I’ve got a nifty new product proposal that can't help but make money, and top management turns thumbs down.
No matter how we price this new item, we expect to make $390,000 on it pretax.
That would contribute over 15 cents per share to our earnings after taxes, which is more than the 10 cent earnings -per-share increase in 2015 that president mode such big thing about in the shareholders' annual report.
It just doesn't make sense for the president to be touting e.p.s. while his subordinates are rejecting profitable project like this one.
The frustrated speaker was Sarah McNeil, product development manager of the consumer Products Division of Enager Industries, Inc.
Enager was a relatively young company, which had grown rapidly to its 2015 sales level of over $222 million. (See Exhibits 1 and 2 for financial data for 2014 and 2015)
Enager had three divisions-Consumer Products, Industrial Products, and Professional Services-each of which accounted for about one-third of Enager's total sales. Consumer Products, the oldest of the three divisions, designed, manufactured, and marketed a line of house ware items, primarily for use in the kitchen.
The Industrial Products Division built one-of-a-kind machine tools to customer specifications (i.e., it was a large "job shop”), with job taking several months to compete.
The Professional Services Division, the newest of the three, had been added to Enager by acquiring a large firm that provided land planning, landscape architecture, structural architecture, and consulting engineering services.
This division has grown rapidly, in part because of its capability to perform "environmental impact" studies, as required by law on many new land development projects.
Because of the differing nature of their activities, each division was treated as an essentially independent company.
There were only a few corporate-level managers and staff people, whose job was to coordinate the activities of the three divisions.
One aspect of this coordination was that all new project proposals requiring investment in excess of $1,500,000 had to be reviewed by the chief financial officer, Henry Hubbard it was Hubbard.
It was Hubbard who had recently rejected McNeil's new product proposal, the essentials of which are shown in Exhibit 3.