Chapter 20

   

“Have you heard that the CEO has been replaced and the eldest young master of the Chu family has come in person to oversee things?”

    

“Is it because of our poor performance? My God, that’s not going to change. I don’t want to be laid off!”

    

“What are you nervous about? This young master is different from that chairman, the second young master. He is a famous playboy. I heard that he’s not interested in anything but alcohol and women. He has no qualifications at all. I think that’s why he came here to hang out, to make it look as if he’s seriously participating in the business.”

    

“That’s right. But it’s not good that in an organization as big as Golden Eagle he had to come here of all places. The economy has been sluggish these years, our company’s profits have been dropping with each year, and I don’t know when it will get better, oh… “

    

In the office area on the sixth floor, the staff from the Sales Department had gathered together to gossip and didn’t notice the person passing by. When he walked around another corner, the chirping voices of the women from the Administration Department came from the pantry.

“Look! It’s this one.”

    

“Wow! He looks so handsome in that picture!”

    

“I know someone who works at the headquarters of the group, Zhang Lili. She said that she met Eldest Young Master Chu once and the real person was more handsome than in the pictures, practically oozing hormones!”

    

“No way! The genes of the Chu family are too good. The dashing Second Young Master Chu’s handsomeness has already reached the sky, and this one is even more… I think it’s great to be in the Administration Department now. Seeing him, my mood at work is different.”

    

“Do you want to hook up with him, ha?”

    

“Actually not. I’m afraid he meets a lot of women and won’t look at me at all.”

    

“That’s not necessarily the case. Isn’t it like this in TV dramas? The prince doesn’t like the princess, he likes Cinderella. Look at his name, Chu Yunhan, both elegant and romantic, tsk.”

  

“Hurry up and fix your makeup! Maybe your Young Master Yun will show up today.”

    ……

The young man walking ahead stopped and listened for a while, then turned to Gao Jin, the deputy general manager, who was following behind him, and said, “Gossiping during working hours. It must be nice working here.”

    

Gao Jin’s forehead was already covered with sweat at this moment, and he said anxiously, “These people…it’s really outrageous, I…”

    

“What should I do according to the company policy?”

    

“Report a misconduct.” 

“Let them write a proper review and upload it on the homepage of the company’s intranet. I’ll leave it to the Personnel Department to give them a first-time warning. If there is a second time, they will be dismissed immediately.”

   

“Yes.”

    

“By the way, just leave two practical and capable people in the Administration Department. I don’t like to keep at my side women whose heads are full of nonsense.”

    

“…Yes.” Gao Jin agreed repeatedly, feeling extremely nervous in his heart. At first, he also thought that the eldest young master had come here only to put up a front. He asked for information the day before, so shortly after, he handed him over a report, but in less than an hour he returned it and had him prepare a new one. He thought it would take him a few days to go through all the information, but Chu Yunhan, whose arm was hanging in a sling, showed up at the company early this morning. He even made an initial display of power and made it clear that he would start with rectifying the discipline at the workplace. 

   

He was afraid this Young Master Chu was not here to play. Jintai Department Store was really going to undergo significant changes.

    

Sitting in the office, Chu Yunhan looked at the complicated list of accounts on the computer, feeling somewhat anxious. Although he graduated with an MBA, he did not have any practical experience in managing an enterprise. Just now, Chu Yichen threw a poorly managed company at him, not providing him any assistance whatsoever, and asked him to increase the turnover to a level that was fundamentally difficult to achieve. To put it plainly, he was making things difficult for him. 

    

But this was his only chance to get rid of that person, and he couldn’t just give up.

    

Although he felt uncertain in his heart, he decided to follow the concept that the fish rots from the head down and start off with an internal reorganization. In the morning, Chu Yunhan looked through all documents and accounts. In the afternoon, he took the floor plan of the building decoration and walked around each floor in a big circle to check the setup and arrangement of the decoration. Then, in the evening, he called the heads of all departments to have a meeting and check out the abilities and ideas of each manager.

    

At eight o’clock in the evening, he went to the private club on Donglin Road to drink tea. He called it “drinking tea”, but he barely touched the cup. He had a wide range of friends, but those pampered young masters in the circle who spent their time drinking and pursuing pleasure were not decent. Many of them worked in their families’ companies. It was already good if they got up and really went to work. Before he was locked up by Chu Yichen, he cut off contact with these people. This time, he simply invited them with the purpose to get back in touch, expand his network, and learn from them how to run a company.

    

Unexpectedly, Young Master Chu, whose love affairs knew no limits, seriously asked them for advice, triggering a burst of ridicule.

    

“Young Master Yun, Young Master Yun, who would have thought you would also have a day like this!”

    

“Hey, I say, your arm wasn’t broken by your iceberg of a cousin, was it?”

    

“I guess I deserved it. I’m obediently going to work at the company now.”

    

“That’s so miserable! Hearing this breaks  one’s heart and seeing it makes one cry, hahahaha!”

    

“Get lost, you idlers! Hurry up!” Chu Yunhan cursed while taking out a notebook. Fortunately, the broken left arm did not affect his writing. Having only drunk a cup of tea, his stomach was empty, but he had a notebook full of notes.

    

After such a busy day of working non-stop, he had not a bit of strength left and fell asleep exhausted in the car on the way home. He slept very soundly, and didn’t fully wake up when somebody shook his body. Not until someone put him on the bed did he suddenly wake up. Feeling that someone touched him, he subconsciously pushed them away hard.

The situation got somewhat awkward. 

    

Chu Yunhan looked at Chu Yichen, who was about to cover him with a blanket, swallowed, and said, “I… will do it myself…”

    

The man withdrew his hand silently and walked out the door.

    

“Umm……”

    

Chu Yichen turned around and looked at him.

    

“This place is too far away from the company… and going back and forth is tiring…well, I think…it would be easier to live in the company…” he said with embarrassment, feeling somewhat guilty.

    

“It’s not suitable to live in the company. I will let Bai Xiao prepare an apartment for you. You can move in at any time,” the man said in a flat tone. “Anything else?”

    

This… He agreed right away? Wasn’t it too easy? Chu Yunhan, who felt like he was dreaming, was taken aback and said, “…Nothing.”

    

“Rest now.” He closed the door.

He breathed a sigh of relief, scratched his head, and suddenly thought of a question. How had he got back to his room?

    

The feeling just now, it should be…He was carried back. But who carried him?

   

Who else could it be?

    

Who else would dare to carry him? 

    ……

Although Chu Yichen promised not to touch him for three months, the training he had received made him very nervous when he saw the other party, wishing he could hide far away. So, the night he got the keys to the apartment, Chu Yunhan couldn’t wait to move in the apartment near the company.

    

The whole person fell back on the unfamiliar but soft and large bed. He felt he was in heaven at this moment. He wished he could get up and let off two strings of firecrackers to express his joy. But as soon as he thought of these “eight percent” he immediately wilted again, got up quickly, and went to work at the desk.

    

As soon as he went to work the next day, he interviewed the financial manager. The other party said that if the promotion was successful, the sales within one week of the store celebration would basically be the same as last year’s, but an increase of 8% would be very difficult to achieve. This gave Chu Yunhan a headache. After thinking about it, he came up with another plan.

    

At present, online sales were gaining more and more popular, and physical sales were deteriorating. Instead of being hidebound, it was better to take advantage of the trend and boost sales through online platforms. Jintai had originally created a website, but because of the low number of clicks it had been basically discarded. If they used it again, it would probably give a strong push to the stagnant company. But restarting it meant investing a lot of time and manpower. It wasn’t clear whether it could be completed before the store celebration, whether it could be promoted successfully, and whether it could achieve the goal of increasing sales by 8% within a week of the store celebration.

    

At this moment, he had two roads ahead of him. One was to follow the established routine and continue walking down the road of traditional physical sales, increase publicity, increase promotional activities and attract walk-in customers. The other was to open up a new battlefield and attract online shopping groups. It was like a big bet. The bet was his life. Once he made the wrong choice, he would lose the game with no chance for recovery.

Chu Yunhan closed his eyes and leaned back on the swivel chair for a long time. When he opened his eyes again, the expression in his eyes was no longer indecisive. He said to Bai Yang, who was waiting at the side, “Invite these people to a meeting tonight.”

    

Deputy General Manager Gao Jin had been unable to sleep well these days. Since Young Master Chu took office, half of Jintai’s department heads had been replaced in just one week. The new hires were recruited by an expensive headhunting company with experience and strategy. He also hired a team of network engineers from overseas, saying he wanted them to reopen Jintai’s online platform, and put him in charge. He turned forty-seven years old this year, and he usually only watched movies online. He didn’t know anything about the internet. Now, he received such a hot potato and simply didn’t know what to do. After tossing and turning for a few days, he took the initiative to say that his health was not good enough to bear such a big responsibility.

    

Chu Yunhan was very kind. He gave him a long leave and told him to rest well. The next day, he promoted the head of the IT Department, who had not been on the job for long, to a holiday replacement of the deputy general manager to take over his position. Gao Jin then realized that in the company he was an old man. There was no credit, only hard work. It was inconvenient for this guy to fire him directly, so he used such a trick. But on a second thought, he still kept his vacant job and was finally taking care of himself.

    

When people get busy, time is never enough. Chu Yunhan devoted himself to work, wishing the day had 48 hours.

    

While solving a series of problems such as website style, backstage listing pages, incorrectly linked pages, server instability, etc., two months passed. The plaster on Chu Yunhan’s arm was removed. Jintai’s official shopping website also entered the final stage of debugging. Merchants settled in Jintai put some goods on the shelves and started the first trial sale. The first round of large-scale online and offline promotion carried out by the promotion team began at the same time. During the trial sale, some minor problems still appeared on the website, for example the payment was debited, but the item wasn’t available, the page did not show the stock, etc., and the return and exchange process was not smooth, which caused some customer dissatisfaction.

    

However, the soaring click-through rate of the website gave Chu Yunhan a glimmer of hope. He asked the IT Department to further improve the features, and sought out the Sales and Planning Department personnel, asking them to jointly plan an “offline try-on, online purchase” activity in the clothing sales area and cooperate with the online payment platform and give certain discounts for customers paying online. Once the plan was mature, they should immediately give it publicity, and wait for the store celebration to be launched together.

    

During this period of time, Chu Yunhan kept spinning like a top every day, often spending the whole day in the conference room, analyzing data with executives, studying the layout, and lying on the table to sleep for a while when he was tired. When he woke up, he would pour a cup of coffee and then continue working. Sometimes he thought that managing a company was so exhausting. Chu Yichen had to manage so many things, wasn’t he tired to death? In his heart, he whispered silently, “That guy is really abnormal”, “I’m really not as good as him”, “I must be crazy to think of him,” and so on.

    

The employees saw the boss working hard, so no one dared to be lazy and working overtime became the norm. Chu Yunhan saw that they were diligent and introduced a generous overtime pay, which won the favor of many employees.

    

With the store celebration getting closer and closer, his nerves became more and more tense. He couldn’t sleep well for several consecutive nights. He wanted to go out and relax, so he asked Bai Yang to drive around. Seeing the familiar golden sign from the distance, he was moved and said, “Go to Lihao.”

Translator: Taalia