Celestial Tech Limited

When I joined Celestial Tech I noticed that nobody was aware or understood the difference between profit mark-up and profit margin.

I tried to explain to my colleagues that we can work either with mark-ups or with margins, but we need to understand what we are talking about and use the correct terminology, especially not using the term margin for mark-up as then we have total confusion.

I promoted the idea of only using margins, as the profitability of companies, in general, is being judged on their net margin, not on their net mark-up. Furthermore, I explained that the mark-up method bears one fundamental risk that I have witnessed in Celestial Tech, that a Director of the company, for a project he conducted calculated a mark-up of 40% on the cost price and then after giving 35% discount on the offered price that he found justified, he was surprised that the project was running a loss.

The CEO got the news that I was trying to educate the staff about mark-ups and margins, and he instructed the staff not lo listen to my bullshit and continue with mark-ups, instead.

May be this is good news for customers, as they may get a good bargain if Celestial Tech continues to use the mark-up technique for their costing.

Any comment or contribution from your side?

An ambitious young lady applied for a job with Celestial Tech Limited. She was attracted by the Management-Trainee Program advertised in the official Celestial Tech website.

The young lady got the job, and to my surprise, without being asked, she was put under my care. What to do with this young lady, with her education and past career records not being related to job I was hired for. On top of that, though being advertised, there is no such thing like a structured management-trainee program in Celestial Tech.

Besides my main job I had volunteered to generate an Employee Handbook and Company Policies & Procedures. Actually, I was focusing on the Policies & Procedures that I regarded most urgent, however, a few days before the young lady started her job with Celestial Tech, two incidences caught the attention of the CEO in conjunction with our company cars: One morning the service vehicle was not washed (after the service e team had returned from an urgent service mission late at night), and the CEO was not happy with our log book of another company car. I was also not happy with that logbook that I was given by the company, but to my understanding this was the way the management wanted to have the car utilization recorded, and I put this topic on a back burner until other more important policies had been created, published and implemented.

From one second to the other, the CEO changed the priorities and instructed me to work on the car-handling policy with highest priority, gave me a company car log book of a Japanese company, of course in Japanese, and requested me to have it translated.

If how we are handling company cars is or highest priority in this company, so be it, and I started drafting the policy. With the new young management-trainee lady joining, I thought, company policies are actually management matters, so why not get her involved in writing our company policies and I let her start with the policy of highest priority, the handling of company cars.

The whole day, the young lady was working on the policy, and in the evening, she submitted her draft to me. The next morning, the young lady did not show up for work, and we never heard or saw anything from here again. This was a very short management-trainee program.

Based on her draft I completed the policy, and of coursed I did not have the Japanese log book translated, as I know pretty well what needs to be recorded in a log book for company car utilization.

Once completed I submitted the Company-Car-Handling Policy to the CEO for his comment and his approval for publication and implementation. Despite repeated reminders during the two months prior to my departure, I never got any response from the CEO about the policy. Apparently, his priority had shifted in the meantime. Unless a miracle has happened, the Company-Car Handling Policy will not have been implemented until today.

Any comment or contribution from your side?

If you engage a local distributor as a principal, you expect the local distributor to take the new business seriously, invest in a long-lasting bright future that benefits both parties. You expect the new distributor to actively market your products and services, try to find new customers to increase the product fleet in the market and to grow the aftersales business.

The understanding in Celestial Tech Limited is different. The majority of the products that Celestial Tech Limited has in its portfolio, and Celestial Tech Limited represents dozens of brands is being used in ships. Instead of marketing the products, the main business of Celestial Tech Limited (and its affiliated companies in the US and Hong Kong) is building ships, or at least sell the ship design with the entire material package. So the target is to use as many as possible of the represented products for their own ship-building projects, benefitting from the distributor discount. For all the companies to which the principals expect Celestial Tech Limited to distribute the products, Celestial Tech Limited is now the competitor, and none of these potential customers can have an interest in purchasing these products at inflated prices from their own competitor. This practice is a way to the market, but in my view not the correct one.

I have highlighted to the management of Celestial Tech Limited, that this practice in fact constitutes a distortion of the market, it cannot be in the long-term interest of the principals and can as such not be sustainable.

What I your opinion about this way to the market, using the discounts as authorized distributor to be a more competitive ship builder.

What is your opinion in this matter? Any comments, any further considerations and contributions?

Imagine you are working in an organization where you are given a certain area of responsibility. You perform your job full heartedly, you spend hours and hours after official working hours, you come to the office on weekly holidays and you come to the office on government holidays as you want to perform your duties for the company diligently.

For certain issues you need the input from the CEO who is frequently travelling overseas. You try to reach out to him by e-mail o by WhatsApp, so the CEO can reply whenever convenient to him, but you simply cannot get any reply from him. You finally get him on the phone, you put your question forward, and the only answer you get is "Why do you ask me?

Next time, in a similar situation you remember the "useful" answer on your question from the CEO, and you opt to make the decision by yourself. Everything seems to be ok until, the CEO returns from hois trip and you get scolded "why didn't you ask me?"

This pattern repeated time and again, you are running crazy and the CEO claims that he will die of a heart attack because of you.

This is the normal life in Celestial Tech Limited. The employee, whose story has been told here, quit from the company after more than 5 years of suffering with unpaid part of his remuneration and with zero severance pay as required under the Bangladesh Labor Act.

Do you want to work in an environment like this, or do you better stay away from such company in the first place?

Any comments or any contributions from the audience?

Imagine you have accepted a position at a middle-management level in a company. You have a team of approx. 10 subordinates and you are tasked to develop sales and service of a new product line and to grow the team with new employees with the respective background.

You do everything to establish yourself as the new manager, get yourself accepted, work on a business plan and a strategy and then, every time the CEO is in the office, you notice that he calls your team members, either individually or in small groups, for meetings, but you are not being invited. You scratch your head what is going in there.

Once these meetings are over, and you get hold of the respective team members and you ask what was the topic of discussion, you are very surprised to hear either, “sorry, I have no time I have to work for the boss now” or even better “sorry, I am not supposed to tell you”.

Confronting the CEO to change way of communication with respect for the chain of command, you only get silence – no answer whatsoever.

This pattern goes on and on, day by day, and even if the CEO is travelling, he regularly calls your subordinates giving them direct instructions about things you do not know or you are not supposed to know.

After the first experience of such kind, newly employed team members come to you asking whom they are supposed to listen to, to their immediate superior or to the CEO. They are totally confused.

This is life of a middle manager in Celestial Tech Limited. In this company, a middle manager simply cannot perform his/her job, and the toxic direct communication of the CEO with your subordinates behind your back corrupts the entire organization (where such organization exists).

Do you want to join a company with such behavior pattern as a middle manager, where ultimately you cannot do anything else other than to resign, or do you stay away from such company in the first place?

Any comments or contribution from the audience?

The CEO of Celestial Tech Limited is extremely proud of the fact that never during the history of the company he has taken a bank loan. There may be two reasons for that:

One reason might be that the business of Celestial Tech Limited is simply not bankable. If you ask a Bangladeshi bank to keep the cash flow running while the company is waiting that funds from Letters of credit are being released, and the bank finds out that actually all the letters of credits are going to Celestial Tech’s offshore sister companies and actually very little money is being generated in the Bangladesh entity, the banks lose interest in financing

The other reason might be that it is much more convenient for the CEO simply not to pay the salaries of the employees for months, or in other words, taking an interest free loan from the employees and let the employees finance the cash flow gaps. When confronting the CEO with the fact that it is not fair to let the employees suffer and let them finance the company, you are being told that this is absolutely normal, and this is also usual practice in the West. I am not sure which “West” he is referring to, maybe he is referring to the partial shutdown of the government operations in the United States.

To me the governmental shutdown in the US is not normal and letting the employees of Celestial Tech finance the operation of Celestial Tech , especially at times when the CEO and his family spends value time on their holiday trips, is definitely not normal.

Any contribution from your side, any comments?

Imagine you apply as a Service Engineer o Marine Electronics with Celestial Tech Limited, an open position advertised in one of the prominent Bangladesh job website.

You make it through the interview with the CEO, you are given an Appointment Letter and you start your job timely at the agreed day and time. You take possession of your desk your chair, your computer and you try to settle in into the company.

There is only one problem: Nobody talks to you business and nobody gives you any work. For one week you are sitting at your desk, turning thumbs and looking holes into the air and still nothing to do. Time does not pass; the days are getting longer and longer.

Finally at the end of the week somebody starts talking to you, telling you that starting next week you do not have to show up for work anymore, as at Celestial Tech Limited there is no work for a Service Engineer Marine Electronics. Poor fellow.

Fantastic manpower planning!

Any contribution from the readership, any contribution from your side?

Imagine you as a vendor create a concept for an exhibition stand for Celestial Tech Limited together with the assigned Celestial-Tech project team, develop a concept over months with several meetings, bring in good ideas, detail the concept and finally, after the project is fixed and the detailed design finished you make your financial offer, hoping, after some negotiation to get the order.

At that time, however, the CEO of Celestial Tech, after having booked the biggest booth in the entire exhibition in prime location and having been the biggest sponsor of the exhibition with the ambition to go in boldly, takes the project out of the hands of the assigned project team, takes the fully developed design of the vendor and hands it over to a third-party exhibition-booth-building contractor and tells them, you build this booth for Celestial Tech for xxx BDT.

The assigned project team is speechless, discouraged to take on any new projects. The original designer and vendor is flabbergasted how the CEO of Celestial Tech can simply steal their design and go ahead with another contractor The project team completely lost face in front of the original vendor

How would you feel as a vendor if you are being treated like that? Is this regarded good business practice? Any similar experience? Any contributions or comments to this blog?

It may be of interest to principals or potential future principals that the CEO pf Celestial Tech Limited has boasted himself repeatedly that he has a medical certificate that requires him to consume a minimum 1.5 Liters of alcohol per day. I have never seen this certificate, but in case it in fact exists, I hope the wording is more something like 1.5 Liters of alcoholic beverages, as 1.5 Liters of pure alcohol per day would be fatal doses.

Let’s assume the certificate exists, the CEO still seems to lack sufficient training in alcohol consumption, as I have witnessed once during my 8 months’ employment with the company that the CEO, after a lunch with a visitor with apparently unlimited flow of alcohol, totally incapacitated, had to be carried by his own employees to the car of his wife and Chairmen of the company, who was called to collect him from the office.

This is a once-in-a-life-time experience that you can hardly witness in any other company.

Any contribution or comment from the audience in this matter?

 

Imagine, after your relentless application for a job with Celestial Tech Limited, you are invited for a job interview, let’s say at 1 pm. You are there in time. In Celestial Tech Limited, the majority of the job interviews are being conducted by the CEO himself. He is in the office, but busy with other things. You are waiting, and waiting, and waiting, 2 pm, 3 pm, 4 pm and then with HR sitting on needles, you are finally granted your interview.

The interview starts, and as the first thing you are being scolded that the photograph on the resume does not reflect your present appearance, as you have grown a beard in the meantime. You are being questioned whether you do not care about the first impression you are giving to the interviewer…

What about the first impression Celestial Tech Limited is giving the applicants by letting them wait for one hour, two hours, three hours and in extreme cases for four hours, clearly giving the signal to the potential future employees that they and their time are valued nothing.

Unfortunately, the job market in Bangladesh is very tight and applicants have no choice other than accepting such treatment.

What is your experience with interviews with Celestial Tech Limited? Any contributions?