Every company has certain employees that perform critical roles, so having a succession plan for them is very important.

What would you do if your company not only didn’t have a plan in place if you ever left, but when you gave your notice, they waited to the last minute to bring in your replacement?

That is what happened to the dispatcher in this story, so he trained the new person as well as he could in a few hours and left, leaving the company in disarray.

Check it out.

Train My Replacement in a Matter of Hours? I Don’t Think That’s Gonna Work Out Well For You.

I was a Dispatcher for a Plumbing/HVAC/Basement Waterproofing company, but I was more of a coordinator.

I handled customer bookings, scheduling, some parts ordering, dispatching, etc.

As I used to say, “I have more hats than a hat rack”.

Why are companies so reluctant to purchase new equipment?

Now my techs had their own tools, and I did my work on the computer.

I kept bugging the boss for a better computer, and he never got me one, so I built a system at my own expense and brought it into the office.

My techs had “personal tools”, so this was mine.

As a matter of fact, 10 years later, it’s the system I am typing on now.

It has a 4-core processor, and a graphics card capable of supporting 4 monitors.

This sounds like a great setup for the job.

To give you a better idea of how long ago this was, I paid $350 for a 60gig SSD.

I used 1 monitor for the Dispatch software, one monitor for Google Maps with traffic overlay, one monitor for Outlook, and one monitor for QuickBooks to issue invoices and purchase orders.

When I gave notice, My Boss, The Owner and I agreed on 3 weeks notice as an exit strategy.

Unknown to me, The Owner was convinced I was bluffing, and was just hunting for a raise.

He refused to hire a replacement.

My Boss was more of a Field Supervisor, The Owner handled the office and Admin.

This is not going to go well.

Finally, the DAY BEFORE my last day, at 2pm, I was introduced to the new hire. Seriously? You intend to have me train a guy for a complicated pivotal role in a few hours?

I was on a 44-hour schedule, 10 hours Mon-Thurs, and Friday I was off at 11am. I said my goodbyes and at 11am, began dismantling my computer.

First thing I did was format the hard drive, as I told them I was going to do.

Fortunately for them, the data was all backed up on the server…except for what had transpired that morning, despite my repeated warnings to trigger a backup into the server at 11am.

I guess he shouldn’t have put things off to the last second.

The Owner came out in a bit of a panic when he saw me taking apart the computer, as he had forgotten that it was me that owned it, and now his Dispatch station had no computer.

He asked if I could leave the computer behind, and I declined.

He set my replacement up on an unused antique computer in a cubicle.

It had a CRT monitor, was slow as molasses.

The job was hard enough with 4 screens, I can’t imagine doing it with one.

Training someone that quickly is impossible.

This guy wasn’t a dummy, but there’s no way I could have trained him in a few hours. He had the bare-bones of the processes, and that’s it.

By noon I was out the door.

My Boss spent the remainder of the day and most of the next week in the field, leaving The Owner to deal with the fallout, and it was legendary.

Nobody could handle it.

The replacement quit, just never showed up on the Tuesday, and nobody else in the office could do what I was doing.

This problem is cascading down to everyone.

He dumped PO generation into accounting, which made them mad with the extra workload.

He tried to handle Scheduling and Dispatching himself, and pissed off a lot of the techs.

He stuck one of the CSRs into training for the role, and she wasn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier.

The best part?

I used to handle after-hours on-call, and since there was nobody with enough experience, The Owner had to answer his phone at all hours of the night, 7 days a week.

That’s when the exodus started. Over the next few weeks many of the good techs bailed, jobs were screwed up.

I heard that he had 2 basement waterproofing jobs, each worth 5 figures, double-booked. The company hit the wall, hard.

It seems to have worked out well for him in the end.

How do I know?

About 3 years ago I reached out to My Boss on Linkedin, and he had moved on to another employer.

He offered me a job, and I took it.

We get along famously, and he has told me all kinds of stories about the the mess that was made when I left.

…and all they had to do was buy a new computer and give me enough time to get the new guy in the groove.

Sometimes bosses and owners can be so short sighted.

Let’s see what the people in the comments think about this.

Sometimes bosses just can’t see the bigger picture.

Yeah, it is satisfying to watch it burn.

So many companies operate like this.

They are in for a huge mess.

What a foolish way to think.

Some companies just have no concept of training people’s replacement and it often ends in disaster.

They were given plenty of notice and did nothing.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.