Santa Gets Fit for Growth
“Santa. Hello. How are you? Well I hope. How’s Misses Claus? Rudolph? Also well? Good.”
The man in the crisp navy suit bulldozed through niceties as he stepped into the conference room. He set his gator-skin briefcase down on the long, brown table with candy-cane trim. His young female colleague pressed her lips into a flat smile and smoothed her skirt as she took a seat across from Santa. The man arched back and shut the door with a bit too much force, causing Santa to jump.
“Where can I plug in?” The man asked as he pulled out a razor-thin laptop and scanned the length of the table.
“Excuse me?” Santa replied, confused. He looked toward the woman for clarification. She blinked with her lips still pressed into a forced smile.
“A dongle. I need a dongle. Do you have a dongle?” The man implored, uttering the last sentence slowly and deliberately while shaking his laptop at chest level. “In order to present OUR findings on THAT TV, I need a dongle.”
“Oh, ho ho. I see now. I’m sorry, that TV is closed circuit only. It turns on when a child is being exceptionally good!” Santa said with a glowing smile. Then his face soured and his tone grew serious, “Or, exceptionally naughty. Ho Ho Hoooo!”
The man stood motionless, waiting for Santa’s uproarious laughter to cease. “Ok then, no dongle. We’ll have to do this the old fashioned way. Luckily Alexa brought printouts. Alexa?”
The young woman bent over and brushed strands of blonde hair behind her ear. She popped back up with a stack of papers as thick as a shoebox and placed them on the table. The man cut the pile in thirds and handed one to Santa, who accepted it with a bemused look on his face.
“The first 30 or so pages are legalese and preamble, which I’m sure you’ll read through tonight. Let’s flip to page 38 outlining your problem statement and the scope of our findings,” the man said, flipping to the exact right page in one turn. “We at McKinsey Consulting understand that you, Santa Claus, are experiencing slimming margins due to an increase in new entrant competition, as well as an increase in the cost of labor and materials. Is that right?”
Santa squirmed in his seat and furrowed his brow. “Well, sort of,” he replied hesitantly.
“Good. Moving on to page 42 you’ll see a summary of our findings. We’ve categorized them according to operational efficiencies, i.e. reducing costs to return to profitability; or business expansion, i.e. revenue uplift through new services and product lines.”
Santa looked up at the young woman, Alexa, to see whether she was following any of this. The same inelastic smile was stretched across her face, and she nodded along robotically.
The man continued. “As far as operational efficiencies go, your workshop appeared to be a tightly run ship, at least it did from a 30,000 ft view. When we actually dove deeper into the machinations of your workforce, however, we were appalled at what we found.”
“My workforce?” Santa asked, pushing his bifocals back up his cherry nose as he looked up from the page. “You mean my elves?”
“That’s right. We spent three days performing an efficiency study, and found the elves to be as efficient as wiping your ass with a dog turd.”
Santa winced.
“Each elf produces approximately 0.83 products per week. The only reason you’ve been able to come close to quota is because you have a workforce the size of Japan — if only they were as industrious as the Japanese.”
“Well, they mean well. They have big hearts!” Santa said in defense.
“Enlarged hearts, maybe. But we will get to their health issues in a minute,” the man said ignoring Santa’s growing concern. “We’ve found that the majority of an elven workday is wasted: Eating cookies, splashing around in the toy parts that they are NOT putting together, throwing snowballs, eating thrown snowballs, breaking into perfectly choreographed flash mobs, licking icy metal poles, sitting on shelves, playing Grand Theft Auto, and eating ornaments… glass ornaments.
“Yesterday we watched in horror as the elves shirked their duties for the entire day. Instead, they spent 9 hours trying to write a new hit Christmas song. When it was all said and done, they realized they had just rewritten the exact melody and lyrics of Up on the Housetop.”
“Oooh that’s a good one,” Santa chimed in, bobbing his head.
“Normally we’d recommend that you fire 80% of them to save on wages, and then pursue robotic process automation, but it’s come to our attention that you don’t pay them anything. As much as it pains me to say this, it may be in your best interest to have them copulate just so there are more of them. This is, of course, at the risk of further watering down the most inbred gene pool we’ve seen outside of the hills of West Virginia.”
“Ho Ho Ho, my elves don’t reproduce! They just… well… I have no idea what they do…” Santa trailed off, sliding his hand over his chin and mouth.
The man let Santa’s imagination run for a long second before cutting back in, “You don’t want to know. Trust us. We’ve seen it. Anyway, the only way to cut costs that we can recommend at this point is to pull their healthcare.”
“Pull their healthcare!” Santa exclaimed. “But I can’t afford to have a bunch of sick elves running around!”
“Actually, it’s the only thing you can afford. The amount of healthcare claims your employees have made in the past few years is staggering, and all of this expense trickles back to you. You’re worried about them, but they aren’t worried about you! If they were, they’d change their diet. They eat nothing but cookies, and — as I said earlier — the occasional ornament. Regarding the latter, they have no pretense about being able to digest the ornaments. They just get swept up in the Christmas spirit and turn into little Yuletide gremlins, devouring everything in sight.”
“But sugar is what keeps them filled with the Christmas spirit,” Santa defended, his voice lifting at the end, as if beginning to question his own reasoning.
“If by ‘Christmas spirit’ you mean ‘Type II diabetes’, then yes. You are spending a fortune on insulin for these guys. This whole place is brimming with sugar. I poured myself a hot coffee in the break room the other day, and when I took a sip my teeth nearly fell out. Turns out it was just a pot full of chocolate syrup, which the elves refuse to mix with milk,” the man said with a grimace and outstuck tongue.
“Well…” Santa said as he scratched his chin, “maybe we can work our way onto some fruit. Let’s start with pineapple and mango.”
The man pulled a pen from his breast pocket and scribbled a few notes. He flipped a few pages ahead, scanned the page for a second, and started shaking his head. “Ok, let’s talk about business expansion — page 56.”
Santa fumbled with the pages for a minute, his white gloves severely limiting his precision motor skills. Alexa reached across and flipped to page 56 for him, then smiled a smile that her eyes did not wish to participate in.
The man started again, “We understand your primary business is the production and distribution of playthings; your distribution model is global; and your customer demographic is all children, aged 2–16.”
“Believers, yes,” Santa interrupted.
“Ok…” The man’s patience grew thinner, “I can’t imagine CitiBank dropping me as a client if I suddenly grew wary of their existence, but I’ll grant you this one. The point is, you’re sitting right in the murdered middle here. You’re doing a little for a lot of people, but not enough for anyone. You either need to niche-down or scale-up.”
“Sorry, do you mean nice-down, because I only deliver to the boys and girls on my ‘nice list’.”
“No!” The man burst, quickly catching himself and smoothing the lapel of his suit as he regained his composure. “No. Niche-down, as in aggressively target a more engaged and more profitable customer base. For example, only serving preteen boys who play competitive soccer, and whose parents are High Net Worth individuals.”
“But the song — Here Come Santa Claus — says that I have toys for ALL the girls AND boys. And that I don’t care if they’re rich or poor… I love them all the same.”
“We can work with marketing on that. Change it to…” the man began snapping his finger rather arrhythmically, and in a low, droning sing-song, “He doesn’t care if you live in Orange County or Beverly Hills, he’ll… something something something.” He turned to Alexa and motioned for her to write that down, apparently pleased with himself.
“Anyway, I’m not sure that niche-ing down is the way you should go, Santa,” the man changed his tone.
“It’s not? Oh that’s good!” Santa said, relieved.
“No. With the production capacity you have here in the workshop, it’d be a crime not to scale up — to take on the big guys… Amazon… Alibaba… Walmart.”
“Ok, well, how do we do that?” Santa asked.
“Easy. You serve everyone everything. You’ll become the one-stop-shop for everything from coffee pots to garlic presses to replacement windshield wipers. Your name will become synonymous with ecommerce.”
“But I want my name to stay synonymous with Christmas!” Santa declared.
“And it will! But instead of delivering gifts once per year — to children only, mind you — you’ll get to deliver them every day to every person on the planet. It’ll be Christmas in July, and — hell! — it’ll be Christmas on Halloween, Easter, and Thanksgiving!”
“Ridiculous! I don’t know what adults want for Christmas!” Santa exclaimed.
“They’ll tell you! Through the app!” the man barked back, getting heated once again.
“You don’t get it! Adults aren’t able to communicate with me at all — only those who believe! But…” Santa’s tone warmed, “there is one adult left on Earth who still believes.”
“Pffffbt, now that’s ridiculous, Santa,” the man said in an overly mocking tone. “Nobody with half a brain buys this nonsense.”
Santa stared at him a moment, then turned to Alexa, “Now, now, Wayne. I’d believe that if Alexa had said it. Her parents told her when she was 7, and so she’s been staring right through me ever since she arrived.”
The man now sat with his hands across his brow, shielding his eyes from Santa’s view. His bobbing shoulders belied the deep sobs that began to form.
Santa flipped to the last page of the document, and said in a voice as warm as a pot full of chocolate syrup, “I see you’ve slipped your Christmas list in here on page 198, Wayne. Why don’t you come sit on Santa’s lap and we’ll read through it together?”
