Chapter 640: End of Year Meeting – Part 1

“Alright everyone, I’m sure we all want to get out of here to enjoy the festivities, so let’s keep this brief,” Lucas declared as he swept his gaze over the faces gathered in front of him.

The uproar surrounding Elizabeth Carlson’s breakthrough was still going strong 12 days after it happened, and there were now just 5 days until the end of the year, but that didn’t mean Lucas could dump everything and go on vacation just yet.

There were plenty of things that needed wrapping up before the New Years Banquet rolled around, the most important of which was this meeting between him and all of the manager-level personnel he had working for him.

46 people in total, not counting Lucas himself, sat in one of the small halls of the Balfour Manor, each one of them carrying a summary of this year’s activity for the business or project they were in charge of.

It was a lot of managers to get through.

What’s more, this meeting didn’t even include Lucas’ associates and partners from his classified projects, or from the projects he was strictly an investor in such as Christina’s bakeries or Eris’ Rising Phoenix Guild.

Only the businesses or research initiatives that Lucas was directly in charge of, or was handling in partnership with the Balfour Family, would be discussed today, yet the boy anticipated it already taking several hours to get through all of these reports.

Although Lucas was extremely reluctant to do something as inane as creating managerial positions to manage other managers, that would probably be necessary in the near future in order to properly administrate the growing bureaucracy of his organization.

Once that happened, having his own dedicated, properly staffed headquarters would likely also become necessary, but these were all considerations for the future. For now, Lucas simply wanted to get through this meeting and then head down to the docks to welcome back his returning Junior Sister.

And so, Lucas opened his notebook and called for the first of many managers to stand.

…..

Thankfully, the majority of the reports were short and succinct.

A manager for one of Lucas’ projects would briefly go over what kind of progress they had made, their total expenditures, and what their plans for the following year would be as well as how much money they estimated needing.

Many of these managers reported financial losses, limited progress, or both, but Lucas already knew that would happen given the experimental nature of the work he had assigned them.

For instance, after learning about the large limestone deposits around Falcon’s Bend from Spirit Smith Eda Mathews in Torren Ridge, Lucas had hired a bunch of workers and craftsmen to both mine some of the rock and then try using it to create cement, otherwise known as ‘flowing rock’ on the Blue Sky Continent.

Unfortunately, all Lucas could provide the research team with was a sample of finished cement powder as well as the knowledge that limestone was the main component.

Naturally, this meant very limited progress had been made despite this being a very important project.

Research into chemical explosives, baking soda, and a whole host of other random items Lucas had, at one point or another, decided he wanted to look into, had all basically produced no results as of yet.

That didn’t discourage Lucas, however, as he knew that all of these items were both useful and valuable, so he continued funding the research with the profits from his more lucrative ventures.

Speak of those ventures, there were actually a number of them.

Rubber was a particularly good example.

Although not available in the Rockwell Kingdom, when Lucas was browsing the list of materials the Vast Ocean Trading Company had in its stockpiles, he had come across something with properties that greatly resembled raw natural rubber.

In a stroke of luck, when Lucas saw this, it immediately triggered one of his inherited memories about vulcanization, and how all it took was heating rubber together with a certain amount of sulphur, a compound that was readily available in the Rockwell Kingdom.

Since then, Lucas had been regularly importing large amounts of rubber and turning it into everything from soccer balls to shoe treads.

The best part?

No one in the Kore Sovereignty seemed to have found a use for the raw rubber yet, so it was dirt cheap and had actually gotten cheaper as time went on, probably because a few enterprising individuals had noticed there was now a client for this product.

Research into sewage treatment and indoor plumbing systems were also progressing quite well, which was perhaps a result of Lucas’ great enthusiasm for bathing.

As a bonus, fertilizer production had also become much more advanced over the past year as there was plenty of ‘raw material’ available to experiment with.

What had previously been considered by everyone as ‘waste’, now actually had a commercial value, which made a surprisingly large number of people happy.

Waste Haulers, who dug up old outhouse pits and carted away the refuse from the city were very pleased that they no longer had to travel so far downstream to dump their cargo as they could now sell it to Lucas’ composting yards.

Farmers were also eager to get their hands on the finished fertilizer after it had been proven to significantly boost agricultural productivity.

Even the ordinary people of the city were pleased with this arrangement, as Lucas and his Urban Development Team were currently investing huge sums of money into designing and installing more efficient sewage systems.

Basically, anything that got rid of the waste and made the city smell cleaner was a good thing in everyone’s mind.

Of course, none of these were the real money-makers among Lucas’ many projects; that distinction belonged to 3 businesses alone, the first of which was his clothing shop, [Vision].

Isaac and Felicity, the two rebel tailors Great Elder Pauline Balfour had sent to Lucas, were in attendance at this meeting and while they both had dark circles around their eyes and looked quite exhausted, the smiles on their faces were unmistakable.

Half-a-year ago, the two of them were literally in jail in Martin, accused of property damage and assault, but now, they were in charge of the hottest fashion shop in the entire Rockwell Kingdom.

Christina’s 16th birthday banquet, and the debut of Lucas’ bold new dress designs, had set off an explosion that rocked noble society, with custom orders pouring in from all over the Rockwell Kingdom, especially from rich and powerful women.

In order to try to meet this demand, Lucas had set up a new factory in the southern district and gone on a massive hiring spree, yet he still couldn’t keep up.

Specialization, standardized sizes, and foot-powered sewing machines had helped quite a bit, streamlining manufacturing and boosting productivity significantly compared to tailors or seamstresses sewing items solely by hand, but there were still limits to what manual labour alone could accomplish.

Lucas had even begun introducing the idea of ‘ready-made’ clothing, which were essentially mass-produced items like shirts, pants, and even underwear, in an effort to further simplify the workflow for his employees.

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