New Startup, Bad Boss, Bad Reviews,Closed Doors!

To all the men who will become a future CEO, or Startup Founder. There is more than improving Operation efficiency and maintaining Strategic positioning to keep you successful in the corporate world. Having good, talented human equity(employees) and a pristine online digital presence is just or even more crucial and imperative to a successful business endeavor or corporation. A robust pool of is essentially the backbone of any business and revenue (ROI) generator.

So, you think you're the best startup company ever. You think because you’re the Owner, Boss, or VP that you or your company are untouchable.

Then you hire your employees, and then you feel like you are on top of the world. Then you start to get relaxed, and then you show your true colors as a boss, thieving, conniving, manipulating and then perversion runs rampant.

Then your employees no longer have trust in you, then they hate you, despise working for you and your stupid startup company, then they lose respect for you, they rebel and the cancer starts to form and spread to all employees. Then you fire them, feeling you're the almighty. Feeling like they come a "dime a dozen". You treat them like cattle and tell them " if you don't like it you can leave".

Then your employees, who now knows all the weakness, all your trade secrets, all the internal office politics, all the affairs, all the perversion, all the drama, all the financials of your company your company business model, your INVENTIONS as well as knowing the Boss's less than desirable character flaws, now have the fuel they need to start a negative review writing campaign on sites like Glass Door, Vault, Indeed, Monster, LinkedIn, Google News, Hallway, and Career Leak.

It doesn’t stop there, then they make a complaint with the BBB, then the rants begin on Twitter, then it goes viral on their Facebook and then a global, vicious smearing campaign ensues. Then they ask all their friends to start a negative writing review campaign on your startup.

Then you the CEO find that you cannot get quality candidates to work for you, your turn over is high and staffing is cumbersome, time costly and slow, you want the bad reviews to go away, then these sites can charge you millions, or maybe it stays online forever.

Then you, the boss can’t get clients, can close deals, can't get investors, can't hire (huge problem), then you want to hire external recruiters to help you staff, but then the recruiter reads the bad publicity and bad reviews crawling all over the internet and cringes.

Then the recruiter doesn't want to send top talent to your firm because that candidate may leave before the 90 days forcing the recruiter to replace that candidate with another daunting prospecting candidate. Then top candidates’ research your company as they do their due diligence before leaving their current role and decide that it would be really stupid to leave their current company to go with another company that has a bad reputation, a bad culture and a lack of appreciation and respect towards their employees.

But wait there’s more!!!!  Then staffing firms refrain from doing business with your company because your company is labeled as a terrible, unethical place to work with poor culture. Then the bad reputation spreads from candidate to candidate like cancer, from recruiter to recruiter, from company to company, then your competitor joyfully jumps on board the character assassination of your fragile little startup. Smile, it get worst.

Now you have almost no employees left, so you hire your family. Then the Boss brings his wife in, his brother; daughter, sister, cousin, uncle, grandpa, grandma, great, great, great grandma, infusing a worse situation the remaining employees have to deal with like pathetic family office politics. Now what’s left of your employees, whom are now broken, have no faith or trust, depressed, oppressed, and starving, starts to look for a lifesaver, a window of hope they are now hoping they get paid.

     Then all of a sudden when they cash their checks and it bounces like a Lebron James dribble. Now you did it, you check your paper work to make sure your business license is up to date and its set up like an LLC, because you know the (bleep) is going to hit the fan and you really want to keep that BMW you bought with your first Angel Investors cash. Now your employees complain about thievery for not getting paid.

    Why?  cause now the Bosses wife is telling the Boss " We can't pay our home mortgage" " we invested our life savings in this startup, we owe investors, we are going to have to skim some of our employees’ wages off the top to keep living our luxurious lifestyle”. It sucks waiting for direct deposit to go through and bam! you read this message “your account has a zero balance” wow, now you have several people really crushed. The same people who believed in your vision, your idea, your creation, the same people who probably worked for free for endless hour till you started to break even and move into making revenue. Tissue please! Tears.

   Then all your employees quit. Then there’s a lawsuit, (public record), a complaint to the Department of Labor Hour and Wages, then to the BBB, Then John Morgan from Morgan & Morgan, (For the People) you know the attorney who's considered by many in my opinion just as sleazy as any boss, has a class action labor lawsuit filed on your Startup.

Then the doors close. All this stemming from a few fired, disgruntle employees who started character assassination war through calculated, malicious reviews and complaints. I mean I get called for jobs every single day, while I’m on the phone with the recruiter or HR, I am researching the company and reading reviews simultaneously, it takes me exactly 26 seconds to read three to four reviews and I just hang up in disgust. Of course, some reviews can be embellished and untruthful, but who has time to decipher what’s true and what’s fabricated. Reviews are designed to quickly persuade. Just like product reviews, hospitality reviews, Angie's List, a site for reading reviews for a certain type of service sought after.

  The moral to this story is this, be like Jesus and do what Jesus would when dealing with your employees while in the infantile fragile stages of building your startup company. Treat them right. Have good and well engaging job designs to keep them interested and motivated in what they do. Have a recognition system set up, even in the smallest scale.  Make sure you have competitive pay, either fair maket or slightly above the market, if the finance for talent was properly addressed in the business plan for investors then you will have it to spend on good talent. Good talent brings in your yearly revenue per employee ROI. So, it’s imperative that they are a well-kept part of your operations.

Always be mindful of your digital, online image or online presence. Get off your high horse; don't treat your employees like garbage, don't fire employees without remorse, compassion, empathy, like they cannot do anything about it. Revenge thru bad reviews can destroy your fragile business. I have seen many startups go down the drain because of pompous bosses, family interference, and unethical, dubious business practices.

Reviews are online forever, and are usually free to post them as well. Your employees are the most important component to your company, don't lie, cheat, steal, drink, drug, allow perversion, insert unfairness and then expect your employees to be loyal, dedicated or to even trust you again.

 Not having the right employees along with having a short staff shows not only poor below par management but it's also a crippling phenomenon that can bring a new fragile, fledgling startup business down due to not having a strong lucrative work force.

         This phenomenon of insufficient staffing led to a closing of a business as it happened Hostess, they had to shut down operations and closed the doors due to their Bakers going on huge continuous strikes as stated by CEO Rayburn of Hostess "We deeply regret the necessity of today's decision, but we do not have the financial resources to weather an extended nationwide strike”.  As a startup company, be appreciative of your employees, be a humble Boss, have compassion, have remorse, be ethical, be fair, be honest, be transparent, be sober, be trustworthy, stop thinking you are so much smarter that your employees, because you are really at their mercy in some way.

While having lunch with a business cohort they told me of a previous job he had as a sign shop manager. His boss, the owner came into his companies door hollering, cursing and complaining about how incompetent his employees were because of how backup they were with client job orders.

A prominent amusement them park happened to be his biggest client, a total of 2 million dollars in job orders. Well this has been going on for a while now and the employees all decided that they are going to teach their boss a lesson in humility.

They erased the entire data from all the computers, yes a case for (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act), but the damage is done and more money to spend on a civil suit. I mean all templates, all the financials records, the entire CRM, 10 years of info, all gone with a startup disk, and then in unison all 6 of them never showed up for work the next day. The owner instantaneously turned into Gandhi and transformed himself into a righteous clergyman and begged for his employees to come into work.

The damage was done, the cancer has spread to the point that it had to be eradicated. The owner was upset and blamed his wife because they had an argument that morning that eased into the work environment that ill faded morning when he transferred his personal strife to his employees.

Let me cut though the chase before I bore you to death, the company closed its doors, loss of all their clients, and he went into printing t-shirts from his garage. Imagine the reviews his business received online.

If you fire someone, be as ethical and discreet as possible, try to give them a severance package, try to find them solutions, or give them letters of recommendations, reference letters or a severance package, but please be classy. Maybe there is something else that employee can do than the job first offered to them. Most of all, the biggest, most devious, downright dirty, nasty, self-inflicted killer of all times is this...PLEASE do not wait till the end of the day or their shift to fire an employee. They will hate you forever, that work time of their production you would have gain of their sweat equity they will never get back.

Nobody cares about working the whole day if they are going to get let go and the end of the day, let me assure you as am matter of fact, especially if the job is physically, or mentally demanding. This really brews like cancer in them and the next thing you know you have an employee going postal!!!!  Also, this way they won’t catch wind of it while working and start a cancerous tornado or even steal or damage computers or information.

Please to all CEO's, Owners, or VP's do the firing first thing in the morning it will save you more bad publicity and bad reviews, plus no business establishment wants police at their business and on the news because of an employee that was fired maliciously at the end of a hard day’s work and went postal in today’s hard economy. It happens unfortunately.

Understand that having good, loyal employees is essential to a startup and will also help in growing your business faster through high operations efficiency along with increasing strategic positioning, keeping cost down and increasing yearly revenue.

Negative reviews are so powerful because they take seconds to persuade someone, and in this fast, brutal corporate world and seconds can make or break deal or bring down a fledgling startup. Don’t let bad reviews be the downfall of your business endeavors or financial dreams.

Having a bad online digital presence will cripple your chances of hiring top talent along with procuring investors. Know your employment laws like AA/EEO, FMLA, ADA, and OSHA regulations. Cherish your employees, respect them, treat them as part of the company and not as detachments, and remember your digital online presence is monumental in today’s employment environment and investor markets.