Finding Stability in a Start Up World

As some of you know, I had the pleasure of being laid off on Halloween. This was not foreseen but could have been avoided by the company. This is the second firm that I was let go from in two years. 

The first instance was a great startup digital marketing firm. The product was great but the company was still in the pocket of its investors. When the investors weren't getting their return as quickly as they liked, the department was shut down and a skeleton crew remained. The company again was great and I get how this could not be avoided. 

The second time this could have been avoided completely. I was brought in during a time where there was rapid growth and the company was expanding, this is what I was told. No investors to impress and feed. Just a great software to push and people actually needed it. Perfect set up... almost. Turns out there was no true plan to the expansion. So it ended up just being me. Just me pushing the service, managing the sales and bringing on prospects that were being provided as a result of the marketing team overseas, bad idea #1.

Bad idea #2 was when they fired the current sales member that I thought would be the one to on board me a week into me arriving. The response was, don't worry, you'll pick it up. I picked it up alright. I came from a background in cafes and restaurants where you jump in and kill it with your new team. You don't ask questions. You just do and at the end of the day you sit and celebrate your victory with your squad.There was no team here and it was clear there never was. 

Bad idea #3 came from the exorbitant amount of money being poured into the marketing side of the business that was responsible for generating leads. The website should have been way nicer for the amount of money put into it. Not on anyone's fault except for the one who approved the final product. In my last conversation, the drop of the axe, it was shared with me that they were spending upwards to 10K a month on leads. 85% were spam leads from Russia. My only guess would be that they continued using the same ad-words over and over expecting different results as opposed to spreading the marketing budget and testing other means of lead generation. 

But what do I know? I'm only the sales manager of a one man team.

I even told the marketing manager to turn off the ads for a while so the spam leads could go elsewhere but they persisted. For every ten leads, one was real. That one real lead was usually either a mistake of someone mistaking us with a cell phone provider or a new fish being added to the pond that was building a business from scratch. This usually took anywhere from a month to three months to close. 

I thought this company was out of their start up stage but boy was I wrong. No plan in place for the long run, just the now and maybe. 

My new career goal is to stay far away from the companies that are in the start up phase of development because as anyone who has worked for a start up knows, it does not always work out when a plan is being "winged". I plan to sign on with a business that has history and a future and that is just what I'll do.