First Day at WeWork — The Post-Restructuring Landscape

You badge into WeWork's headquarters at 75 Rockefeller Plaza on a Monday morning. The lobby has that distinctive WeWork energy — exposed brick, communal coffee bar, members working on laptops at long oak tables — but there's a quiet undercurrent you notice immediately. The furniture is the same, the branding is the same, but the headcount is not. Floors that were once packed are now half-occupied. The restructuring shed 60% of corporate staff, and the survivors carry that particular mix of resilience and wariness.

André Fernandez, the CFO, meets you at the 14th-floor elevator bank. He's already moving — coffee in one hand, iPad in the other. 'Good, you're here. I have 30 minutes before my next call. Let me walk you through the state of things.' He leads you through the finance floor, gesturing at a team of 11 people hunched over screens. 'That's Maria Santos's team. They're running our financials on 14 separate QuickBooks instances. Month-end close takes 22 days. We close the books faster by hand than most companies do with SAP. But it's not sustainable and it's not auditable at the level our new board expects.'

He stops at a glass-walled conference room. 'Here's what I need you to understand. This company almost died. We shed $4 billion in lease obligations, lost two-thirds of our people, and rebuilt from the wreckage. The board approved $4.8 million for this ERP because we cannot grow — or be acquired, or go public again, or do anything strategic — without financial infrastructure that works. RSM is good. NetSuite is the right platform. The money is approved. What I need from you is execution discipline. No surprises, no scope creep, no heroics. Just deliver.'

He glances at his watch. 'Your desk is in the open plan next to the finance team. Maria will walk you through the current systems this afternoon. RSM's kickoff is tomorrow. Read the handover notes I sent — everything I'm worried about is in there. Questions?'