How would you hand in your resignation in this situation?
Brace yourself, it’s a bit of a long one but I promise this context is crucial.
I joined this company two and a bit years ago as their first digital marketer. They didn’t have a marketing department prior to me entering and took a gamble to hire a somewhat recent graduate with limited job experience in marketing, but someone who showed a lot of potential, motivation and knowledge.
Hell, to secure this job I wrote them an 8-page marketing strategy doc, ripping their current practices into shreds and suggesting multiple points of improvement’s – I essentially created a marketing strategy for free. I did this unprompted to hand it to them on my 1st interview.
I got the job, £25k a year. The job came with a company car to travel to photoshoots! In my first 18 months I doubled the revenue and quadrupled the number of their leads. I set up a whole lead management system, advert ampaigns, and a bunch of other processes that are now essential to the business. They are even saving 2-3k a month on a freelance photographer they used to work with, as my photography skills are good enough to place our projects in magazine features.
I worked evenings, weekends, and frequently taken work calls outside of my working hours from the director. I even took some responsibility away from the sales guys in calling and qualifying the leads from my personal phone, as the sales people were taking 3 to 5 days to respond to an initial enquiry!! I had been calling the leads and qualifying them for a year now.
Since then I asked for multiple pay rises, and I got declined each time. “The company doesn’t have enough money.” “Now it’s not a good time.” “We are expending in other areas at the moment.”
Two months ago they offered me a bonus scheme, which was essentially a one off fee for a closed sales generated via digital marketing. At most I could earn an extra £2500 a year based on the sales guys closing the sale of the leads that I generated (by the way, 1.5k is the average monthly comission for a salesperson working here). I told my boss this offer is simply insulting and left it at that.
A year ago on my performance review I asked to be binged up to 35k. They said that’s impossible.
Oh, and that car? Never got it despite it being written in my contract. Instead, I may use company vans if (and when) they are available.
The next time we spoke about the remuneration, I told the director that I’m going to look for another job that pays at least 50% more as there are so many roles starting in this range.
He said he checked them after our last annual nual review and told me that I don’t have enough experience to get them.
We went back and forth in the same conversation and he essentially told me to “get rid of my ego” and help the company grow by imagining the long-term vision of dominating our market, having more team members in marketing, and of course, better pay. I said that I don’t believe this based on how the company profits were distributed over the last two years (back into the business development rather than rewarding employees). His response was that “The reward is the job security.”
Over the last few weeks my director has been micromanaging me, calling me for an hour at the start of the working day and again at the end.
I feel disrespected. Unappreciated. Incredibly frustrated. When things go great I don’t get any praise or recognition. When we don’t get many leads because of seasonal variables or lack of referrals due incredibly poor customer service which is outside of my control, I become the scapegoat for local clients not wanting to engage with our products and services.
We live in a line of small villages in the countryside. My boss knows where I live, I as he drives by to drop off his baby at the nursery and picks me up to work once a week. To top this off, his mother is the HR lady of the company who is practically retired and doesn’t really interact with the business other than onboarding or disciplinaries. This whole business was his dads and he took over almost a decade ago.
Today, I got an offer for a position earning almost double, with much better working conditions and what looks like much, MUCH better work life balance.
The thing is, I developed, integrated and coded the systems that now everyone in the company is using: lead management, project management and custom coding for a bunch of automations that make mine, the sales team and the other employees much, much easier.
Obviously I’m not going to delete my work but I will charge a high consultancy rate for each change they will inevitably want me to do once I leave.
There are so many details I missed out, but in essence I delivered incredible value to the company, far beyond my role and much more than can be quantified with basic statistics, and neither my pay, working conditions and attitudes of the management towards me reflect my contributions.
I feel that I at least owe it to the sales team to submit a month’s notice rather than the two weeks that’s required in my contract. Call me stupid, but leaving so many things incomplete hanging and going to waste is just not my style.
As I was the fist marketer to join, creating the handover document would take a full week if I was purely focused on this. I feel incredible pity for whoever has to pick my role up next.
So, how should I hand in my notice and what should I write? At this point I genuinely don’t care about burning this bridge – I am never planning to work for this business ever again. I am keep alternating between giving the minimum 2-week notice and actually showing some decency as a human being to not leave things like this.
TLDR: Started what looked like great job two years ago, became borderline irreplaceable and delivered incredible value to the company. A year in i began feeling In reality abused, overworked and disrespected. I got an offer for a better job and I don’t know how to hand in my notice.