Ever since people started getting all hyped up about UV exposure and skin cancer and stuff, our tanning salon, Smokin’ Skin, has really hit the skids. No one wants to lie in a super-hot humming electric tube and fry themselves anymore, and it is really hurting our profit margin. In fact, if we don’t do something soon, we’re probably going to be looking down the barrel of a buyout or bankruptcy situation before too long.
But we’re not ready to throw in the sweaty towel just yet. We call a meeting with our two managers and ten employees, and we make them an offer we hope they won’t refuse: we want them to invest in the salon. In return for their money, we’ll make them all part owners of Smokin’ Skin. In essence, we’re offering to turn Smokin’ Skin into an employee-owned business. This last-ditch effort to save a company before it heads into buyout territory is known as a “savior plan,” because we’re basically asking our employees to be our business’s saviors.
Sometimes savior plans actually work. Sometimes all that’s needed to pull a company out of its funk is a little employee buy-in, literally. But a lot of the time, savior plans just become the latest in a line of failed attempts to make a nonprofitable business look otherwise, and investors and brokers and financial analysts all know it. Implementing a savior plan isn’t going to suddenly and automatically make our salon look like a hot investment opportunity. Smokin’ Skin isn’t doing poorly because it’s in a funk; it’s doing poorly because the tanning bed industry as a whole is about a thousand times less popular than it was when we opened the salon in 1994. And no amount of employee saviors is going to change that fact.
