My Employees Beg Me to Stop Giving Them Raises, or the Company Will Go Public

Cheng Ye only wanted to spend his last 37,000 yuan and shut down his company with dignity. But the next day, another 370,000 yuan appeared in the account. A voice in his head told him: Pay an employee one yuan and get ten back; dare to withhold their pay, and ten times the amount will be deducted; if a second person finds out, everything goes back to zero.

Grinding his teeth, he started throwing money around: back pay for overtime, severance pay, and snacks piled high at every desk. Operations manager Zhou Min immediately posted on Xiaohongshu: "The boss suddenly gave us a raise and weekends off. I suspect the company is laundering money." The post went viral, the media crowded the office, and competitors laughed that the company wouldn't last three months.

Even more absurdly, the harder he tried to keep a low profile, the bigger the company got. From eight employees to three hundred, then from three hundred to three thousand. At the annual party, employees held up signs: "Mr. Cheng, please stop handing out money. At this rate, the company really will go public."

The finance director twice showed up with the books and asked where the money came from. Competitors publicly questioned his funding in interviews, and the IPO due diligence team wanted to inspect every transaction from the past three years. Cheng Ye's palms grew sweaty, but he still had to smile and say, "Accounts receivable came in."

He only wanted to protect one secret, but the world was forcing him to become the richest man alive.