So Cisco Sales team members already had flights and hotel rooms booked for GSX which is this week in Vegas! Did they still go if they got LR'd and if not who ate all the $$$ spent on non refundable flights?
9 replies (most recent on top)
My trip was canceled as soon as I received the notice. I don't know anyone who was LR'd and went to GSX (although there may have been a few). All of the rah-rahing would have no meaning if you're on the way out. Plus, Cisco doesn't want any disgruntled employees bringing down their "Full Speed Ahead" mantra.
Confirmed. The Sales guys I knew were NOT allowed to attend GSX. Reservations were cancelled. S---s to be that close to attending GSX.
There are LR'd folks at GSX, and not unreasonable for the company to honour that as they can use the event to network to hopefully find another role. I did precisely that a few years ago.
US LR'rd employees were canceled
Don't forget the line item budget for bail. And I'm not kidding.
Oh - and one more point - given the airline costs were accrued against Q4 when booked, but then refunded in Q1, the company is actually "making money" by timing the LR this way. So the real net-net impact is they make money, not lose money....
The impact is probably less than $250k. While any wasted money is bad, net-net, the cost of the airline tickets is the only loss - and it's not really that big a number in the grand scheme.
Total GSX costs around $70 million for everything (except opportunity cost of lost productivity and incremental bar tabs you're not allowed to submit, but magically do).
If you assume attendance is relatively stable every year at around 18,000 for GSX - then taking 7% of that is 1260 people. Let's round it up to 1500 for easy math (assumes we all got cut for poor math skills).
Airline tickets for about 1500 GSX people impacted x say $500 average cost (some much higher, most lower) = $750,000. This would have been charged last quarter when the tickets were booked.
GSX costs are effectively:
1) Airline tickets - the only variable cost - and most Fortune 500 companies have contracts in place with preferred carriers that allow pooling of un-used / cancelled tickets with some kind of penalty clause. So if you assume 85% of impacted employees used an approved carrier, then the $750k is more like $200k of real impact.
2) Hotel reservations - our contract allows us to reduce the reservation hold so rooms are either single occupancy = no difference in cost anyway, or left empty = given back to hotel to rebook with other customers.
3) Physical Event costs - these are fixed with 18000 people or 16,500 people. Bus and Catering will be reduced. Evening parties are not impacted.
4) Entertainment - fixed cost.
So $200k of $75M = less than 1% impact = they don't care. Even if you tripled the impact = they don't care.
Yes rest of world (beyond americas) salesforce - all at GSX, including LR candidates.
Hundreds in uncertainty. Seems that sales specialists and GSP sales in the spot of LR
Nope. Thier travel was canceled.