Dateline: 2005-07. Righto, about that daily sales scorecard. When I arrived, there were 2 names at the top: Sean & Taylor. Both early hires. Both had 5 kids. At least one was so abusive he was legendary. In any normal company he would have been quickly fired. But here, at a startup doubling in size every year, laser focused on revenue? Free pass. Oh and: he's Mormon. I've never met an abusive Mormon and I reckon you haven't either. They're generally pleasant folks. But not this guy. I had my own experience of this, mebbe a couple months in.
I was pitching the company's survey software over the phone to some random agency. They asked if it could handle some obscure programming technique. I said I'll check. Asked HQ, someone told me Taylor had 'sold' this question's technique to some agency for $10k. The $10k was apparently supposed to cover the programming costs. But the kicker was, only they could use it. He made something proprietary. It was asinine to agree to that. Taylor found out I was asking about this & rang me up, for the 1st & last time. I only recall one line from him ranting & yelling at me for having the nerve to call HQ to understand what happened: 'the market research industry is small!' he hissed. Not sure what he meant by that, but my thought was 'yes it is asshat bully, so why'd you do it?' He tried to steamroll me, he was used to being untouchable. Never really talked to him again but heard the stories. A couple years later he was finally chopped when he tried to engineer a coup against the head of sales (our boss).
Sean pitched & sold the most blatantly fake project I've ever seen or heard of in any industry. It was like the FTX of market research. Legendary. His client, a big agency with a big pharma client of their own, needed to run ideas by a population with a bipolar condition. Sean pitched on a written slide deck, our panel of 'thousands of bipolar sufferers'. In fact, our 'bipolar panel' was nonexistent. Zero members. The gig sold and was dumped on the Mpls office I worked in. Poor Amy, remember her? She was tasked with delivering this gig. On more than one occasion I walked by her office to see her openly crying. She normally was a tough skirt btw. But this broke her. She told me all about it; showed me his slide deck that inked this train wreck. I heard about threatened lawsuits, but it was all hush hush & I steered clear of it. Gives you an idea of how lying came easily to Sean and abusive behavior by Taylor. But when you're at the top of the daily sales scorecard? Untouchable. I think Sean burned for this one though, I don't recall him being around after that happened. If you're costing more than you bring in. He stayed in the survey biz though, can't believe word of this didn't get around to his new employers.
My 2nd year there I achieved one of my career highlights. That year was largely consumed by securing a global exclusive supplier deal with a giant international agency HQ in Chicago. My boss had provided one of their execs a theoretical 'rate card' or fixed pricing schedule for the commodity shite we were selling. The prices were so low, deliberately, as to be comical. Deliberately so as to get their attention. Which it did. My boss told me to work on it & get the dealio. This took me months & months of complex legal & logistics. The exec on their side was an older guy, had to be pushing 70, from Australia. Extremely polite & well mannered. Sharp. Flew to USA often from AUS, yuk. I was on point to work with him to hash out the logistics & the legal arrangements. Each of which required an absurdly long, boring dry document. A 'master services agreement' MSA & a legal contract about billing, breaches, endless pages of jargon.
I flew to Chicago often to meet him, usually monthly & hash stuff out page by page. It was agonizing boring minutia he was obsessed with. Over & over. Sentence by sentence. Knowing how the machinery worked on my end I would mentally shrug and agree to shit just to keep it moving.
Fast forward several months and the deal finally was signed. Apparently, it shook this slice of the industry as a 'global exclusive' with a major buyer was the 1st of its kind. And no other firm saw it or heard about it until the press release.
One of the awkward oddities of inking this gig was that it was handed off to an exec there who happened to be my longtime friend & biz mentor. He lived in Chicago at the time. He was on point for them, myself for my end. Yeah, awkward, as getting it off the ground initially was a seismic shock for them. For everyone. The large team of buyers there were now legally required to buy from us or give us right of 1st refusal anyhoots. Unprecedented. They had no more buying power to shop around & negotiate. Imagine their enthusiasm. Now they could badmouth us in between their gagging. But officially it was happy faces.
Or would have been for me except that the leadership structure at my HQ started collapsing. Just before I inked this global exclusive, the main venture capital guy finally caught wind of what was shaking at HQ in Seattle. Maybe he heard about the various execs, legit sharp folks the CEO lured or acquired via buying their firm, bailing ship within months or even weeks of their arrival. The CEO's obsession with doubling in size every caused the following unwise decision.
One of the heavy hitters lured from wherever, I think retirement, was an older guy (70?) hired as the CFO. Word was he was a known name on wall street. Used to be a big cheese sayeth the rumors. Supposedly to give us legitimacy in one day going public via IPO which is so laughable it's hallucinatory. Let's focus.
The firm started small, was around for 3 years when I arrived for the next 3. The revenue was doubling in size each year. By year 6 it hit $50 million or thereabouts. The CEO/founder was obsessed with doubling again. Going from 25 to 50 is one thing; 50 to 100 is another entirely. There was a company call with all the managers, I wasn't on the call. But my buddy was. During Q&A he was the only one out of a couple dozen execs & board members on the call who asked the simple question: 'so what is the $100 million projection based on?'
That simple question apparently set in motion a domino effect of execs snapping out of their shared delusion of doubling into perpetuity and finger pointing began. But here's where it actually fell apart. The CEO/founder was going over the quarterly numbers with the new big cheese CFO who had been there only a matter of weeks. The story goes that the CEO didn't like what the books were showing and literally told the guy 'make the numbers better.'
And with that, and there were witnesses to this: the guy stood up, put on his jacket & bowler, walked out to his car & drove off. Never to return. The big money backer VC guy quickly heard about this, in fact he's the one who placed the CFO there. Shortly after that, the founder, employee #1, was whacked. Got a shitload of money to buy out his company shares he later said in interviews, but he was gone. The most verbally abusive founder I've ever experienced was no more. And the entire HQ basically ground to a halt. No longer fearful of this guy, the urgency of everything vanished. Good for them, except I had just inked a global exclusive I spent months & months of my lfe on. And when I dialed into the exec team, just myself, to give updates, it was clear nobody gave a shit about it. Or anything.
Except for one Sr. level guy we'll call Micheal. He & I got along swimmingly. He actually tried to help me. But he didn't have suck at HQ so it went nowhere. Two craptastic Micheal recollections. My middle year there I was promoted to team leader when my boss bailed. I was in that role for 6 months. During that time there was a corporate retreat boondoggle in Whistler, BC. My boss told the small team of 3 regional managers & Michael for some reason to meet a few days prior at the fancy ski resort there. Ergo 5 of us in the giant townhome in the fancy town. I don't downhill ski but I do XC ergo rented those for a day or 2.
But here's the story at this place. Micheal's luggage showed but was missing a separate suitcase with his CPAP machine. And he fucking freaked out. He was on the phone with the airline seemingly every single hour, SHRIEKING at them top of lungs. I actually had to leave & walk around. Everyone else was skiing so they didn't witness his meltdown. The rest of the complex had to. It was beyond belief, the volume & frequency of his yelling. We were there 3 days, his machine finally showed on day 3. I saw him answer the door and he shouted at the delivery guy.
Oh and the actual reason we were there in Whistler, BC. A 2-day management getaway / 'team building.' Put on by the idjits in HR. Day 1 was so idiotic I actually skipped day 2, just stayed in my hotel room and didn't give a shit if they thought I was hungover or whatnot.
Example: all the main execs, the dozen, had to stand in a line and give a single idea for improvement. It was like 3rd grade. But the worst was, wait for it, the post-it notes exercise. Yes, we assembled in small groups, wrote ideas on notes, then went to our whiteboard and arranged them. Then, someone from the group talked about the theme, the reasoning behind, whatnot. Then! We all voted on the priority, or value, or something. The entire room of 40 of us voted on a sea of post it notes. Hundreds of notes. Fucking HR idjits. Just stick to your paperwork mountain. Don't try to build teams. Don't think you know people. More on one in particular in part 3.
This is classic HR: doing an activity to waste time and pretend they're earning their salary. The company was growing fast & also so dysfunctional the thought of post it notes fixing anything is comical, to this day.
Story 2 actually got me in trouble for an unrelated idiotic decision he made. He entered into a legal agreement with some firm somewhere, committing to something impossible. And the kicker was: nobody knew about it until after the fact. He just did it. No approval, no authorization. Apparently, it was a big shitshow at HQ. Word came down that nobody signs nothing, only the in-house lawyers to. One was one of the very 1st hires, still there. The other was someone totally incompetent. I mean embarrassing. I talked to her a few times. Even in emails she was fucking brain dead. I had to explain legal shit to her. Later sued the shop for emotional distress or whatnot. Figures. Guess HQ caught on she was a shite hire.
Let's focus. I had been working McDonald's corporate, out in the Chicago burbs. Pretty exciting for a sales guy to secure a meeting onsite there, which I did. Anyhoots, I received an NDA from them to continue talking about a potential gig. I signed it, returned it to them. They asked me where to mail the hardcopy countersigned NDA. I said HQ, which was a mistake. That shite lawyer skirt rang the alarm bell as if I had done what Michael had done. My boss called me, said she was flipping out and telling the entirety of HQ about me. I said 'it's a fucking signed fucking NDA from McDonalds. Does nobody get this? This is excellent news!' He agreed just said yeah everyone's touchy there because of the legal mess Michael got the company into.
Speaking of Chicago, I was there often, as outlined earlier. One of the firms I called on, and actually worked for a spell after I left this Seattle shop, was a Russian owned small shop. The did the survey programming for Leo Burnett, my earlier one & done crash & burn, which is where their name popped up. I decided to go give them a visit for a meet & greet, which I did. Fun visit, we connected instantly. He was a braggy brash Russian owner I became friends with over the years. He's actually pretty awesome if you separate the con man vibe which I could do. He had an American head of sales, John, I kept in contact with separately for a few years. I could write a separate blurb about this experience but shan't for now.
Anyhoots this Russian firm was notorious for stiffing panel providers (those providing 'human' survey respondents like my Seattle employer). Just ignoring their invoices. They got away with is as Leo Burnett bought the panelists directly, most of the time. They were also notorious for stiffing employees, which confirmed myself, going unpaid for months (he finally paid me). I talked to John then a few times, he said he was unpaid also for months, maybe never paid. The brash Russian owner, I would actually stay at his house in the N. Chicago burbs, Gigantic McMansion, inside was nearly completely empty. Like no furniture. I slept on an air mattress in a totally empty bedroom. Meanwhile he had a fleet of very expensive cars. Weird all around. Anyhoots.
I recall chatting with a solopreneur who had some supposedly bigwig exec he wanted me to meet. I said sure of course so the 3 of us went to some expensive chain steakhouse one night. It was so expensive I recall only ordering a sandwich or something to keep expense account down, realizing it was a bullshit outing, guy just wanted a free steak. Zero interest in business. I also recall my guy forgot where he parked his car, and we wandered around for way too long to find it. It happened now & then. Actually, in sales most of the meetings are a waste, but it's the 10% that aren't that keep ya going. Variable interval reinforcement schedule. Same as a casino.
Here's a typical fiasco I inadvertently created & endured as a sales guy / account manager. Was working this small shop in NE Mpls. Funky loft space. Mebbe 5 employees, all sharpies. My primary was Laura, a super great person, one of my favorite ever clients. She agreed to place a study with me. Required doctors filling out an online survey on whatever topic her client needed. Doctors aren't keen on online surveys ergo the incentive for these studies is high, over $100 & often well over. It's the only way they'll take a boring 15 minute survey.
Waving $100 dollar bills on the internet to anonymously take an online survey simply by claiming to be a doctor? Whatever could go wrong?
Well guess what? The firm my colleague hired, some shop in Florida (shocker) was infected with scammers making bank by working from home pretending to be a doctor & taking surveys. Nice gig if you can get it.
So as results started arriving, Laura called me in a panic alerting the data was fucked every which way. Open end comments were nonsensical, clearly non-doctors were taking the survey. Ergo I call my guy in Seattle in a panic saying what the fuck dude. Did you vet them at all? Turns out my guy, Brian, was oblivious to any of this. I think he was a bricklayer or taxi driver or something irrelevant prior to joining HQ. That's what happens when you're doubling in size every year: hire warm bodies & figure it out later. And Brian was in charge of 'our medical practice.' Fucking great. Lara is local to me, she's cool & nice & patient and on the hook herself to her client.
This stressful drama dragged out for weeks. Daily calls with her & I, and Brian & I. Brian was fucking useless. He supposedly leaned on Florida, but he didn't give a shit. I think we just closed the gig, used whatever data we could. My 1st sale to this firm & Laura. Worked them for weeks. Multiple visits & presentations to build credibility. This happened to me in some form for years. I sell a gig & the asshats back at HQ don't know shit from shinola.
One more clusterfuck story. HQ acquired a Norwegian software company we'll randomly call MI Pro. They made a desktop number crunching program that compiled giant data sets in blazing speeds. It was amazing, actually. None of the other sales ppl would go near it as it required technical knowledge to sell it. Laura moved from that small shop to Target stores HQ and amazingly didn't hold a grudge. She let me pitch to her team. They actually licensed it. So that part is good.
The Norway guy, the #2 guy there joined me in St. Paul to pitch it at 3M. Which we did. And it went swimmingly. A 3M guy, actually an intern, sent me an RFP to complete as a qualifying hurdle.
It was 400 questions long.
I spent weeks completing it. A couple hours every day. Submitted it. Never heard back yay or nay. A full year later I'm back at 3M with another executive from my HQ when I ask the same guy privately 'whatever happened to that RFP'? He replies, 'oh yeah we decided to not pursue that.'
Thanks dude.