I have two of them (I will get to the other one in a future post), but I’m going to start with the most amazing disconnect in my career history. I was hired to be the Social Media Marketing lead for a healthcare startup in Austin. (A startup that had called itself that for 5 years before I got there.) I never did hear what happened to the employee before me. Or, … Well, let me not jump ahead.

Home Health for Everyone
(founded by a famous entrepreneur who has “Open To Work” on his LinkedIn profile. [grin])

My hiring was rushed a bit. I had a Tex-Mex lunch with the man who was about to be my micro-manager. We had a lovely lunch. Talked aspirationally about our work and our BMWs. As a final touch, I had a 10-minute interview with this founder and celebrated entrepreneur. He was a bit gross. Dismissive. “Why do you want to work here?” It ended with some unspoken retort “if it doesn’t work out, I will just fire you.”

“I accept.”

During my FIRST week at my new job, my hyper-insecure manager (Perhaps the marketing had been his role, he was the VP of Marketing, I was now the Director of Marketing.) called me into his office, closed the door and asked, “Are you looking for another job?”

“What?”

“You’ve taken two lunches this week that lasted over an hour.”

“Um, I figured since I come early and leave late I could run a few errands during lunch.”

“Okay.”

But it was far from okay. I called my business mentor after the encounter and he said, “Just say calm. Stay the course. Maybe he’s just nervous.”

Immediately I began building new pathways for customer growth. I launched a blog about healthcare. We highlighted the product opportunities for consumers, and offered stories about how “stay at home and let our NPs come to you.” It was a cool model. There was one big problem.

Price

They had been trying a number of pricing models before I arrived. All of them failed to move the needle a bit. Sales of the “consumer” version of their service was anemic. So I had to try some different things.

Social media, they said, will solve everything. Well, I did drive thousands of eyeballs to our offer pages. I revised our offering. I got more heartwarming stories from actual customers. I sent out $5 gift cards to everyone who wrote a positive review on City Search. (Remember them?)

Nothing was working.

We tried some TV ads in markets we hoped to open. We tried news media and news stories in Boston, as we prepared to open the consumer offering in an area where our corporate or executive offering was gaining a foothold.

I gave DAILY reports to my hovering manager. I don’t think he knew what to do with his time. He spent a lot of it in deep conversations with the CEO, who was a bit of a tyrant. A funny tyrant. He drove two different AMG Mercedes depending on his mood. One was blacked out, the other was red. I guess he was telling us he was bipolar. Also, his ambition in life, was to be on Dancing with the Stars. He had a much younger trophy wife (his third) and she liked to dance.

Still, I could not move the needle. When I started we sold about 2 -3 consumer packages per week. As I ramped up their existing website, built a better ecommerce path, and used a blog to generate 30% more traffic, we got to 2,000 views a week and sold 4 – 5 packages. Nothing to justify my Director role or my value to the company.

The problem wasn’t me, however. The problem was the offering sucked. The idea was great. But the price point for a small family was silly. A subscription model was used. $500 sign up, gets you concierge care for a year. Then you paid only $50 per visit.

Well, the math to me is $550 for my initial house call. And that’s a BIG NOPE to people other than our CEO who saw no problem with the pricing. “There are plenty of rich people who are not using our services. That’s the niche we need to go after.” I altered a few pages to highlight the luxury side of having doctors come to you.

“Summer camp physical, no need to leave home and wait in a doctor’s office. We will come to you.”

Now, as we headed into the heat of summer, the CEO was furious that we could not move more consumer subscriptions. He wanted daily reports. He wanted me to pivot table the charts so he could look at the demographic data of our incoming traffic and the success rate.

Clearly, I was failing, and his face and our meetings, with my mute manager in tow, were getting rougher. On July 4th, a Friday, I was told, in a meeting with my manager only, that I was being let go. It was good riddance, but it was a blow to my financial life that took a long time to recover from. They were going to pay me through the period. One week severance.

A Couple of Learnings

If the company is so desperate to hire you quickly, that might indicate some internal issues.

• If the CEO is a raving egotist, his sheepish VP of Marketing is not going to shield or even help with the leadership and strategic direction.
• If you drive visits to an offer page 1000% higher and get 1% more sales, there’s something wrong with your offer or your demand generation strategy.
• Paid ads and paid SEO cannot fix a broken offering.
• If your corporate product is selling, but your consumer product is not, just kill the consumer product.
• When your boss accuses you of “looking for another job” during your first week, you’d better start looking for another job.

It’s not easy out there. When a company and product are failing, the firefighters are often not enough to save the building.

Side note of humor: One of my colleagues at this failing company was in sales. We came up with a greeting that summed up our experience. “I’m really fucking sorry.” As in “I’m really fucking about your new job.” It even spawned a Facebook page.

John McElhenney —  LinkedIn

Please check out a few of my books on AMAZON. 

Especially this one, about living a creative and human life of intention and joy. 100% human generated – with the exception of ai-assisted spelling.