Never Mind The Botox: Rachel by Penny Avis Read Free Book Online Page B

get started.’
    ‘Yes, quite right,’ said Rosa.
    Rachel read out the first invoice number and Rosa carefully worked her way through the filing cabinets until she found it.
    ‘Does it have the procedure details on?’ Rachel asked.
    ‘Yes it does,’ said Rosa.
    ‘Great, let’s get out the ones we need then, make copies of them and then put them back. Then we can use the copies to build up the sales analysis.’
    Rachel helped Rosa for a while and then headed back to the project room to carry on with her own work, looking at the average ages of the client base. She still hadn’t spotted a single celebrity name in the information she’d been looking at and was determined to try to find some. She sat down and went back over the analysis she’d been doing over the past few days. The most common age group was coming out at twenty-five to thirty years, which was younger than she’d expected. She’d thought that most people would be having something done to them in their forties. It was probably something to do with the fact that breast augmentation was their most popular procedure. Rachel made a note to chat to Tom about it next time they met.
    She moved on to look at average price per procedure, starting with breast augmentation. There wasn’t really that much of a range. Most of the patients had been charged somewhere between four and five thousand pounds. But as Rosa had found, quite a few of the sales records just showed ‘other’ for the procedure type.
    It took Rosa two days to find and copy all the invoices they needed.
    ‘That was a rubbish job!’ she declared as she came back into the project room clutching a large pile of paper.
    ‘Well done,’ said Rachel. ‘Right, let’s have a recap as to where we are, shall we? AJ, why don’t you talk me through where you’ve got to?’
    ‘Right,’ said AJ. ‘I’ve been looking at the growth rates of procedures outside of the top five. Some of the fastest growing areas include light treatments for things like thread veins and age spots, Botox and fillers, as you might expect, and also um, um…’
    AJ stopped talking. He had started to go red.
    Rachel and Rosa looked at each other in amusement.
    ‘Also what?’ Rachel asked.
    ‘Well, it’s er, well, um,’ AJ stammered.
    ‘Spit it out, man!’ Rachel said. ‘You’re going to have to present on this soon enough. No point being embarrassed.’
    ‘Alright, one of the other fast growing areas is vaginoplasty,’ said AJ eventually.
    As he spoke, Rachel and Rosa burst out laughing. He looked cross at first, but soon starting laughing too. They were all still laughing when the door of the project room suddenly opened. It was Tom Duffy. They all stopped immediately.
    ‘What’s all the hilarity?’ Tom asked.
    For a moment none of them said anything as they searched for an answer.
    Then Rachel said, ‘Oh, er, AJ was just telling us about a funny best man’s speech that he heard at a wedding he went to at the weekend.’
    AJ looked at Rachel in horror.
    ‘Oh yes, what was that AJ?’ Tom asked.
    AJ froze, seemingly totally unable to think of a reply.
    Rachel stepped in quickly. ‘He was telling us about the best man who, as it happens, also has a bit of a drug habit.’
    AJ looked even more horrified.
    ‘And he stood up and started his speech by saying, “I had prepared a couple of lines for this speech but I’m afraid I’ve snorted them both.” The young people at the wedding thought it was hilarious but it didn’t go down too well with the bride’s family!’ Rachel said.
    Tom laughed loudly. ‘Ah yes, very good, very funny. And what nice company you keep, AJ. Anyway, I’d just dropped in to check that you’d got the information you needed from the invoices you had to pull out.’
    Rosa patted a large pile of paper. ‘Yes thanks,’ she said. ‘All here.’
    ‘Right good, don’t want Equinox to think we can’t keep our books properly. Also, we’re having an all-party meeting on Monday