I have thought about posting about this for a long time now, but I didn’t know where to go with this information. I have been out of the field of a year now and I think it is time to go over how disgustingly opaque that field is.
A little background information – I was let go at the beginning of the pandemic from this small working capital company where I was in the sales team. I was one of the unfortunate ones that drew the short end of the straw and especially being at the beginning of pandemic, it felt scary losing a source of income without knowing what is in our future with this disease.
After few months of being jobless, I got a job for a similar sales gig as my previous role except this would be solely focusing on equipment financing for small businesses.
I was excited to get out of the house again and start earning money as things had been tight during the pandemic. The role required for me to essentially cold call business owners all over the states and seeing if they are looking for financing for any equipment now or in the near future. Simple enough right? I thought so too!
This job paid well in commission (upwards of ~60% of the money made on that deal) but for you to earn that good $$, you needed to go full commission with no base pay. Which a lot of the salespeople in this company did within their first year. That sounded reasonable. The problem came with the ethics on how the sales were made which started to nag at my consciousness.
This company used various calculating methods to try and swindle business owners with higher rates than what the business owners thought they were getting. Not only that, but they would also often sneak in monetary amounts or percentages in the contract for ownership of said equipment. For example: if at the end of their contract even if the owner was under the assumption that they have been making payments for 36 months to own the equipment and now they must pay FMV (fair market value) or % of leased amount for a 200k equipment for which they have already paid 200k + financing cost will now have to pay even more to own it. If they do, guess what? The salesman made up to 20% of that amount as well. So, they were well incentivized to add these hidden things in there to get paid.
To top it all off – the owners are aware that MOST of the sales team are using these tactics to close their sales and they are happy. I mean why wouldn’t they be? One of the owners has so much money that dude had to buy a parking garage to park all his Porsches, and other exotic cars.
I basically did this gig until one day I just couldn’t. I texted my wife in the morning after getting into work that I was planning on quitting because I was not happy.
I have now transitioned into a non-sales role and am very happy in this field.