It has nothing to do with those perfect lips and mile long legs, I tell myself. I almost believe it. Not that I was about to step over the bounds of professional ethics. The company has enough shit to deal with. The last thing that I needed was for the board and everyone else to lose faith in me and hand the company over to some guy who would squeeze everything he could out of the company my father started before selling it off.
I always knew that someday I would become owner and CEO of Red Canyon Steakhouse. My father had drilled it into me ever since I was a kid. Back then, I would come home after school every day and do my homework at the table between lunch and dinner service, when the restaurant was quiet except for the sounds of the chefs in the kitchen prepping for dinner. Then, at five, when the first diners would start trickling in, my aunt would come pick me up to go home so that my parents could keep working into the night.
Family dinners weren’t a thing in my household. Instead it would be family breakfasts, where my dad would go and talk about the restaurant and explain to me how things were done. I’d done my fair share. When I turned sixteen, I became a dishwasher; at eighteen, when I went to college, I became a waiter. When I was getting my MBA, I was assistant manager at one of the smaller branches near campus. There was no such thing as a free ride with my dad. He’d worked too hard for every cent and he wanted his boy to know that same lesson. ‘Nothing is a replacement for cash earned with your own hands son,’ I can still hear him saying to me. At the time I resented my dad for it. We were clearly doing well. At that point, Red Canyon Steakhouse was opening new branches left and right. Now though, I’m glad for it. If I didn’t know how to run a restaurant inside and out, I know we don’t have a rat’s chance in hell of getting out of the mess we’re in.
“How could he have let all this happen?” I mutter to myself.
But I do know how. My father died of a heart attack at his desk. He was working late that night, like most nights, and hadn’t been found until the next morning. It was too late then. According to my mom though, what killed him was the stress. He had kept her, and everyone else, in the dark about the true nature of things. She thought he was planning on taking the chain national, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, we had expanded too quickly, and we hadn’t been able to scale our operations to keep up. The standard had slipped at Red Canyon Steakhouse, and with it, our profits. I’m heading to a meeting right now to see just how bad it all really is.
I enter into the meeting room, and steel myself for bad news. The grim faces on my staff say it all. Each of them has a piece of the puzzle, but because my dad handled everything, nobody knew just how bad things were. Until now. Until I stepped in. I wasn’t going to do things like my father did. He was a great man, but he was also a control freak, and that just doesn’t work in a company with more than a handful of restaurants. There are just too many moving pieces to keep track of. Add to that the shoddy bookkeeping, and well, it’s a miracle our doors are still open.
“Give it to me straight Sean,” I say to my best friend in college, who happened to major in accounting. I pulled him into this as soon as I found out what was happening. I knew that he would do a thorough job, and he wouldn’t try to sugarcoat things. That’s the last thing I needed right now. I am too tense to even sit down, and instead I pace at the front of the room.
“It’s not good Logan,” Sean says, looking down at his papers. “You’re hemorrhaging money left and right. There have been, shall we say, discrepancies in how things are being handled from restaurant to restaurant. More than one manager has been ordering more food than necessary to keep up with appearances. I even encountered a staff member who’s been selling off the excess to put in their own pocket. Stuff like that has gone unchecked because there was only one person to answer to: your father. And I got the impression from the staff that they were too terrified of losing their jobs to speak up.”
“How could this happen?” I ask, turning to my father’s oldest employee and friend, Kevin.
“Things slipped through the cracks. Your father was a stubborn man. He didn’t like to be told that he was getting old and letting go of his power,” he replied, giving his bony shoulders a shrug.
“There are other things too,” a woman says quietly. Her name is Linda, and she’s in charge of the advertising/marketing side of things. “Your father was against social media. Thought it lowered the brand in the eyes of the public. We still run full page ads in newspapers. Our clientele has aged, but we haven’t been able to bring in a younger crowd. Red Canyon Steakhouse should be the place for business lunches and dinners, and yet, it isn’t happening. One of the firs things your father slashed was the advertising budget. He thought that everyone already knew Red Canyon.”