We All Have That One Manager
We all have managers they we don’t like. Some of us have managers we straight up despise. Unfortunately, many of us never get a chance to get back at those who have done their best to make our lives miserable. We grit our teeth, do what they tell us, and fantasize about walking out. Occasionally though, someone gets revenge on that manager that was cruel to them, and we are all the better for it.
The hero of our story is named Beau. Beau is a recent college graduate with a marketing degree. As many of you know, entry levels jobs can be thin on the ground. He eventually found one which was a hybrid of marketing with sales support. The company specialized in recruitment, contractor hiring, and headhunting. They also subcontracted work for a recruitment technology provider, which matched up perfectly with one of Beau’s other passions – technology. It seemed like a dream come true, until things changed.
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The Happy Beginning
For the first 18 months, Beau absolutely loved the role. He worked on a wide variety of tasks, including everything along the marketing and sales cycle. At this place, Beau had two managers. One ran sales and the other ran marketing. The marketing manager was awesome, the sales manager, well… they were not friends.
The sales manager was an old school sales guy. Shiny shoes, slicked back hair, the works. He is exactly the old-school sales guy that you are picturing. Let’s call him Dapper Dan. In that initial period, Beau would do marketing half the time then do some sales support and billable work. A lot was building custom careers/job sites to host the recruitment system front end. Intense learning curve but with the help of some developer friends, Beau was able to get it down pat. His focus was always on the digital as he loved the technology side of everything.
Unfortunately the digital focus was what started the whole ordeal.
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The Brutal Takeover
The marketing manager eventually moved on to a better position, and unfortunately, they gave all the marketing responsibilities to Dapper Dan, a man who thought digital was a fad and that old school schmoozing would always be the way. Beau knew he was being considered for the position but Dan had gotten the nod to take over.
Beau described Dapper Dan’s changes as “immediate” and “far-reaching” as soon as he took over the role. Dan cut the digital budget, forced Beau to focus half of his time on sales support to “better enable the sales team,” and completely rewrote Beau’s annual objectives to better align with his own desires.
“When I voiced my objections, he took me aside for a ‘friendly chat’ and told me if I didn’t like it, I could always leave.” This wasn’t a demon he could tackle alone, Beau knew he needed reinforcements.
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Some Help From The Outside
Beau went and had drinks with the former marketing manager, and after complaining for half an hour, she hit Beau with words he will never forget:
“Each job pays you twice. You get your money now, that’s your wage. You also get experience now, that’s how you get paid in the future. So. Are you still getting paid? Yes? Are you still learning? No? Figure out how to keep learning, or leave.”
The realization hit Beau like a shot of lightning. He took the advice to heart and worked his tail off for a year. He knew tech was his focus, so he did everything he could to learn that outside of work. Beau wrote:
“I worked on digital outside of office hours. I made friends with the tech provider’s support and dev teams. I went to developer group meetups, attended conferences, studied for and acquired industry qualifications. I joined the national marketers and digital marketers group. I dug through blogs, articles, emailed people, took every opportunity to cross skill, upskill, to learn.”
All the while sitting and smiling as ol’ Dapper Dan delegated to him the busy-work that his sales team didn’t want to do, just so they could “focus on their work.”
But this is where things took a turn. Dan just couldn’t let Beau be happy.
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The Ultimate Betrayal
As Dan had been able to take on some of the marketing budget, his sales projections had skyrocketed. This lead to the company being acquired by a large competitor. Dan was very proud of himself for this, and he made sure everyone knew how much of an impact he had had.
The kicker was that in the company, managers have the ability to reward shares to hardworking employees. They are worthless normally, but as they were being acquired the shares could potentially become very valuable. Now that a takeover was coming, Dan decided that he did want to hand these out. So he handed them out the sales team and NO ONE ELSE. The sales team does the actual work he said, the rest of you are just support. Beau’s previous manager had given him a verbal agreement that he would receive some of the shares, and Beau went to talk to Dan about it.
Dan’s response was “well, a verbal agreement is only worth the paper it’s written on. You don’t make any sales, you haven’t built the business, you don’t get a cut.” “If you didn’t like it,” he reiterated, “you’re welcome to leave.”
So that’s what Beau decided to do. But he was going to go beyond that.
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The Takeover Begins
The way company takeovers work is that your employment contract with the old company expires then you sign a contract with the new company and become an employee for them. Dan handed Beau his new contract. Obviously Beau couldn’t sign as he wanted to leave. But it wasn’t going to be as easy as not signing, he needed to delay. He waited a week or so and then sent a bunch of follow-up questions that took Dan two weeks to respond to. It was now t-minus three weeks until the changeover.
While this is going on Beau is setting up his fallback plan. He registered a domain name and start writing a few articles on installing recruitment software. This is all designed to build his brand online. He knew he was going to out of a job soon, so he needed another plan. But the best part is who he was appealing to with the website.
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The Plan Begins
A few weeks passed and Beau sent back some more super complex questions to Dan regarding benefits switch over. He is totally dragging this out at this point. Dan knows that Beau is opening these emails and immediately pushing it to the side. Beau keeps the blog articles up, doing all he can to get his name out there in this niche industry.
The week of the handover comes and Dan has clearly gotten some heat from HR about Beau not having signed a contract. He pulls Beau into a room to scream at him about getting it signed NOW. Beau tells him that since the share options incident, he needed to get some clarification on the points he sent Dan before he signed it. Dan looked LIVID. Dan then says the magic words Beau been waiting for:
“If the signed contract is not on my desk by Friday, don’t bother coming into the office Monday.”
He paused for dramatic effect, and reiterated, “I mean it. You won’t have a job.”
Beau told Dan that he totally understood, and would have it to him by close of business that Friday.
Beau knew that Dan would usually go to “client meetings” every Friday that would almost always turn into afternoon-long drinking fest, so he knew it was time.
The time for Beau’s plan to unfold has come.
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Seeya Never!
At 4:45 Beau finished up the last of his reports, sent IT the passwords for all the accounts he had handled (including the login info for all of their clients). Most satisfyingly, he forwarded his phone to Ol’ Dapper Dan so he could handle all the ‘admin’ tasks he had assigned him.
Walking out of there knowing that a storm was brewing was one of the most satisfying moments of Beau’s life. Dan had no idea what was waiting for him on the other side of his weekend.
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The Deluge Begins
Over the weekend Beau launched his new business website and updated his Linkedin to “actively searching.” Monday morning is when the fun started. Beau’s pooch was especially happy when his best bud didn’t have to leave the house at 7:20 am, so they took a nice little stroll down to the local coffee shop. At about 8:15 am the deluge started and didn’t stop.
“We stop for coffee at a local cafe and my phone begins to ring,” Beau recalled. “It’s one of the sales drones at old company; I ignore it and thoroughly enjoy the freedom of being able to amble through a park without anywhere to be. The phone buzzes another eight or ten times by the time I get home. The poop has well and truly hit the windmill.”
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A New Hope Rises
Besides the calls from Dapper Dan, Beau was starting to get calls from salespeople at companies they’d contracted for, wondering why they are receiving calls that are normally handled by Beau. Basically, Beau had been the central cog in the machine, and now that cog was missing.
Beau finally decided to answer a call from a former contact who’d he’d always been fond of and explained the situation. A few minutes later the contact called him back with his head of product one the line and asked where Beau would like to go to lunch. Later that day they are sitting at a lovely Thai restaurant and she is explaining to Beau the life of a contractor and the daily rates they pay for highly technical staff such as him. He spoke to their recruiter on the way home and the stage is set for the final part of the revenge.
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Beau Begins His New Journey
During lunch the voicemails from Dapper Dan had grown to a gargantuan amount. Dan was finally starting to realize the problems he had created for himself. Suddenly, Beau got a text message from the personal phone of the HR manager, asking if he was available for a chat. “Of course!”
During the conversation Beau explained to HR the options set out by Dan on Friday, and that he felt he had no option other than to cease employment. They informed him that for my shares to fully vest, he needed to be at the new company for over a year. “Oh but, didn’t Dan tell you? I never received any shares” Beau said. Cue a full four second pause from HR. Apparently they had not been privy to Dan’s decision to offer Beau the ultimatum and not offer him any shares. The conversation ended pleasantly, with Beau asking HR if Dan could stop his messages as Beau found his them quite unprofessional.
The contract for the new position as an independent technical contractor came through that night, which Beau promptly signed and returned. After two days of holiday he was happily sent to a client’s site. A few months later Beau met up with a former colleague at a trade show and he finally learned the fate of Dapper Dan.
The Fate Of Dapper Dan
The first notice the company had that something was amiss was a call from the help desk asking who they should route Beau’s calls to, as neither Dan nor Beau was answering. One of the techs came up to see where Beau was but they found the desk empty. The tech then saw Beau’s laptop, ID, and postal note on Dapper Dan’s desk, putting two and two together. They locked his account as a safety measure and went to HR to see if there was a leaver form.
Once HR realized there was no leaver form and a big NO text to “new contract signed” form, they freaked and started furiously calling Dan, who happened to be on the road. He told them that he knew for a fact the contract was signed and on his desk, and to leave him alone.
This is when Dan started calling Beau to ream him out, but as the day went on, the creeping dread started to grow in Dan. He knew something was up, and it was something he had caused. Once he got back to the office and saw the contract wasn’t there, he realized what had happened and goes and explains it to HR. Dan told them that’d he’d sort it as it was his issue.
No they said, this is an HR issue now. And we all know what happens when HR gets involved.
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The Punishment Comes
That is when Beau got the text message from HR asking for the call.
Shortly after that conversation, HR burst into a sales meeting and pulls Dapper Dan out. He is promptly rung out in the way that only HR and senior management can do. He was demoted, his budget was slashed, and a separate marketing position was created to handle marketing duties, with an EMPHASIS on digital. Not only this but Dan’s team was put under review and forced to complete all of the admin tasks that Beau had previously done. This dropped their productivity and caused their ambitious sales goals to be missed.
During this chaos the sales team missed several deadlines for client website build outs. The company went to market to find someone to help but Dan quickly realized how expensive technical marketing skills can be. Dan refused to pay the wages, so several clients took their build in-house, especially now that they had the resources they could hire to work on it (Beau). Beau ended up working on three projects that his former company had had to relinquish, getting paid a full contractors wage, and there was nothing the company could do as his contract had expired so the non-compete didn’t extend. And there was still one last cherry on top.
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Our Hero Gets His Happy Ending
The best part was, Beau knew that Dapper Dan got to see the rate he was being paid, which was CONSIDERABLY higher than what Dan was being paid after his demotion. The sweet taste of revenge can be overwhelming sometimes.
Later on Beau found out that as sales has lagged, Dan had had to endure the displeasure of upper management for the full 12 months so that his shares would vest. We can only imagine this was a very unpleasant year for him. He quit within two weeks of the date he could and was hit with a 12 month non-compete clause. As far as Beau knows he’s still on the job market. Everything ended happily for everyone else, as Beau is living the glorious life of a contractor, and his former marketing manager is a VP at a big multinational.
It just goes to show you, without the support staff beneath you, things may come crumbling down. Lets hope you learned your lesson, Dan.
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