Chula Vista

Just got a settlement offer from Megacorp (MC) that the Chinese Factory (CF) pre-approved.

What a freaking insult and slap in the face to my company (DB). Brief recap:

Over the course of 16 years DB designed and developed a hugely successful line of commercial speakers for MC. 18 unique models. The original 6 models that went into production back in 1998 have become the industry standards and still sell in huge numbers today.

We put all of this business into CF and estimate that it's resulted in DB placing orders of over $50 million in sales to CF through the years. MC has probably had sales of upwards of a quarter of a billion dollars over the same time period.

Back in the spring of 2014 MC met with CF and told them they wanted to cut DB out so they could save a little money. CF would also be able to make more money off of the deal. In september 2014 CF simply stopped shipping product that we had ordered and started selling it direct to MC.

- Our sales dropped 85% overnight since CF also stopped shipping our products for other customers too.
- Annual sales went from about $8 million down to $1.2 million.
- In about 8 months DB went from 35 employees down to 3.
- We had to break out lease on our office building and liquidate all of our assets at huge losses.
- I had to take a 30% pay cut. Linda lost an awesome job so it's really hurt us personally.
- CF and MC are using our designs and trade secrets. MC broke California laws by interfering with a business relationship.
- We can only afford 2 lawyers.
- Both CF and MC have been using a couple of worldwide firms that employ dozens of lawyers all over the world.

This is what MC offered for totally destroying a 40 year old family owned business.

Half a million up front of which 50% has to be paid out to CF. Then 2.5% of their purchases of the systems we designed for the next 5 years. And we have to turn over all of our trade secrets and intellectural property to them.

We figure that the 2.5% would equal about $1.5 million total over 5 years. At least it's an easy decision to tell them to **** off.

TL;DR

Just got butt ****ed.

__________________

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”