The Unreal World

• I am writing this to vent my unbelievable frustration with my first real world experience and to prevent any of you from making the same mistake that I did. As many of you know, I took the job with Competitive Sports Marketing. The people that worked there were awesome and the opportunity, albeit a bit risky, was perfectly tailored to me - or so they made me think.
• The interview process itself was about a 10 hour process & after talking with the boss I was sold on the company and felt priviledged to be offered this opportunity. I turned down a job with Enterprise, moved to Austin at the beginning of this month and began the day after. Let me break down the job to you so to avoid any confusion. Training was intense and it was 10 days long, they guarenteed me a minimum of $300 a week (boss said 'that's definitely a low estimate) during this period as well. After training I would jump into leadership in which I would be training new employees and conducting interviews with the minimum salary being aroudn $800 a week here adn leadership was supposed to last 4-8 months. After leadership I would move into Assistant Mgmt with a guarenteed $1500 a week and this phase would last 2 months. I would then get my own branch. Now what the company does is they are an outsourced sales force for Fortune 100 companies.. this particular branch did Quill office supplies. So what I did was go door to door trying to sell office supplies & I knew this going in and was prepared for it. I generally enjoyed dealing with people and figured I would be awesome at it.
• The company advertised looking for motivated, competitive entry level college grads who were risk takers and wanted to improve themselves and open up their own branch within a year... keep that in mind as I unfold everything...
• Day one - well I had to come in at 730 in the morning (during the interview they had me come in at 9 and leave at 5) so that already kind of threw me off but no big deal. In the morning we held all these dumbass team building/motivation exercises & I seriously thought I was back @ A&M's basketball camp combined with some powerhouse 'let's party for Jesus' Sunday service. I was sent out with a trainer and given this whole packet of 'the system' as they called it. Well they had me read it in the car and go into businesses right away trying to pitch and sell to them, crazy I know, but they had warned me it was extremely intense and fast paced so no big deal really. My trainer made zero sales for that day - he's been with the company for 11 months and hasn't even been promoted to Asst. Mgr. yet so that already had me raising some questions. He was an awesome guy though, unbelievable integrity, fun to hang out with (coming from me that says a lot), and well this is all what I was made to believe. Despite the zero sales we both were joking around on the way home and came back to the office. Now this was what really began to throw me off. We got back around 5:30 and well nobody would fucking leave the office! I just kind of kept waiting for somebody to leave but nobody ever did.. there was more team building and talking about what we all did wrong that way and how to get better. We weren't allowed to mention the number of sales we got or have a bad attitude or else we would get bitched at. Anyway I ended up getting home at 9pm, and I was just thinkign this was a one day thing and they couldn't possibly do this everyday,, MAN WAS I WRONG!
• The first week my hours were 730am-9pm and when I came home I had no time for anything because I had to practice 'the system' and get the pitch down along with all the rules of which businesses were ok to go into, etc. Basically I had no life, along with poor nutrition, and unbelievably tired. Anyway, I just accepted it as that's how it was supposed to be and that I would do whatever it takes to bust my ass to land a promotion. Now with this system we were supposed to meet 8 office managers a day, visit 80 businesses, and get 2 sales... I'm also embarassed to say that I had no idea the ENTIRE job was commission based until the 4th day mainly b/c they had me convinced by 'you will be making a minimum of $$$ per week'. Anyway these people seriously had no friends outside of the office and they wanted to hang out with me Friday, Saturday, and even have dinner on Sunday night and that freaked me out a little bit. I didn't join a frat in college for a reason, and no offense to those who are in one. I just don't like being forced to do things against will or be forced to respect or be friends with someone who's done nothing to earn my respect. I did go watch the UT game with them but that was mainly because I didn't have a TV but yeah seeing those people for 13 hours a day was already WAY enough for me, despite their coolness.
• The next week is when I really began 2nd guessing everything. I have always prided myself on seeing through bullshit but I have never encountered anything this structured or established before. First thing I noticed was that I drove the best car to work.. this is including my boss who claims to make 300k a year and drives a 92 single cab Toyota Tacoma, make sense to you?!?! Everything was hush hush as well.. 3 people quit in the 4 days I had been working and no word was mentioned of it. Also when I started, only 3 of the employees out of 15 were the same as from when I did my interview. I definitely questioned that and the answer I got was (oh well this job is only for the elite and 95% of the population can't handle it) and well they stroked my ego and it definitely worked for the time being. I went out with my trainer again Monday and once again ZERO sales. I started to word my questions better as to get more direct answers. I found out my trainer only makes about $400 a week (he's been there for 11 months) and that there also were no benefits and that promotion was solely based on the sales that were made. This was the EXACT opposite of what I was fed during my interview but of course my trainer managed to cover everything with some false optimism that this was an upstart company and things were on the upswing yada yada. Like I said these people were awesome so I had no reason not to believe them.
• 5th day I got my own territory in New Braunfels and ended up visiting every business in that city in 3 days and landed 3 sales.. this was after walking in 240 doors!!! I had never encountered so many rude people in my life but I sat back and thought about it.. if I saw someone walk in with a suit, tie, and a bag I would probably treat them the same way. Nobody likes to be sold to. I definitely had my own style with selling, I formed it to my personality.. I didn't incorporate any manipulation which I suppose didn't help me much but I played the cards the best I could. It was frustrating, especially now realizing everything was commission based and my trainer said that most people don't even get a sale during training and that I was doing awesome so I kept going...
• Now this girl from A&M started 3 days before I did.. I didn't talk to her that much in the first week but after Monday the boss comes down as we were leaving and says he wanted to talk to us. He told us how he has never been this excited about 2 employees ever and that we were going to take the company to a new level and he had big plans for us. We bought it and me and her sat on the back of her pickup that night and talked about how exciting this all was. What's funny is the next night we hightailed it out of work early and went to a bar to grab a beer and just opened up about everything. She was trained and went out with completely different people so we shared our stories and thoughts. She was just as skeptical as I was. The people she got trained by also had ZERO sales on days and they had been with the company for well over a year and yeah there was NO ASST. MGR. at all in the entire company... We laughed about how much we hated how everyone was so buddy buddy and always wanted to hang out all the time and we bitched about the hours and the rude people at businesses. We both made a commitment to make a decision Friday and we were going to meet up and talk about it. Thursday was just something awful terrible.. I spent 2 hours with this lady and had the order placed only to have her cancel it the last second. One lady asked me 'did you ever graduate 1st grade.. because apparently you can't read the No Soliciting on the door', and well I did zero sales that day. That wasn't enough to cause me to quit though, I'm pretty thick skinned and I'll be damned if I let some miserable attitude of a person with a desk job ruin my day...
• I called my uncle that night. My uncle is a regional manager for MotionInc. which is the 3rd largest sales firm in the nation so I figured he would know his shit. He had me read him our pitch and just tell him everything then he just started going off.. He told me not to even show up to work tomorrow. Basically we both broke the company down as this: Basically they go to, in this company's case - Quill Office Supplies, and say 'hey we are going to put ads out advertising for motivated, competitive, recent college grads and tell them they are going to become a manager within a year'.. 'now what we are really going to do is get you tons of sales from these motivated students and make it so tough and insanely difficult on them so that they quit & we don't have to waste money on paying for their branch (Quill pays each new branch manager $25000 per year so)'. That just made perfect sense to me even though everything wasn't completely clear that was enough to justify me quitting the next day.
• So Friday I sleep in and head up to work and sit down with my boss 1 on 1. I wasn't going to leave without leaving a piece of my mind behind. I basically told him that I figured it all out and that if they were really looking to retain employees they would start us off with a base during training and then build up from there. He came back with how they have tried that before and it doesn't work because nobody works as hard and people are lazy. Then I go 'ok you are putting out advertisements saying that you are looking for competitive motivated individuals, and I know me personally I would have busted my ass just the same, base pay or no base pay but now you have lost a good employee because of your so called system.. you wander why you have such high turnover but you really don't even seem to care.. if people were being lazy then obviously you aren't hiring the people the ad says you are looking for.. plain and simple!' I think he respected my words at least and he even offered to write me a recommendation for my next job, how weird is that ha! Anyway I was relieved leaving.
• Now the girl, my partner in crime, I told her everything my uncle said but she was now giving it until the next Friday because she had just been promoted and she just wanted to get a feel of whether or not it was going to get better and plus she didn't even have a place in AUstin yet (she was driving from Giddings everyday). Well I have talked with her everyday, sometimes twice a day.. I almost died when she told me what she did this week.. Basically the next promotion of course was taking out interviews and building a team within the company then after that it was asst. mgr. OK, well she is looking through the packet and in selling to customers we have four things we use to help complete a sale:
• 1. Sense of Urgency - make it seem like this is a once in a lifetime chance at these deals
• 2. Fear of Loss - ties into the first one a bit
• 3. Indifference - pretend we don't care whether or not we get the sale or not
• 4. Jones - that's saying something like 'well we do business with Bobo's law firm down the road' to make them feel more at ease
• Now in her packet it says TO USE THE SAME FOUR TECHNIQUES ON YOUR INTERVIEWEES to make them take the job!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That set me off!!!!! I started thinking back to everything.. everything that was spoken in the office, outside of the office, it was all based off of the system. They even had the day with the interview all mapped out like 1030am - crack a few jokes and loosen up the interviewee, lunch - explain the barebones structure of the company, then it specifically said do not mention anything else about the company unless the interviewee asks and even if they do just give short brief answers: K.I.S.S. (keep it short and simple) yet another manipulation sales technique. Anyway the convo we had for the next 30 minutes was actually one for a good comedy show,, I was like.. oh shit he totally Jones'd me that time. Me being pissed off was quite an understatement but her telling me that is when it all fell into place for me. The whole thing made sense and it's just scary looking at it now - it reminded me a lot of The Skulls to be exact. So she is calling in sick now because she can't even bare to face them anymore. She has to make sure she gets her paycheck Friday so she is going in for that but yeah it is crazy. I really can't even put into words what the environment there was really like but I tried the best I could.
• So now... well I am essentially screwed. I turned down Enterprise for this job and they won't take me back for another 6 months due to some stupid laws and I have lots of bills coming up at the beginning of this month. I seriously doubt the $50 I made for the 101 hours I put in at Competitive Sports Marketing (which is another weird thing b/c now on monster it is listed as Competitive Marketing Concepts) will even cover a bathroom tile here at this place. Oh well, I do believe everything has a purpose for happening and hopefully this will only lead me to better opportunities and bigger things - I have had worse happen to me before so this is just another upstream battle for me, which I'm not gonna lie I kind of enjoy it.
• I wrote this to close this chapter in my life and to prevent any of you from making the same mistake I did.. no matter how emotionally intelligent you are, just like with even the most expert computer hackers struggle with, there are some tough systems to break through in this world to discover the truth. I'm just thankful I"m not in my 11 month with this company excited about my 'future'.