Free Web NovelChapter 344: Head Manager Victoria – Part 1
Lucas wasn’t the only one who found himself buried in work; in fact, Lucas himself was responsible for burying several people in work.
Of all these unlucky individuals, the one who had it the worst was undoubtedly Victoria Moore, Lucas’ newly employed Head Manager.
Sometimes, Lucas would jokingly refer to her as his CEO, a joke that, unfortunately, only he understood.
When she stepped down from her position as Viscount of the Moore Family and agreed to work for Lucas, Victoria was naturally disgruntled. She saw this as a serious demotion and drop in status, only complying because she had no choice in the matter.
Victoria did see potential in what Lucas was trying to create and felt that, given enough time, she would again rise to a position of importance, but in the short-term, the only comfort she was able to give herself was that she would have less responsibilities and more free time for herself.
For the first month or so, this proved to be true.
While the journey from Iron Rock to Misty City could hardly be described as uneventful, Victoria did enjoy quite a bit of leisure and was even able to spend multiple consecutive nights getting 8 or more hours of uninterrupted sleep, something she hadn’t done in many years.
However, the moment they landed in Misty City, the Head Manager’s nightmare began.
Not only did the former Viscount need to spend a huge amount of time handling refugees, networking with nobles, and negotiating with merchants, she was also assigned by Lucas to oversee the re-establishment of both his sugar and soap industries while he focused on the overall re-settlement plan and other new projects.
Just dealing with the immediate issues was already more than a full-time job, often requiring Victoria to run all over Misty City from dawn to dusk, or to hop on a tartan and fly to other cities to settle payments or disputes.
Then, of course, there were her own Moore Family’s problems.
She may not have been Viscount anymore, but as the one who up until a month ago had been the Matriarch, there was quite a bit of information that only Victoria had regarding the family, resulting in the new head of the house and the various Elders frequently coming to her with questions.
Some of these problems Victoria could solve with a few simple words, but others required her to make an extra trip and spend many hours sifting through books and papers looking for obscure yet vital data.
As for preparing for the sugar harvest and getting soap production up and running, that was like adding yet another full-time job onto her already full schedule.
The only thing that kept Victoria sane was knowing that everyone else around her was just as busy as she was, with her new boss quite possibly being the busiest of them all.
That didn’t mean Victoria went easy on Lucas, of course.
Despite technically being his subordinate, when Victoria disagreed with Lucas about how something should be done, she would engage in fierce debates with him.
Most of these debates remained civil, but sometimes they involved shouting, and sometimes they involved things being thrown.
When something went wrong and it was clearly Victoria’s fault, Lucas didn’t hesitate to give her an earful, but when something went wrong and it was the young boy’s fault, Victoria would rip into him just as mercilessly.
Through all of this, however, Lucas never once accused Victoria of being disloyal, and Victoria never claimed that Lucas was acting incompetently.
The two of them fought and argued vigorously, but the relationship between Lucas and Victoria didn’t become hostile or toxic as a result. In fact, the more they worked together, the more they came to respect one another.
This was also why Lucas felt so comfortable leaving such important matters in his newly hired Head Manager’s hands. He would still contribute when Victoria came to consult with him or when some technical aspect of the project exceeded her current knowledge, but for the most part, Lucas allowed her to handle things however she saw fit.
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It was 10 days after the river convoy’s arrival that Victoria Moore finally found enough daylight hours to start really working on the commercial projects Lucas had assigned to her, not that she hadn’t been doing some late-night planning and preparations.
The first thing the Head Manager had to do was admit her limits. There was no way she could be deeply involved in both the sugar and soap projects, so she decided to focus her attention on the former.
There were a number of reasons Victoria made this decision, but the biggest one was undoubtedly because it was the more difficult of the two. Not only was making sugar a much less developed process compared to making soap, much of the setup and production process had to be done with a high degree of secrecy.
Soap was both useful and profitable, and preventing others from immediately learning its production method was important, but if it leaked out somehow, it wasn’t too big of a problem.
Between washing clothes, washing dishes, washing floors, washing people, and so on and so forth, it wouldn’t be strange to need the equivalent of 1 or 2 bars of soap per person in the Rockwell Kingdom every month.
Given that there were some 6 million people in the Rockwell Kingdom, that meant that 9 or 10 million bars of soap would be needed to supply ’basic’ demand.
Put simply, even if the recipe for soap was leaked, and a month later 100 times as much was produced in the Rockwell Kingdom compared to what Lucas was manufacturing back in Redwood Town, it still wouldn’t come anywhere close to saturating the market.
That wasn’t even considering the possibility of exporting soap to other nations, which would increase the market size by another 100-fold.
No matter how much soap was produced, Lucas could still make a profit with little to no detrimental effects on him, the Balfour Family, or the Rockwell Kingdom as a whole.
Sugar, however, was different.
Not only were the sweet crystals many times more profitable than soap, they were also a kind of strategic resource, one that involved politics and economics on a nation-to-nation scale.
The primary source of sugar in the Rockwell Kingdom was the Darr Kingdom, a hostile nation. Sugar was also a major black-market good, and controlling its import was a serious issue that both the Royal Council and military had a hand in.
In short, Victoria didn’t feel comfortable allowing anyone else to be directly responsible for such an important project, even if they were both competent and capable of doing so.
Still, that didn’t mean she was going to handle such a monumental task all on her own. In the end, she was Head Manager, her job was to put the right people in the right positions, not do everything herself.
To that end, one of the things the competent woman made a point of doing over the past couple of months was getting to know the personnel Lucas already had working for him, amongst whom she was pleasantly surprised to discover a number of talents worth nurturing.
Although some of them had been swept away in the Spatial Storm, most of Lucas’ core group of subordinates, the ones he had personally trained back in Redwood Town, were still together with them.
These 30 or so individuals all had experience working for him, and some even had some administrative training and advanced knowledge the young boy had imparted to them over the last 6 months.
Laura, in particular, caught Victoria’s eye.
Although not an outright monster like Lucas, Laura was not only a capable leader, she was also fiercely loyal, extremely determined, and eager to learn, all traits Victoria Moore appreciated greatly, so much so that she decided to take the young woman as a kind of apprentice.
For her part, Laura at first found the idea of there being another boss between her and Lucas a bit upsetting.
Up until now, she had basically been the one in charge of things for Lucas, so suddenly having to answer to someone else who was essentially an outsider made her feel like she wasn’t competent or capable enough.
Still, Laura wasn’t inflexible, and she had an enormous amount of trust and respect in her young boss, so she set aside her pride, held her tongue, and did her best to work with the new Head Manager, a decision she swiftly determined was the right one.
While it was true that Victoria wasn’t as familiar with how Lucas did things as Laura was, when it came to basically everything else, the new Head Manager was clearly far superior to Laura in terms of abilities.
This, of course, made perfect sense; if a former Viscount wasn’t more capable than a random countryside orphan with less than a single year of job training, that would really have been shocking.
Completely throwing away any lingering reluctance she might have felt, Laura took to her new role with great enthusiasm, determined to learn everything she could from her new teacher.
In response to the fervor her new apprentice showed, Victoria leaned into teaching Laura, even allowing her to take charge of a number of duties that she herself was less familiar with, the two women quickly forming a highly efficient and effective management team.
The first order of business Victoria and Laura had to tackle was preparing harvesting equipment.
On its face, making Maple Sugar wasn’t a complicated process.
Drill a hole in a lych tree, insert a hollow spout, then hang a bucket beneath it.
Once the bucket filled with sap, collect it, bring it back, and boil it into sugar.
When Lucas first explained this procedure to Victoria, she was stunned at how simple it was to obtain this rare and valuable luxury good; however, when the young boy started listing off the requirements he had going forward to turn this into a proper industry, Head Manager Moore couldn’t help gulping nervously.
Determining where the largest concentration of lych trees were in the South-East Province.
Determining which lych trees were most suitable to collect sap from.
Determining the optimum size, depth, and position of the hole drilled into the tree.
Determining the appropriate size of bucket to use when collecting sap.
Determining what materials the taps and buckets should be made from.
Determining how many taps could be drilled into a single tree to gather the most sap.
Determining how much sap could be extracted from a single tree without harming its health or reducing the quality of the end product...
