Chapter 8
MAKING IT THAT WAY
“You knew we were coming. So why exactly weren’t you prepared?” London said, her voice edgy enough to sharpen a pencil that she’d broken the tip off of stabbing on the paper.
She felt Spencer’s glare burn into her cheek. A sharp, hot, and unmistakable singe. She didn’t even have to look. The message was loud and clear: tone it the hell down.
Yeah…that wasn’t happening. If anything, she was ready to crank it up.
Especially after the welcome she got the moment they walked in. The foreman’s eyes had crawled over her like she was a product on a shelf. Something he might take home for a test run if she came with a gag to keep her quiet.
The slow, nasty smirk he gave her was enough to make her skin tighten with disgust and the quick burger she’d eaten in the car before walking in threatened to come up all over the foreman’s Redwings.
Not in fear, but in letting him know what she really thought of him and his look of disdain that she was the one here auditing their practices.
She wasn’t stupid. She’d seen that look her whole life.
And feeling Spencer tense beside her at the exact moment said at least she wasn’t imagining it.
When Spencer straightened to his full height and leveled the foreman with a glare that basically read try it and you go down, something hot twisted in her chest.
And not in a good way.
Because while part of her registered the protectiveness and filed it away, maybe even savored it for half a second, the rest of her wanted to shove him out of the way and clap back, “I’ve been handling men like him my entire damn life. I don’t need a shield.”
She could fight her own battles.
Always had. Always would.
But she had her sister’s words in her head to find a way to get along with Spencer. Relax around him.
“We didn’t have the time to gather it all.”
“Bob,” she said, leaning on her forearms across the table. “You were told weeks ago that West was sending in consultants to go over the operations. Weeks. You knew it was happening.”
Bob shrugged. “Yeah, but I just found out on Thursday. So maybe you should take it up with my boss.”
“Oh, I will. Where is he?”
“He’s off today,” Bob said.
She ground her teeth and turned to Spencer when he nudged her foot under the table. “Can you reach him?” she asked, her voice missing some of the edge it had seconds ago.
“He doesn’t like us to call him on his day off.”
“Chad is your boss, correct?”
“That’s right,” Bob said, leaning back in the chair, his white T-shirt having lost its shine and brightness years ago. “He don’t like no interruptions on his vacation.”
“Vacation?” she asked. “Not just a day off?”
Bob shrugged. “He don’t tell us much. Just comes in and sits in that office up there.”
She turned her head to follow Bob’s gaze through the glass of the conference room that overlooked the production floor. Over it was another room with a large glass pane looking down.
The smell of the sea and fish had hit them hard when they walked in, but after ten minutes she was used to it. Sort of. She just knew she’d have to wash it off before she got in bed tonight.
“Who’s Chad’s boss?” she asked. She’d only been told she’d be meeting with Chad and those under him today. No one else.
“Belinda owns the company. It was left to her from her father, but she doesn’t do much with it. Just comes in a few times a month and leaves the running of it to Chad.”
Which explained a lot of what the problem was right there.
London was typing into her computer, making her notes, Spencer next to her on his phone. She didn’t know who he was texting, but then he slid his phone next to her.
She looked down and saw the message from Braylon with Belinda Gretchen’s number.
“Guess it’s time to talk to the owner,” she said, pushing the numbers into her phone and putting it to her ear.
“Hello.”
It was an older voice, but not like a grandparent. At least she hoped not. “Hi, Belinda, this is London Westerly. I’m the consultant sent here by The Carlisle Group. We are on site for a few days and it seems Chad is on vacation.”
“Oh,” Belinda said. “I had no idea. Is there anyone else there who can help you?”
“It doesn’t seem it. This was arranged almost a month ago and no one is prepared with what we requested. Wasting time and money is not the best way to impress the man who saved your company.”
The sigh coming out of Spencer’s lips wasn’t lost on her.
Maybe she could have dialed it back to the woman who didn’t appear to know what was going on in her own company, but the words had to be spoken.
This was just a waste of their time and West’s money sending them here to sit around and do nothing.
“I’m so sorry,” Belinda said. “I’ve been dealing with health issues the past year and have left the running of the company to Chad. I haven’t heard of any problems. No one has reached out to me.”
She shut her eyes and felt like shit. Her sister would give her a smack on the arm right now for assuming things without all the facts.
She knew better than to jump the gun, but this first job wasn’t going any way that she’d imagined.
“I’m sorry to hear that.” She softened her tone even more. “Is there any way you can come down and talk to us? Or let other staff here know and get us the information we need?”
“I can be there in twenty minutes,” Belinda said. “Again, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know there were problems or that consultants were even coming in.”
“Chad hadn’t told you?”
“No. I’ve left the running of the company in his hands. He’s been there for years. His father was my late husband’s best friend. I just... I thought things were going so well.”
She let out a sigh. “We’ll catch you up when you arrive. Until then, I’ve got Bob in front of me and will have him walk us through the process on the floor.”
Bob’s nose twitched as if he was going to argue, but the lift of her eyebrow almost taunted him to try.
She put her phone down, picked up her tablet that was in her bag and easier to carry around, then stood.
“We done?” Bob asked.
“You can show us around the floor and explain the process,” she said. “I’ll be recording it for our reference.”
“Can you do that?” Bob asked.
“If you’re asking if we can legally do it,” Spencer said. “The answer is yes. West Carlisle owns half this company and we are here at his order. I’d advise you to do as Ms. Westerly has requested.”
She didn’t do that great of a job hiding her annoyance that Bob only moved once Spencer spoke.
This was going to be a long couple of days.
“I had it covered,” she whispered to him when Bob walked out ahead of them.
“He asked a legal question and I answered. That’s my job,” he said, his voice more firm than it’d been but not snappy like hers. She didn’t think he even had it in him to raise his voice.
She sighed. “This is a nightmare.”
“You’re making it that way,” he whispered back. “The guy you need to take it up with isn’t here. The ones that are don’t know what is going on.”
“Meaning dial it back for them?”
“Would you want to be talked to like that if you were clueless?”
“Bob isn’t clueless,” she said.
“Don’t kid yourself. He knows what he’s told and does about the same. Let him tell you what he’s good at and you’ll get more.”
“Oh, so letting the little lady see how the machines run?”
“London. I get it. We aren’t here long and the drive wasn’t that great. Neither is this smell. When Belinda gets here, hopefully she can provide more insight.”
She hoped because the last thing she wanted to do was return here again and have this be a completely wasted trip.
“One can hope,” she said, moving out onto the floor where Bob was talking with others.
“Let’s start outside,” Bob said. “The lobster boats come in daily, sometimes multiple times a day. We purchase what is caught, but there are standards to it.”
She breathed a sigh of relief. This was the information she needed. “Perfect. Can you let me know the standards that you require for purchase?”
While they walked to the docks where the boats came in, Bob explained that he was the one who inspected the catches. “Around these parts a lobsterman knows to only keep the lobsters over a certain weight and throws back the egg-bearing females to keep more coming.”
She got a history on that, glad it was being recorded because it was all new information for her.
After ten minutes, they returned to the building where Bob walked them through the daily process to get the lobster out the door and distributed across the US.
Belinda came in shortly after, got reports run and sent to them and spent another hour going over concerns that she hadn’t been aware of.
When London and Spencer were left alone, she said, “I can see the biggest problem already.”
“The man left in charge who doesn’t seem to do much.”
“Exactly and Belinda speaks so highly of him as being like family,” she said.
“That’s not our concern. When West gets these reports, it will be a conversation for him and Belinda.”
She smiled. “I’m not sure if West actually has those conversations himself.”
At least she didn’t think so. He had too many ventures to deal with them all. That was why he had teams and staff.
“That’s not my understanding,” he said. “Not for an operation this large and that big of a percentage at stake. West pumped a lot of money into the place to get it up to modern times and worked on the distribution.”
“Which has some issues also.”
From the data she had already, she knew shipping times were lagging, with some shipments missed completely because trucks arrived and had to wait and couldn’t get back on the road fast enough.
“Belinda should get all of that for us now. I’ve seen the trends and the decline in purchases. Businesses not happy with the turnaround time on the product.”
“The product itself isn’t lacking,” she said. Which meant it was the way the business was being handled.
And why she was here.
She wasn’t privy to the profit West made on his businesses, but she knew Stonington was one of the top lobster landing ports in the US.
This plant was massive, and expanded to twice its size when West invested in it eight years ago.
“The profits have been steadily dropping in the past twelve to eighteen months,” he said.
“When it sounds as if Chad took over.”
“You don’t have enough to make that assessment.”
She bit the inside of her cheek. “I know my job as well as you know yours. I’m making an educated guess but not a final judgment. I won’t get to that for a week or more.”
A few days here auditing their processes and procedures, then going over all her notes and running more analysis back home, trying to streamline and look into supply and distribution chains.
Belinda came rushing in. “I just found out that one of my main freezers has been down for months.”
She turned to Spencer. “And what exactly was held in there?”
“We ship out live lobsters when the orders come in. That’s a big part of our business daily and on a timeline. But we also freeze lobsters after they are cooked to go to wholesalers. Do you want to know that process?”
“Please,” she said.
Two hours later, London got the rundown on that and the impact of one freezer being down. That alone could contribute to the decrease in profit.
By five, she was exhausted, between their travel time and the almost six frustrating hours of how poorly things were being run without Belinda’s knowledge and the man in charge out of town for the week.
She was pretty sure things could be turned around relatively easy, but she wasn’t out for easy. She was out for efficiency.
Before they left, she told Belinda to get the freezer fixed ASAP or get it replaced if it couldn’t be repaired. She didn’t care that Chad had pulled people off that process to put them in the live process for more orders there.
Increase staff if need be, but don’t all but halt half of the business’s revenue.
She and Spencer left and climbed into their rental, her head back against the seat.
“Just say it.”
“Say what?” he asked.
“I was out of line with my words and my tone.”
“If you know, then I don’t need to say it.”
The silence that followed was louder than a hammer slamming a nail into a coffin.