Single Point Of Failure: 31 Companies That Crumbled After One Exit

Not quite a crash and burn, yet was fun to watch. I worked in Department of A. The President of the place decoded to merge us with Department B. Our beloved boss was let go and the boss of B was not a good boss or even a good person. They took away our jobs and gave us new ones. The accounting in Department A was mostly done by one older woman who I shall call Jane. The powers at Department B could never make any sense of the accounting system. They hired about five consultants to "fix" the problem. Never once did they ask Jane about how she did her job. She could have explained it in less than a day. And she did not get paid anywhere near what the consultants charged. One of the consultants finally talked to her about her job. The whole mess was cleared up quickly. Lesson: Never under estimate an older worker who has had the same job for 40 years or more.

There was a dude. He'd been there 10 years when I got hired. I knew more about databases and they wanted to promote me into a lead role. I told them to promote him instead and I'd help with the DB side. They didn't he left. We were a creative space product that integrated with Photoshop. I don't know s**t about Photoshop. Company was bought, everyone was laid off except a skeleton crew to offshore all operations.

When I worked at EF Hutton the CEO was [angry] that the top broker made more money than he did and let everyone know it. The broker left. Then the company got in trouble for check kiting, which was a form of collecting interest on money that was supposed to be in non interest accruing demand deposit accounts. Ego over profits.

...all the technical stuff, and worked a lot...

Aka me. I looked after all the payment machines, door timers, lighting, etc. They contracted the machines out to a company that worked Mon-Fri, 8am-5pm. Noone would look after the door timers, lighting, etc without upfront payment as they were known for not paying for several months. I was on call when there, and would help customers if they needed, no matter the hour, and did whatever was needed to keep the sites going. 6 months later, the company was in shambles, and later sold all their leases off to another company, and left the city.

My former co-worker used to be a secretary at Lehman Brothers (yeah, that place). She had a high position at the company making 150k-250k a year in 2007. (Yup, she worked with someone very important.) Right before the company crashed, her boss asked her to shred some documents, and accidently noticed what those documents read (something like the company was going collapse soon and ordering all the higher ups to "cash out of their retirement funds ASAP" situation. She walked away with alot of money, and bought two houses during the great ressision, in cash, in NYC. She bought herself two homes; one-family home and a mutli-family home of 5-families (for rent).. She lives off the rents, she "retired at age 35" and sells vintage clothes as a side-hobby..

I remember one specific case where I was fired illegally. Or better said, the company forged documents in my name stating I decided to quit, while I was on a vacation and learned about it during. Their reasoning was they weren't allowed to give fulltime contracts anymore by HQ (because a lot of fulltimers left shortly after getting a fulltime contract), and because I was on a two-week vacation. They weren't able to speak to me about it. So their smartest decision was to forge those documents in my name and make it so i'd quit.

Little did they realize (till it was already too late) I was one of the important employees in the store. Our store has two deposit-machines for plastic and beerbottles which had a lot of outages when customers threw in their bottles wrongly, which happens a lot because a lot of people have the mental capacity of a cashewnut. We used to handle those machines with a coworker and myself, till he got fired for being sick too much (at least thats what we got told). So I was the only one who knew how to hndle the machines, fix issues and seperate all bottles efficiently.

So during my vacation I got illegally fired by management. I got told by a coworker they realized messed up when I didn't showed up for work after my vacation anymore (because they fired me duhh) and they had no one to handle the deposit-machines.

For when someone asks: No I was not able to fight it in court because they sided with the company. Even though I had bulletproof evidence of never signing any documents, and being on vacation at time of "signing".

A great manager. He knew how to lead people. Soft skills are so important.

My sales manager left and all of a sudden long term customers started leaving in droves. Turns out the Sales manager was spending a ton of money taking them all out and disguising the costs as if he was riding with salesman and paying for meals and events.

The (only) person who maintained and managed the data and databases.

Way back during the late 2000's financial crisis, a manufacturing company I worked at suffered some layoffs (me included) but after only like 40 days they called me back up and said they had a new plan to get through. I went to this meeting and it was very obvious this was a half-baked idea that would turn into a cluster-F*** as soon as the regular work returned. This exact scenario played out and after they announced 7-day schedules as a last-pitch effort to not to drown, I reminded them this is exactly what I said would happen and then quit. I think the company did survive but a lot of managers got fired for fumbling it. It still felt good to be right after they ignored my reasoning in that meeting.

My friend fixed LEDs for the patriots. Right after he left, Tom Brady left too.