I shut down my Perth warehouse last week. The week before they had reported sales of $74.55. For that I paid rent on a warehouse and a retainer for the Manager. The bloke over there seemed more interested in getting toner for the photocopier than generating sales or distributors.

The warehouse sale in Sydney keeps me busy. We’ve just started a warehouse sale in Brisbane. Neither I nor Sam (my National Sales Manager) had time to fly over to Perth to shut it down. But it needed closing before December 1.

Sam thought it would take at least a week (he’d closed the Victorian Warehouse three years ago). A friend had long ago suggested I hire Forstaff to send a bunch of casuals in to do it.

I called Mick, Forstaff’s WA manager, who sent Gordon around to estimate the job on the sly. Gordon figured 3 guys would take no more than 3 days to pack it all up and load it on trucks to the east coast. Gordon also had a chat with my WA manager, who didn’t know what was coming but made an unenthusiastic impression anyway.

Wednesday morning local time I got on the phone and broke the news to my WA manager. We just couldn’t afford to run that office anymore. I sent Gordon and the three casual storemen and packers in on the other line and asked my WA manager to hand him the keys, gather any personal effects and go home.

I’d never fired anyone by phone before, it didn’t feel good, but it had to happen to save the whole company.

The Forstaff gang managed to empty the warehouse onto 73 pallets in three days. Great work and at a lower price than me flying over to supervise.