RE:Burns Resigns. Well I'm sure Mike will be just fine as long as he saved some of the money he took out of the company. His $180k salary plus the double-dipping as President of Pioneer which was not reported in the financials. On top of the cash he took for the sale of the business in the first place. And all the tax credits he left in Pioneer Exploration when he converted the initial business purchase offer into an asset purchase. Thus the reason for the massive write-down of goodwill in Pioneer 2-3 years ago. Which was a smart play for him as he was able to get a 6-figure R&D tax credit back from the government for the "technology" he sold to Global. That technology being little more than how to use zip-ties to strap an off-the-shelf sensor onto the bottom of an off-the-shelf drone. Same setup all their competitors are using. But he had a TradeMark on the name "UAVMag" so that justified the million dollar valuation in his mind.
I'd love to get a closer look at the books to see if they were pushing Pioneer expenses up into Global as a way of increasing Pioneer's apparent profits so he got a bigger profit sharing check. This would explain why Global showed such high consulting and travel fees while having such low cost of sales while continuing to lose money every quarter.
The concept that James and Andrew will continue to run the company is laughable. They know even less about drones than most of you. Andrew has been travelling the world trying to raise money but completely unsucessfully because investors aren't stupid. They know he knows nothing about drones.
It's true the rumors both these guys put so little work into the company it was crippling. Novaerial had to move offices twice in less than 6 months because James couldn't figure out how to pay the rent on time. Neither one of them did anything to save High Eye which ran out of cash because Global's accountant couldn't be bothered to invoice customers and James did nothing about it. James wanted the last guy there to pay bills from his own source. And Andrew didn't even bother talking to the guy one single time before he quit and took assets with him to guarantee payment of what he was owed. A $400,000 asset being held to settle a $20,000 debt and Andrew wanted to take the issue to court. They left Mike to clean up that mess as usual.
James couldn't make a plan to meet payroll and was spending a fortune in overnight courier charges and bank fees because it was always last minute and from wherever he happened to be at the time. Payments always coming from some random source, method and location, until the one time they didn't even make payroll and didn't pre-warn employees. Left it up to Mike to explain that one. You think employees stick around when this kinda stuff is going down? Stewart Bailey left because he was sick of this stuff. They continually lost good employees because of the mis-management of really really basic stuff.
Andrew picked a stupid fight with a former employee which went to the labour board. Where he lost and was ordered to pay, plus penalties. But then just ignored it. So it went back to the board. He didn't even bother showing up to the hearing. They lost again and had to pay even more, with more penalties. The final insult had to be making the last employee at Novaerial write his own termination letter before he left! Hell after somebody DIED these guys wouldn't even respond to his widow to tell her when they might pay what he was owed. The lowest of the low.
Novaerial could have been successful but Mike and James decided early on that they would take over sales. That's why Global UAV Sales and Leasing was started and why Nova's sales dried up shortly after the acquisition. They never bothered hiring anybody to run it and you saw the disaster of a website that James set up. And lets not forget James' yogurt cup video to sell FLIR cameras. Marketing genius that was. Nova actually got one sale by themselves but James insisted on getting involved. Took so long for him to do nothing more than change the letterhead on the documents and sign it that the customer walked.
All of this stupidity crippled AIR which had been built on the back of the Procyon. But when they sent them in for service they just sat for months because Mike and James had all the Nova guys off chasing rainbows. All of Nova's resources tied up for months on the Huawei thing that was a technological dead end and they only managed to collect $20k from Huawei as a service provider. There was never any partnership. Especially after Mike got scolded by Huawei for trying to fly first class on their dime. Or the Planck thing that died because James never budgetted to pay the invoice. Or the ES Aero thing where they spent tons of resources without even asking how much money they wanted to even produce a quote to produce a quote on production. Those guys work for NASA there was no chance these guys could afford it. But they press released their intentions anyway. When Mike stated they had 12 Procyons flying all over the world in testing? Lies. Most of them were sitting in boxes at Nova.
You can't make this stuff up. They should make a movie.
Well at least Andrew gets to add another failed company to his resume. Eventually he won't be able to rely on his faked success at Cancana any more. He was not responsible for the success of that company as he suggests. He was turfed and his replacement finished the job.
And James will be fine as he can run Longford, the company he started by borrowing Global's money for liquidity. There was a revolving door of cash between Pioneer and Longford. It must have all balanced out at the end or the accountants would have flagged it but I have no idea how any accountant could make sense of it.
The whole thing was just a disaster of epic proportions.