I'm on a burner account for obvious reasons.
So this happened almost a year ago exactly, and I wanted to share with all of you.
After getting laid off during COVID, I got a job through a staffing agency that I thought had some potential. I live in a major metro with a large entertainment industry. The job was at a Food/Bev company in their accounting dept. This brand is VERY popular with certain sectors of the celebrity/influencer culture, and their products are in fact quite good.
I began this job in Feb 2021, and I thought this would be a good chance to grow, and the pay was pretty good considering it was through an agency. But as soon as I started, I saw some major red flags.
One: the work hours were 7:30 to 4. No flexibility, no remote. Show up at 730, and they lock the doors and shut out the lights at 4 on the dot. (I'll add that they rented out an entire 2 story office, so it's not like the hours needed to be set in stone). 30 minutes for lunch (and I got chewed out on my 3rd day for taking 40 minutes for lunch). Two: I did not have a dedicated email, just “[email protected]“. I could see pretty early on that I was the 6th person to do this role in the 2 years prior (so it wasn't a covid thing, just poor management). Three: They did virtually all their accounting tracking ON PHYSICAL PAPER. We did use QuickBooks, but really only for printing checks. Four: The Owner. A nice enough guy, but very clearly a rich kid who had never worked a hard day in his life (his day job was working for his dad's real estate company). He liked to do local press where he bragged about attending [jerk-off Ivy League school] and brag about his clothes.
Now to the job. My role basically consisted of printing invoices, organizing them by LLC (each location has their own LLC) and handing them over for approval, then printing checks. They had something like 14 different locations and two different holding companies (on top of handling all the household expenses for the owner and his wife (who obviously did not work)). This created A LOT OF PAPER. Seriously, reams and reams of paper every week, plus a ton of ink. On top of that, the accounting manager was probably the absolute worst boss I've ever had. Of course, she was able to work from home 3-4 days a week, while I had to sit in the windowless basement. Not once when she was at home did she call or email. On the days she was there, she would hand me a list of menial tasks and then nag about when they were going to be complete. We did not have one convo about myself or how I could help the organization. After four months there, I doubt she could tell someone more than two or three things about me unrelated to my job duties. Any time I would ask her some advice or offer suggestions, I was either told No or straight up ignored. Some of the other staffers were friendly and warm, just not this woman.
Pretty quickly I realized what was going on with this company. It existed as basically as a tax shelter for the owners' real estate company. The RE company owned the office building and most of the store locations. The highest priority checks were the rents and distribution checks every month. They also ran a lot of expenses through the various LLC unrelated to day to day operations. One of the LLCs (from a location that had closed) even bought a $96,000 Mercedes for the wife (with funds that originated from the RE company).
Now all of that I could deal with. What really bothered me was the amount of paper and shuffling and filing I had to do. I've done this type of job for a while. It's very easy to manage a lot of this digitally, plus it would free up a lot of time for me to do actual productive work. Since I got no guidance from anyone, I took it upon myself to create a system to manage all the expenses digitally (mostly with excel and G-drive). I coordinated with the managers of the store locations, and they all were on board with this (I'm pretty sure they all hated having to keep paper records of everything too). I pestered my bosses for several weeks with no real response.
After a while, I got fed up, and I pushed back. I wrote a very professional email outlining my ideas with all the sample sheets I had created. I showed the emails from the managers who were excited. The next day I get a response from the owner that they like how this are going and won't be making any changes. Well, I kind of lost it. I explained that I have lots of knowledge, as well as an advanced degree. Paying me to sit and basically file paperwork is a waste of my time and their resources. That's not what got me terminated, though. I wrote to him, “did they not teach business technology or management principles at [jerk-off ivy league school] or [jerk-off MBA program]?”
Needless to say, they asked me not to return to the office after lunch. The lady with the staffing agency wasn't super pleased, but I had been communicating all my frustrations to her, and she was understanding of my position (I had also made my pitch to the internal HR lady, and she was on board until my snarky email). I have since found a better role (not without issues though). But, at my current job, if I see ways to improve operations or create new systems, they get excited; They ask me about my life; we can stay late if we need, or we can do some of the work at home. Overall, it's just a much more supportive environment. I saw recently that they were hiring again for this specific role, which means they have gone through at least 8 people in three years for a role that pays decently and should be stable.
Now I am just waiting for the owner to get indicted for tax fraud or something.
Thanks for listening.