So it's in the title. I almost got fired today. It's late at night and my wife went to bed. I'm smoking a bowl and staring at Linkedin / updating my resume trying to prepare for the endless onslaught of job applications I'm about to send out into the void. I need a little social validation right now I guess.
Context. I work for a mortgage marketing agency that is run by a legit sociopath CEO. This guy lives in a 4 million-dollar mansion in California and has a history of defrauding the government for hundreds of millions through some FHA scam he ran or something. He ended up serving zero jail time, paid a small fine, and got away with it – but he can't serve loans anymore for the rest of his life. You know, rich people rules. So, he ended up making a marketing agency that works with mortgage lenders as a workaround. If he can't fuck people over, he'll fuck over the businesses that serve out the loans instead. He flat out refuses to talk or deal with any clients whatsoever outside of selling. Sells them on insane shit that we can never deliver on. Like we'll get mortgage lenders 100 verified leads in month type stuff on a fresh pixel for a client who doesn't even have a website or a FB page. If you know anything about mortgages or PPC in general, this is virtually impossible. We're operating under paltry budgets too. I'm talking $500 – $1k a month is the max they can go on a statewide lead gen campaign. Since we operate under a special ad category, we're limited on the kind of targeting we can put out, so I have to run lead gen on whatever few interests FB allows and rely on lookalike audiences, and customer lists. I've tried Google ads a few times but the clients never have the patience to allow me to build out proper ad groups. If I don't have a customer list or a pixel with history we're basically relying on the algorithm. I've identified that running FB lead gen forms is a great way to build history on a fresh account before shifting over to a landing page where I can increase the lead quality slightly by asking credit questions and disqualifying those with poor credit. When I get enough conversions, I run CBO campaigns on two ad sets, one going to 5% LAL on thank you page lead event and the other 5% LAL on engagement. The quality is pretty bad at first, but after a while, it tends to get better with this method. I've been able to get quite a considerable amount of closed deals for my clients, and many of them have thanked me personally for the effort I put in for them even when the company I worked for puts none.
If you haven't guessed by now, it's a churn and burn agency where the CEO is trying to make as many sales as possible on a monthly basis to keep cash funneling in, and burns through the mortgage lender client market as lenders continue to cancel. The clients come in and get sold on a total marketing package. Website, PPC, SEO, the works – get locked into an x amount of month's deal, and he gets their money guaranteed for these months while I scramble to build out an ad campaign that produces something for them while they're here. The SEO team is nonexistent. It's a junior web developer that he hired off of Upwork for an extremely low cost. Our “designer” is a 22-year-old kid with barely any industry experience. Poor girl gets panic attacks constantly from what I heard from my supervisor and tells him she's constantly working on projects that never actually get finished. I make all our ad creative and write our copy. Our account managers are offline for the majority of the day, and pop in here and there just to respond to emails before vanishing again. They have no working knowledge of the mortgage industry or marketing in general, so every client-related question gets fielded back to me. I could go on and on about the immense deficiencies within this organization, but you probably get the point.
Getting back to the CEO…
He had my manager fire 7 people today because he referenced a spreadsheet that told him his profit margins weren't lining up. I get it. it's business, and if you're not making a profit then you sometimes have to make the hard choice. I guess. But this shit was cold. I was pulled into a meeting this morning. You know, the fun ones where your managers send you a Slack out of the blue on a Friday afternoon, “Hey, can we chat for a second?” and my heart sinks into my asshole. The first thing he says is “I just want to let you know that you are not being fired today. “Great, this conversation is going well”, I said in response. He proceeds to explain to me that the ad manager who I was training and had just got the job 1 month ago is canned, along with 7 others. Designers, account managers, etc. CEO is cleaning house. He's paying us too much and he can just hire out to manage what clients we have left, along with any in-house lead gen needed for new clients. He did however offer to hire back the web developer at half salary on 1099. Get the same work for half the price. Great guy.
At this very moment, I am actively in the process of buying a new house. We have already sold the house we currently live in, and we're in the final stages of being contingent on the one we hope to live in. My wife and I both come from poverty and have ground our way through the shit to be able to carve out some kind of stability for us and our children. We're finally in the position to buy the home that we truly want, despite the crazy market conditions – and have identified a property we actually love. Seriously, this is our dream home if there ever was one for us, and we're days away from finalizing financing. If I were to have lost this job today, I would not be able to finalize financing on the house and would lose it entirely, effectively making my family homeless. The CEO knows this.
The only reason I still have my job is that my manager flat-out refused to fire me. He told the CEO that he quite literally could not do that to me after everything I've put into this job and that if he really wanted me gone then he would have to do it himself. That loyalty needed to mean something. He told me that the CEO mumbled that he guessed loyalty does have to matter and that it was okay, I can keep my position for now. What I really think was that he simply didn't want to deal with the uncomfortable scenario of firing someone, so he let it go for now. For the remainder of the day, my supervisor had to go one by one, laying off people while he could hear their kids playing in the background.
So, yeah. T'was my Friday. I still have a job for now, but I've been instructed to run internal lead gen ads for the company by Mr. CEO, and have them ready by Monday morning. I'm gonna be grinding away throughout the weekend to try and cobble together as many ad campaigns as I can to bring in whatever volume to distract the CEO long enough to find myself another job before he remembers to fire me again. If you've read this far, I hope I was entertaining.
TLDR; I almost got fired and would have been homeless, but thankfully didn't.