The Tale Of My Awful Corporate Odyssey and the Redemption That Came 13 Years Later
How’s that for a title huh?
I often use the funny line that my wife Ally saved me from corporate misery and it’s true. I love being an entrepreneur. Yes it has it’s own set of stresses, but I’ll trade those any day for the peace of mind that comes with loving what you do, enjoying your daily existence and calling your own shots.
The impetus for this post is my relationship with my new client BH IoT Group - I’m really excited to work with these guys. They are leaders in the IoT (Internet of Things) space and we’ve launched a new video interview series called IoT nuggets which you can check out on LinkedIn. But the background on this one is an important lesson especially for young people in the real world.
Corporate beginnings…
For context let’s go back to the beginnings of my corporate career back in 1992 when I was freshly graduated from the University of Michigan still with no clue what I wanted to “do with my life”. I landed a job at PPOM, a healthcare PPO which was founded by Rich Rogel who has since donated almost 200 million dollars to U of M and now has the cancer center named for him. I came on board for the exciting yearly salary of $17,500! Now granted I was living at home so I didn’t really have bills to pay and that actually felt like a decent amount of money. My experience there was actually very good at the beginning and I was a fan of Rich. We had parties at his home and I can remember screaming across the lake on one of his wave runners feeling on top of the world. It was a small growing company with an atmosphere that felt like family and I was able to get my feet wet in the business world. That job took me to Ohio for two years working just about every corner of the state, living in Dayton, Columbus and Cleveland. I was a young star in that company - kicking ass and opening up new markets in the state to the south and I had a fun year living in Cleveland while one of my best friends played for the Browns - I often refer to that year like the “Entourage” year with my buddy being the Vincent Chase and me being the…..Turtle/Johnny Drama/E? Lots of fun. Going to every concert that came through Cleveland and hanging out backstage with all the bands. But during that time I reconnected with Ally on a chance encounter at Roosevelt’s while home on a visit in Farmington Hills and it wasn’t long after that we were locked into a serious long distance relationship - that’s a whole other story! But meanwhile, when I agreed to move to Dayton, Ohio for PPOM (not the most glamorous destination for a 22 year old single guy) it was with the WRITTEN promise that it would not be permanent. A lot changed at PPOM during that growth period as things took on a much more corporate atmosphere and they were eventually absorbed by Blue Cross Blue Shield. I did everything that was asked of me in two years moving twice from Dayton to Columbus (with all my stuff in storage while in Columbus for 2 months) and then from Columbus to Cleveland. There were no more offices to open in Ohio and I was ready to move back home to be with Ally and work at the home office. They said no. Well actually it was an “official” no but an “unofficial” yes. They said they needed me in Cleveland (they didn’t) but would agree for me to relocate back to Michigan but I would have to pay for my relo. They also claimed they never promised that I could come back to Michigan. They had to eat those words when we actually found the written promise in my file when I challenged it. This was my first of many experiences finding out how corporate America doesn’t think twice about screwing people - chewing them up and spitting them out. It wasn’t long before I left.
Lost In The Wilderness…
I borrowed this phrase from Clay Miller who played at Michigan before me. Clay is a successful guy in Minneapolis but he referenced being “lost in the wilderness” for years after college before he started to find success. That really resonated with me. I made stops at Solution Management, my in-laws family business of Dial Machine and Tool, back to school at Wayne State to work on my MBA, USN Communications, McLeodUSA, Sprint, ANX eBusiness, Wireless Toyz, and T-Mobile. Hard to believe looking back on that…. talk about the wilderness… Now, it wasn’t ALL bad. There were many ups and downs - but a rollercoaster for that long where you feel like you’re not getting anywhere… not good. Plus your soul starts to suffer over time - at least mine did. I was too smart for this - I had way too much to offer. So here’s a few fun tidbits from the 16 year corporate journey and you’ll get what I mean:
USN Communications - holy moly… I’ve always thought the meteoric rise and fall of this telecom startup would make for a great book. No one would believe it if you weren’t there… Sex, drugs, fraud, backstabbing, Cheap Trick playing our company party which we held at the Rock Hall of Fame in Cleveland and lots more…. A rock star culture for the leaders of the company and one of the biggest corporate fails you can imagine. I was promoted to management within 6 months and commuting to Flint with a sales team up there - I was 26! I remember the first time I had to fire someone and he was twice my age - boy was I freaking out… We signed up a ton of customers for telecom services without letting customers know the price. It was totally scripted in person conceptual selling and someone was throwing insane amounts of money into this thing. People signed up for the service and then didn’t get a bill for a year or so. When they finally did it was so convoluted - someone whose phone bill might average $700 per month for example would get a 400 page bill including 12 months worth of service all scrambled and indecipherable for like $4700…. Finally the day came when they decided they had to stop the bleeding and they terminated about 90% of the company’s employees to ready the thing for chapter 11 and eventual sale to Corecomm on what everyone was calling “Black Monday” as I remember it. My friend Debra Barron and I were able to keep our jobs, but our new roles were literally to go to these businesses and play let’s make a deal. In the above example we might say pay us $1500 and we’ll write off the rest and Deb and I would get paid commission on how much we collected. Nuts. The one good thing that came out of this company for me was a few solid relationships I still have to this day like Deb, Brent Schroeder and most importantly to my career back then, David Jaeger. One of the VERY few people I met along the way in corporate who I learned from and who truly had my back. I’ll never forget the trip David and I took to Oklahoma City to inspect a cockamamie call center scheme USN tried to deploy. David and I were basically throwing 20 dollar bills around the room to any telemarketer who made a good call - we had a good laugh about that trip. I would eventually follow David to McLeodUSA and ultimately to T-Mobile. I will always be grateful to that guy.
A few other stops along the way - McLeodUSA was another telecom company and this time it started off well again. David Jaeger brought me there. But once again my employer ultimately went chapter 11 and all my stock options went down the drain.
Sprint was a joke - Jennifer the manager who hired me promptly went on maternity leave shortly after I started. The only thing memorable about her was the sight of her taking her smoke breaks while pregnant. That was the first “big” company I worked for and it may have been the most laughable. I stayed there for about 6 months and had to get out of there.
ANX eBusiness was a complete bait and switch… I was “selling” a product our customers were forced by the automakers to use and that was all. But I basically had to beg for accounts that my manager Jim would then call to threaten to sign up for the service. Alex the CEO just called me into his office one day and terminated me because they realized they didn’t have enough leads for everybody. Jaeger always said everyone should experience getting fired at least once and going to jail once. I don’t know about the jail part - thankfully I haven’t done that.
Wireless Toyz - good times, great people. Richard Simtob and Joe Barbat - both very successful guys who at the time were opening up cell phone multi-carrier superstores around the country. I had a B2B franchise - it was a bit of an experiment that ultimately didn’t succeed but really more because of the B2B model and the carriers getting cold feet about supporting authorized distributors on the corporate side. I really loved the Wireless Toyz crew though - lots of great people and another family atmosphere - a melting pot of diversity too.
T-Mobile. I was struggling trying to make a go of it at Wireless Toyz when Jaeger called again with what looked like the most promising opportunity for me yet. National accounts with a major carrier? The GM and Chrysler accounts? Visteon? Lear? Kelly Services? ThyssenKrupp? Volkswagen (who by the way was the very worst account to try to work with I’ve EVER experienced)? Sign me up! Again it started off okay… But Jaeger left after about a year and a half and I didn’t really have a champion for a while there after that. My boss (NOT Jaeger) was having an affair with my incompetent field account manager responsible for servicing my accounts. Instead she “serviced” my boss, and when she messed up - like the time she mistakenly sent my contact to a porn phone line in an email and claimed it was a typo - my boss ripped my ass for calling her out on it instead of ripping her for sending my account to a porn line. My field engineer was completely incompetent as well and he was using company resources to run his own business on the side instead of doing his job. His boss was based out of Dallas and couldn’t care less. Our product sucked, our support on the enterprise side only got worse instead of better from the time I got there, and then the great recession of 2008 hit. First the banks got the bailouts and then the automotives were next. My accounts were all in chapter 11 bankruptcy on hiring and buying freezes and Detroit was becoming a ghost town. I went about a year at 10% of my sales quota before they finally fired my next boss - an old school and all around good guy Keith Wheeler. I knew my time was short…
This is the part of the story that sets up the redemption and the full circle that just closed this month.
As the walls were closing in at T-Mobile I got in touch with John Hubler who was heading the telemetry division of the company - I don’t even remember how that happened but he flew into Detroit and I met him at the airport hotel to discuss changing positions and working for him. He actually reminded me a little of Jaeger and we connected right away. I really wanted to make that move. It could have saved my employment with the company, given me a position that was no longer reliant on the dumpster fire that was the automotive industry at the time, and allowed me to work for another guy I could learn from. John actually told me he wanted to hire me, but the problem was that the company policy was not to allow anyone to make a move who was on a performance plan - like a probation which I was on. Listen I understand that paying sales reps indefinitely with no sales coming in isn’t really sustainable, but if you have a quality guy who is indeed an asset to the company in a currently no-win situation you can’t make an exception if someone else in the company wants him? Stupid.
Corporate Chapter Ends. Entrepreneurial Chapter Begins.
So I got fired. The T-Mobile termination was a pivotal event in my life, and I was scared and angry. I was coming off of arguably the biggest disappointment of my corporate career - a position that I finally thought was going to be a great one that turned into another disaster and I was unceremoniously fired like I was some loser. Meanwhile Ally had been building her photography business on the side and it was growing…so she suggested (strongly) that we just build that business together and that’s what we did. I joined Ally to build Frameable Faces Photography and eventually M10 Social here at the Orchard Mall in West Bloomfield. Yes I was excited about the potential for Frameable Faces but we had young kids and needed income. That wasn’t easy but we worked hard and built an amazing business! We’re a great team and we’ve been doing this now for over 12 years - almost as long as my corporate career!
Redemption.
John Hubler and I stayed in touch on and off all this time and now he has his own firm with his partner Steve Brumer. A few weeks ago after I posted my most recent interview about social media on Civic Center TV on LinkedIn he called me and said “Okay so tell me what exactly do you do, because I need to hire you to help our business” and now we’re working together - for the first time - neither of us trapped in the big corporate machine. To have someone from that time reach out to me all these years later to do business based on what I have done on my own after I picked myself up off the ground back in 2008 feels like…….redemption. And to be clear, it’s not like this is the first time I’ve felt “redeemed” since then. Living well and being successful and happy for years now has been the best revenge, but this new piece of the puzzle links back directly to that time so it feels particularly validating.
And here’s a lesson especially for young people. If you come out of college like I did not knowing exactly what you want to do, first get a job (obviously), but second, pay attention. Even if your job isn’t the most desirable, learn from it. As crappy as my overall corporate journey was I’ve used elements of it to be a better entrepreneur. While I was in it I built up enough experience and acumen that it prepared me to be on my own, and I kept the relationships that I valued with an eye on the big picture. I left the idiots behind and I stayed in touch with most of the good ones. Sometimes it just takes time to find your way - it certainly took me time to find mine!
M10 Social is owned by Doug Cohen in West Bloomfield, MI and provides social media training and digital marketing services from the Frameable Faces Photography studio Doug owns with his wife Ally. He can be reached there at tel:248-790-7317, by mobile at tel:248-346-4121 or via email at mailto:doug@frameablefaces.com.
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