A Mind Lost

In my previous post I told you all about they guy who has just left our company. He had developed, in company time, a visual basic program which was used to produce, monitor and track all of our import orders. There were also other files which he had been storing on his PC instead of on the server. After he left we could not find the program or files on his PC so when we contacted him to return his company property (keys, mobile etc), he said that he used to store it on his phone so that he could use it at home and in the office. So we asked for our property back and yesterday we finally got it.

When I checked his phone, everything had been erased except for the VB executable for the import orders program, which was useless to us since he had hard coded his MySQL login credentials into the program and of course I had disabled or deleted all of his user accounts and privileges as soon as it was apparent he was leaving.

Not to be beaten, I searched the net for a data recovery tool for usb/pen drives and came across a demo for Pen Drive Data Recovery Software by Pro Data Doctor. I removed the memory stick from the Sony Ericsson K800i mobile and plugged it into a USB multi-card reader. The demo allowed me to scan the card and showed me all of the files which had been deleted. Being a demo, it wouldn’t allow be to recover them but at least I knew they were there and that the program could see them. I bought the software online for £32.89, and within seconds had a download link and serial number to activate it. After a five minute scan, I was asked for a destination directory and all files were recovered. The only slight glitch was that the first character of some filenames (less than 5% I would estimate) had been replaced by an underscore. These were easy to guess and correct.

That £32.89 saved me hours of work re-creating the missing software and recovered files we would have had great difficulty replacing and this incident shows the dangers of allowing employees to break the rules and store files anywhere but on the server where they can be regularly backed-up.

It’s been too long since I last posted and this is solely due to work commitments. We recently had some major developments which started with us beginning negotiations to buy one of our competitors. They were struggling after losing some staff and falling out with their key supplier so they were ripe for picking and we would be able to take most of their customer base and take them out of the market, significantly reducing our market competition. However, you could call the owner of the competitor shrewd, arrogant or misguided since when talks stalled he decided to try to poach our Sales Manager and one of our purchasing and sales guys to join his company, possibly in an effort to force the deal his way!

After a few days of political and financial games in which I tried to keep both our guys on board, the outcome was a large restructuring of our company which saw our Managing Director retire, our sales manager promoted to Sales Director and myself promoted to Commercial and Financial Director! The other guy who was approached by the competitor over-played his hand and in the process burned his bridges with our owners and has now left. The deal has fallen through and he is now languishing in a company with little or no future and will probably be moving on again within months.

This is a huge step forward for our company and one which was planned in the near future anyway. We now have a younger, more motivated board which is looking to double our turnover within two years. We have a small, dedicated management and admin team who will be encouraged to develop their roles and skills and can look forward to sharing in the rewards.

It’s been a long and hectic couple of weeks. But I’ve come out of it in a better position, both personally and financially. Hopefully, now that the dust is settling, I’ll be able to get back to posting here again!