Civilization Chronicles: Rise of the Divine Creator

After viewing over a dozen different facilities, some old, some renovated, some brand new, Pauline had managed to tick off every publicly acknowledged project Lucas and her mother were working on, and to say she was impressed would be a dramatic understatement.

A lot of the work going on was experimental, so it wasn’t likely to produce any practical results or generate a positive revenue stream anytime soon; however, some of these projects were already commercially viable and they were raking in money.

Lucas’ soap factory was the prime example.

Even with many improvements to the manufacturing process and bulk purchasing of ingredients, the final production cost per unit of soap now hovered around 25 Coppers, up from around 20 back in Redwood Town.

The quality of soap produced in the factory was much higher, mind you, and raw ingredients in the city were naturally higher than in the rural countryside, so this increased cost made sense.

Lucas could have set the retail price as high as he wanted, probably all the way up to 1 Gold per bar to match the cost of a jar of Bathing Cream, but he had been adamant about not charging more than 1 Silver in any of the stores owned or operated directly by the Balfour Family.

A 300% retail profit margin was still ridiculously high, so it wasn’t like he was losing money, but Lucas main objective in keeping the price down was to spread soap and the better hygiene habits it promoted as quickly and widely as possible.

In fact, in the future, once mass-market adoption had truly set in, Lucas planned to lower the price for soap even further, assuming production could keep up demand.

The Balfour Family naturally purchased soap at production cost, which allowed bars of it to appear in every shower stall in every bathhouse in the Manor.

As for those big merchant groups and close allies of the Balfour Family, Lucas offered them a discount, selling to them wholesale at 75 Copper per bar.

Lucas had wanted to offer a bulk discount, but he didn’t have enough supply yet to do so, and Rebecca, the one he had put in charge of the factory, had told him that it would be several months before they could significantly expand production as new supply chains needed to be established first.

Put simply, selling soap was incredibly profitable, but on a per-bar basis, it wasn’t very valuable.

That said, production wasn’t nearly high enough to meet market demand, which meant there was plenty of room for growth.

Currently, a little more than a month since opening, the factory was capable of producing about 5,000 bars per day.

With an average profit of 50 Coppers per bar, that meant that Lucas’ first fully functional business venture was bringing in 250 Gold.

Per day.

That was 8,000 Gold a month!

How much more the factory could expand wasn’t totally clear, but it had been built to eventually reach 33,000 bars per day or roughly 1 million bars per month, and Rebecca had sworn to Lucas she would find a way to reach that number within the next 2 years.

1 million bars of soap per month translated to 50,000 Gold per month or 600,000 Gold per year, assuming prices were held steady.

The revenue the Balfour Family collected each year through its businesses, industries, and taxes was somewhere in the neighbourhood of 50 to 100 million Gold, which sounded like a lot, until you realized that their expenditures such as salaries, equipment maintenance, and just general expenses ate up no less than 95% of that amount, sometimes even exceeding 100%, causing them to have to dip into their reserves.

In other words, on average, the Balfour Family managed to add about 3 million Gold to its treasury each year.

That didn’t include personal revenue streams of the individual Balfour Family members, which were significant in their own rights, but it did give a general idea of the family’s level of prosperity.

According to the deal Lucas had struck with his master, 75% of all profits from any business they jointly started would go to the Balfour Family. 75% of 600,000 was 450,000.

Adding 450,000 Gold was enough to increase to the Balfour Family’s average yearly savings by more than 15%.

That.

Was.

MASSIVE!

But more importantly, soap was just 1 product, produced from 1 business, while Lucas had dozens of similar projects on the go.

Given this reality, Pauline could easily imagine a future where the Balfour Family’s total yearly revenues doubled, tripled, quadrupled...

Revenues, not profits!

As for how many times their actual profits and savings would increase...

Even better, if Pauline wasn’t reading her mother’s enigmatic First Disciple wrong, the projects Lucas had already started were by no means all the ideas he had floating around in his head.

To state the obvious, she was right.

Basically, whenever Lucas found something lacking in his current life, he tried to dig up knowledge related to it from his inherited memories. If he was able to find a solution, and extract enough information to attempt to replicate it, he would jot down his ideas, compile whatever he knew about it, then seek out appropriate partners from the Manor or in Misty City.

After signing some confidentiality agreements and work contracts, Lucas would hand everything over to the professionals, write them a check from the Balfour Family or his personal savings, depending on what he felt was more beneficial, then set them to work.

This had happened 26 times since he arrived in the South-East Province, and wasn’t likely to stop for decades to come.

Lucas could have kept all this to himself and slowly worked on it with a tight group of trusted confidants, thus maximizing the benefits for both himself and the Balfour Family, but that kind of approach was far too slow for his taste.

Better to farm out his ideas to others and have them do the work for him than to try doing everything himself, at least for things he and his Master didn’t consider ’sensitive’.

Besides, Lucas really didn’t have the time or capacity to pursue so many different projects. If he wanted to push the Rockwell Kingdom’s level of civilization forward at a noticeable pace, he needed to get as many people involved in the effort as possible.

And so, for anything he could categorize as non-essential but potentially beneficial, Lucas simply delegated.

Of course, just because Lucas handed these projects to others to work on didn’t mean he and his inner circle weren’t involved at all.

Regular check ins, random inspections, mandatory progress reports, participating in research, controlling manpower, resources, money, workspaces, etc...

In short, Lucas had traded research and grunt work for administrative oversight duties. Fortunately, so far, no one around Lucas had thrown up their hands in frustration and demanded he stop making more headaches for them.

Though, as the one this extra work normally got dumped on first, and the one who had to sort out the messes Lucas made, Victoria Moore had come close to that point a few times...

The only things that kept Victoria from exploding and giving up were her deep sense of professionalism, an innate stubborn determination to succeed, the boundless pride she had in both herself and her work, the fierce willpower that had been forged into her very soul by suffering and strife...

Aaand maybe the fact that Lucas had promised her 5% shares in any business she managed for him, currently worth about half-a-million Gold and growing by thousands of Gold per day...

Just maybe!