We had six months left

**Adam Wathan** (0:00)
All right, going for another walk this morning in the post-freezing rain winter apocalypse that is Southern Ontario in January. A lot of things to talk about in this one, some kind of, I don't know what the right word is, but not great things. So I don't know if I will even release this one, or if I might just record this for myself, to force myself to talk through some of this stuff, and just get it out of my head, and maybe feel a bit better about it. One thing I can promise is if I do release this episode, there will be no value delivered, and it will be mostly just a combination of complaining, venting, and I don't know, negativity.
So where do I start? I guess to set the tone for the entire thing. I've talked on the podcast before about how revenue continues to decline here, and it's something we're trying to figure out. I've shared some of the ideas we have for turning things around, and I'm still optimistic that we can do that. I'm excited about these ideas. But over the holidays, I finally did what any responsible business owner would probably have already been doing, which is do some proper forecasting of revenue versus just going based on gut feel. And yeah, situation was just significantly worse than I realized. So revenue has been like trending down slowly for a couple of years. But it's been almost like so slow and so steady that it's like a boiling the frog sort of situation where you almost like don't really notice. You just get used to the lower revenue being sort of normal and you can still pay all your bills and stuff. But I almost just got hit by a car backing out of the driveway. So forgive me for being a little distracted here. But yeah, what was I saying? The boiling the frog situation. Every month, it feels like it's kind of fine because you're still able to pay your bills, still have a little bit of money leftover for yourself. And yeah, you know, it seems okay. And you just get used to each month being a little lower than the previous one. And you kind of forget that the previous one was a little bit higher. And the story I've been telling myself in my head the whole time is that, you know, things are low, but like, they're not really declining anymore. We've sort of hit like a stable point because it sort of feels like revenue has been the same for a long time now. But yeah, I finally went and did like proper forecasting, looking at the actual data and charting things and calculating what the average drop in revenue is each month. And I was sort of caught off guard to realize that, no, it's not stabilizing at all. And revenue is consistently down by pretty much a fixed amount every month, which means it's an ever increasing percentage of revenue. And forecasting it out like the next year, if nothing changed at all, which of course is not the plan because we're trying to grow the business, we're trying out new ideas and stuff like that. So the intention isn't that the trend will continue, but I can't guarantee that it won't, right? It's not in my control. I can try to influence it, but I don't control the outcome. If absolutely nothing changed, then in about six months, we would no longer be able to meet payroll obligations, which was a pretty shitty thing to realize. Six months is not a lot of time. So over the break, we had to make the brutal decision to scale down the size of the team to something the business actually can afford, because if we didn't do it now, then we would not be able to give people generous severance packages for them to have the time to find new roles. And I don't know, that's important to me, because that's what I would hope that someone would do for me if I was in that situation. Because I know it's really fucking stressful to find out that you don't have a job anymore, because the company that employs you doesn't have the cash flow to be able to pay your invoices every month.
So, what's today, Wednesday? Yeah, so on Monday, we officially let go 75% of our engineering team in order to get the business into a place where our declining revenue can comfortably support the staff that we have. Now, the company is not huge, so 75% isn't tons of people, it's three people that we had to let go. But I do think the percentage is important to share, because to say that, oh, we have to let go three people, it doesn't sound like we have to do much. But in reality, we have four engineers on staff, and now we have one. So it is a big change.