Morgan tried to remind herself that they'd set aggressive goals for themselves. There was no reason that every goal had to be hit, as if they were some kind of supermen.
If you fall short of an 'aggressive' timeline by a few days, you're still months ahead of the competition. But there's a good deal of embarrassment involved with not being able to say that you were completely on track the entire time.
And as the new head of a national company, with no public experience running a company—regardless of what happened behind closed doors after her father got sick—her reputation needs to be stainless.
Which is why, even though it's hardly a big deal, she's not going to leave this detail out of the weekly call back to the board in Nevada.
Maybe she should. Maybe she'd just be spooking them. But it's a decision that needs to be made, and she's just made it.
Her heart thumps loudly in her chest. No problem. No problem. She can do this. She picks up the phone and dials in to the conference call.
A minute later she's in.
"Who do we have?"
A round of voices respond. She ticks them off in her head. Peter's here, James is here, Ron is here, Shane is here, Andrea's here. Which leaves Will, Lana, and Craig.
Nobody talks. It's not a friendly chat. No doubt every one of them is looking to get this over with, but it's something that needs to be done. Nobody likes to have these talks; it takes time out of the day, and involves a serious risk that they're going to hear something that they very much don't like.
But on the other hand, it's better to know what's happening at Lowe Industrial than to not know, and it's better for Morgan to make sure that they're not freaking out at the first media reports that reach their ears, because they already know what's happening.
Because she's already made her bi-monthly report on how things are really going around the build site, around the factory, and on the financial side of things.
Lana arrives next. She's perhaps the bubbliest of the lot of them; the only knock-on effect it has is that she sounds a little more energetic when she says hello.
Will and Craig arrive minutes later.
"That's everyone here, then?"
Everyone goes through again. It's all of them. Morgan takes a deep breath and holds it in. Her heart beat speeds up a little with the extra oxygen, and when she breathes out, it slows down again.
"First order of business," she begins. "The Wyoming factories."
She looks down at the notes in front of her. She knows what they say, and the words make good sense in her head, but it feels like her eyes aren't reading them correctly somehow. She does her best to ignore the nerves that keep threatening to crop up.
"I can confidently say, we haven't hit any major snags. We've got a small delay, in the form of some unstable ground on the Western campus, but we've already identified the problem. A fix shouldn't add more than two days to the total build time, and our men are confident that they won't find any further issues."
Her fingers tap on the table, waiting for someone to break the silence. She should be getting some sort of reaction… right?
"Good news, then?"
"I mean, you always hope for the best, but you prepare for the worst. In this
case, I think we're closer to the best-case than the worst-case."
The ton of the conversation seems to be in general agreement.
"Second. I've taken on a little bit of a side project, but one that I think will pay out significant dividends when it pays off."
She takes a breath in and hopes that nobody asks specifically how it's going.
"You'll all be aware of what I'm referring to when I say that I'm looking at purchasing the Callahan ranch. I'm not quite to the stage of negotiating on price yet, but I'm confident—"
"Your father was adamant that the man wouldn't sell. What makes you think that this time is any different?"
It takes a real effort for Morgan to swallow the response that pops into her head first.
The biggest difference is that he was a shell of the man who she knew growing up. He'd been knocking on heaven's door for months up to that point. It was amazing that he managed to get out of bed every morning, and Morgan was thankful for every second that she had with him.