To: All employees
From: Senior Management

The past year has been a financial challenge for the Company.  The 
revenue for the first 2 months of FY 2010 is below budget.  It is 
imperative that we save cash and minimize spending.

The following cost savings measures are being taken:

1.  Continue the suspension of salary increases
2.  Maintain the hiring freeze
2.  Minimize capital expenditures
3.  Stop company 401K contributions (match and nondiscretionary 
contributions) for FY 2010.

The 401K contribution will be our first priority of restored cuts once 
profitability is attained.


continue to be conscious of the need to minimize spending.

---

Now, if it were me, I'd say that the really *imperative* thing is that 
we need to START MAKING SALES. Because, you know, if nobody is paying us 
then it is mathematically impossible to break even, never mind profit.

The company seems to be placing a huge amount of emphasis on minimising 
costs (at any cost), improving efficiency and increasing staff training. 
Which seems silly to be, because none of these things are the problem. 
The *problem* is that just down the hall from me, we have 35 staff 
standing around doing nothing because WE HAVE NO WORK. I'm not sure what 
it costs to pay 35 highly skilled stuff to do nothing, but I'm guessing 
it's not cheap.

We can provide training until our people are world-renouned experts in 
their field. And we can look for ways for them to do nothing as 
efficiently as possible. But we /still/ aren't going to make any money. 
WE NEED TO START MAKING SALES. I really don't understand why nobody in 
senior management seems to comprehend this. Without sales, we can't do 
our jobs. It's that simple.

Sure, I can appreciate that until we start getting those sales, we need 
to save money, or we'll just go out of business. But seriously, all this 
emphasis on internal affairs seems rather misplaced. What we urgently 
need to focus on is making customers give us their custom, so we have 
money coming in...

(It's not as if we've lost business *because* of staff training or work 
inefficiency. Indeed, a year or two ago, the UK was the *only* site 
actually showing a net profit. But having spent the last year or so with 
an empty order book, the whole company is feeling the pinch.)

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