experience that Mr. Chin was supposed to bring to the table quickly turned out to be less than it had been made out to be...

Last Friday, without any announcements or anything, the company died a natural death, without ever really getting any clients or generating any revenue to speak of at all, it died lonely, broke and will be missed by noone.

If you allow me to end this eulogy with a poem:

Lonely Funeral
An unforgiving memory conspicuously brought

back to existence

The beginning of the end has only begun

You can douse the corpse in cough syrup,

but your timing’s a little off

You seem to have murdered your own heart

I hope it had a lonely funeral

I regret to inform you but the eulogy’s been

said

Did you ever plan to notice that your clock had fallen behind?

The possible remedy missed its chance

Time waits for nothing, gone in a glance

It appears you have murdered your own heart

I’m sure it had a lonely funeral

Manny Negron