Today the Media’s NYT Daily podcast broadcasted a piece about quitters in current events: Elizabeth Warren, Michael Bloomberg, Pete Buttigieg, etc. I feel like I’m in good company. All of us realizing the the odds are stacked against us and packin’ it in.
I am reminded this morning about the other job I just quit- well actually it was February 15th or something and the driver to actually starting this blog. I quit a consulting gig that I was hired for that obviously, as they nicely say these days ‘didn’t work out.’
I was hired by a billionaire-owned restaurant group to do sales for their adjacent, many millions of dollar state-of-the-art gluten free bakery. Despite the fact that i hate rich people and this billionaire is a well known disgusting pig I thought, well maybe I should try out working for rich people again. Sure, I’ll try that! I’ll work for a billionaire pig’s restaurant group’s exclusive gluten free bakery. I have LOTS OF DEBT. The money they offered was pretty fantastic. It reminds me of brittany kaiser’s situation in the netflix movie ‘the great hack” https://www.netflix.com/title/80117542 which I think is an underreported problem for a lot of people and another blog post. So I signed a contract that stated a bunch of items.
I understand that this is the way the world works. I understand that there are contracts that state a lot of items. These items are meant to protect both parties. but the language in the contract is written before embarking on said gig and so therefore it’s all fortune telling. Also you sign at the bottom to show that you’ve read the items but you haven’t started the project yet so how can you know what hidden conflicts will arise? You can try to anticipate and put them on the next contract you sign after this current contract is sure to fail and and you can try to learn from your mistakes but in this case I had no mistakes to learn from. I’m not even a consultant!
This company, let’s call them Abbey’s Station, hired me to sell their ‘exclusive’ and actually quite delicious gluten free product(s) and in the process help them increase their volume, among other things, according to this contract. It was all marked down on there! All the things they wanted. and I did them. I actually even wrote a fucking marketing plan for them. I never even did that for my own business. Well, I did, but it’s amazing what you can forget you did in heats of productivity. I have so many files from the early days. Anyways three things happened.
- I found out that profitability was not a concern for this Abbey’s Station’s Adjacent GF Bakery as products were intended to be sold to the restaurant group’s locations at (definitely incorrectly calculated) ‘cost’, then sold for above market price at restaurant location to inflate profit margin at the restaurant level to increase company’s perceived valuation.
- I actually presented Abbey’s Boulevard’s Adjacent GF Bakery with four food businesses (former customers of mine at Free Bread) that wanted to buy their products. They refused three of the companies because they didn’t want to sell the bread product unsliced (which would have cut on their labor expenses)
- While at on site at a former customer restaurant location, sampling Abbey’s Boulevard’s Adjacent GF Bakery bread product, I was asked to create a bread for the former free bread customer whose restaurant I was in.
This was a very odd situation to me. Yet I’m sure this kind of thing happens a lot. I’m starting to understand that a lot of things happen a lot and that my experiences are not unusual and yet every fucking day my mind is blown. Anyway ONE of the things on this contract said that I could not do business with any company within 1000 feet of one of the locations of Abbey’s Station locations. Of course, the restaurant group who I was sampling has one location on within 1000 feet of a location of Abbey’s Station. Of course. So I said, you know, I hate this billionaire pig, I hate his adjacent bakery, I hate the people who go to Abbey’s station and I hate the people who like Abbey’s station. So I quit.
I QUIT EVERYTHING 