Nova's Fucked

*NOTICE - The information contained within this entry is entirely public information. Nothing disclosed here is in any way a company secret, or something that cannot be learned from public newspaper articles and other documencts. I.e. don't fire me.*

So the buzz recently in my life is the fate of my company. Nova's hurting somethin awful, and it's getting to be almost farcical at this point.

See, there were a bunch of scandals regarding Nova not too long ago, a lot of things came to the surface about their policies that weren't exactly legit from a legal standpoint, including, but not limited to refusing to give refunds, discounting the price of points for refunds actually given, failing to provide students with vital information about their own accounts such as the number of points remaining in their contract, and creating an application system that wastes nearly all of the 7 day governmentally mandated risk free back-out period on all contractual agreements signed by customers. So, as a result, Nova was forced to pay some unGodly fine and was forbidden to sign new customers for any contract longer than 1 year for a period of six months, which, given the nature of how Nova makes its money, i.e. get the largest amount of money you possibly can up front and never, ever, ever give it back, is more or less a death blow.

This, coupled with Nova's ill-fated expansion into completely demand-devoid areas, which succeeded not in bringing in new customers but rather only in spreading existing customers around, thusly reducing any 1 branch's income significantly, more or less instantly dropped Nova into the red, big time.

Nova was additionally forced to hire 700 more teachers to compensate for the widespread complaint that students were not able to book lessons at times that were convenient to them, but, due to the unfortunate and ill-timed recent murder of a British Nova instructor, recruitment drives have failed to be as effective as I'm sure the company would wish. Additionally, scares about Nova's financial position have made taking a job with the company increasingly less attractive.

For a little while Nova could skate on their profit margins, but now that we're towards the end of that 6 month period, cockroaches can be seen, i.e. the place is infested with problems and they're becoming increasingly noticeable, nay, impossible to ignore.

This is including, but again, not limited to: branch closures. Over 200 are closing nationwide, including my own. Moraju, Tennodai, and Abiko in my area alone are closing. Branches are closing because landlords are evicting them for failing to pay rent for the last 3 or 4 months. Teachers are being evicted from their apartments because Nova hasn't paid their rent in 3 or 4 months. Teachers that have recently quit have not received their final paychecks. Current teachers, namely titled instructors, didn't get paid on time, actually, their payday was pushed back three times, accompanied by grossly insufficient apologies from Mr. Sahashi, the CEO. The Japanese staff as well have experienced similar tardiness in pay.

The worst part about the branch closures is that students are all gonna quit because of it.

And so on and so forth. If you look at the financial data, Nova's fucked. Nova reported a 4.5 billion yen loss in the las financial quarter alone, which was limited to 2.5 billion due to a liquidation of assets.

This just goes to show how incredibly poorly this, and other companies like it, have been designed and performing, but on the other hand it's a classic example of the corporate model of business. You do something to make a lot of money and then you use that money to expand yourself and make more money, and continue to do this until you literally collapse under your own weight, and then the owners embezzle the bankruptcy money and sneak away to start again.

If you want a unique but not too far off look at the future of this planet, take a look at what's happening to Nova. This is what we're doing to the planet. I think I just said it, but, for emphasis and deeper consideration, I'll repeat: Nova's fucked.