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I’ve spent the last year out of work.  I had a horrid experience at my last job which took me a while to get over.  I had answered an advertisement for a job which turned out to be for a man who wanted to set up a new company and needed an admin/secretary/PA/type person to help.  At the time, I wasn’t really looking for a job with any real responsibility and was happy to take a position that did not require much from me.  A strict nine to five, no extra’s sort.

I went along to the interview which was in a small barn alongside the main house where the man had his office.  He explained that he had a new idea for a business and showed me a leaflet he had had made up.  When I read it through, I realised straight away that he needed someone with skills in writing and design as the leaflet was not well written, despite him using a  professional marketing company.  We discussed the business and leaflet and I was quite interested in the job.  I told him I wasn’t really looking for major responsibility but that I could see I could be of use to him and we discussed terms which were pretty bad but since I didn’t have any other work on, something seemed better than nothing.

Over the next two years I did everything from rewriting the marketing leaflet, setting up the office procedures for the company, endless phone sales and getting clients.  I helped with finding contractors, interviewed and selected a sales girl, liased with a legal expert to make sure we were covered in everyway, helped define the client contracts, came up with marketing strategy, went over endless figures and projections and so on.  I could see clearly where my boss lacked talent and skills and where I lacked them and we complimented one another very well.

After a while, my boss offered me a directorship along with a twenty percent share of the business on the basis that as we couldn’t pay me much money, it would provide an extra incentive for me.  I accepted the offer and became the admin director.  While the company was getting up and running, I also worked for one of his other businesses and was paid from that until our own could take over wages.  I had always said, that I did not want to get involved with the financial side of the business as figures are not my strong point and other than a cursory look over the monthly analysis, cheque book and bank statements I left that side of things to him.

I noticed over time, that my boss seemed to have his fingers in several pies.  He had another mail order business with a couple who shared our office but it wasn’t long before he fell out with them.  I watched, as over time, he did nothing to help them, never pointed out their mistakes or made any useful suggestions and sat back and waited for this business to collapse which it eventually did.  I felt sorry for the woman involved.  She really didn’t have what it took to be a succesful business woman though she had high expectations.  She had a cut out picture pinned up in the office, from a magazine of a fancy BMW which was top of her wish list when the company became sucessful.  Sad really.  She had been a secretary for a man who she ended up  marrying and I noticed that he still treated her like a secretary and less like a wife.  What with him being overbearing and my boss being negligent, the whole thing was doomed.  As far as I could tell, my boss had lost interest in this venture and had moved on and wanted to put all his efforts into the one we were doing. It was a bit embarassing and awkward between them and me as it was plain that I was the new interest and they were being sidelined.  I should have seen warning signs at that point.

Once we had our business up and running we realised we needed to take on someone to deal with the contractors and so we added another director, ‘director of operations’.  There was a fourth director who my boss had originally intended for this position but he had not come up with any money.  He kept him on but he had no real involvement in the company but he was to prove my downfall.  This man, was an agricultural worker.  He had at one time, got a good business going and employed a few men to do various tractor work around the many local farms but he came unstuck and nearly lost his house.  He was unabe to take on any more financial liabilities as he was still paying off the bank but he remained a director in our company and attended director’s meetings.  He was by no means a business man but very kindly and decent and occasionally came up with useful ideas.

After two years of hard work, I was getting fed up with the very low pay and as we had given ourselves five years to make the business up to a standard where it could either be franchised or sold off, I was looking at a fairly long time before I saw any financial reward.  The business was primarily a winter service which meant in the summer there was less to do and we couldn’t afford to pay me all year round.  I still worked for the other business but it was part time and I was struggling to manage on such limited hours.  I didn’t have a salary for either company and was paid by the hour.  In our second summer, I was really feeling fed up.  I felt I had worked very hard with great comitment, often going out to sites with the boss at all hours of the night to check on work, all without extra pay.  It seemed to me, that the directorship was really a way of making me put in a lot of work while paying me very little.  I wanted to expand the company’s business so that it covered the whole year and not just the winter and we had ideas as to how to achieve this.  But every time I started to work on this, the boss would dither and change his mind.

We came to blows one day, in an embarassing meeting between the directors and our sales girl.  I had done some research into the expansion idea but every time I tried to answer questions, my boss belittled me or was dismisive.  All this was in front of the other director and my sales girl and it was very awkward.  Feeling annoyed with his changed attitude to me, I brought up the subject of money and more or less said that since I was being paid peanuts, he couldn’t expect me to be at his beck and call.  He had let me down a few times over the summer, when I expected him to have work for me, only to find on arriving at the office that ihe hadn’t organised it for me.  He was furious with me when I raised the issue and said he wasn’t going to raise any wages until the following winter and that we would put it on the agenda for discussion in our Autumn meeting.

My sales girl was very anxious after the meeting.  She was appalled by the way I had been spoken to and wondered whether if I could be treated like that, how secure was her own job.  I assured her she would be OK  and that I would look after her as she had left her husband on the basis of a reliable job and had two small children to look after. 

I didn’t realise it at the time, but my fate was sealed at that meeting.  It seemed that my boss had now decided he didn’t like me anymore and was treating me like he had the other couple who disappeared out of his life.  Since I was a director though, I wasn’t especially worried.  A couple of months later, things had settled down but I noticed he no longer consulted me on things and it was awkward when we were in the office at the same time.  He borrowed more money from the bank without telling me, though since the money side was his responsibility I let it go.

And then I had a conversation with the director of operations who I got on well with.  I had noticed a large amount of money had been paid to him when I went through the cheque book.  I queried it with him but he said he had not received it which seemed distinctly odd.  We discussed the financial side of the business as by now there was quite a hefty overdraft and we needed a cold winter to get plenty of business to pay it off.  He made some remark about my share of the overdraft which I immediately told him was nothing to do with me.  I told him that the arrangement between myself and the boss did not include any liability for the company’s financial affairs.  It turned out, that my boss, being utterley useless had forgotten that I did not sign any papers for the bank loan as per our agreement, at the beginning, that I would not get involved in the financing as I couldn’t afford to do so.  Amazingly he had forgotten this vital point.  The other director must have mentioned this to my boss as soon after this conversation, I arrived at the office to find him in a pensive and worried mood.  He started to talk about the growing bank loan and I reminded him that he had not consulted me when he chose to increase it.  He didn’t acknowledge that he had forgotten about our arrangements but clearly he had.  He informed me that he had called in the ‘sleeping’ director for a meeting that morning and again he had not arranged this with me first which was unusual. 

And suddenly it was all over.  The sleeping director on hearing of the financial implications had immediately decided that the company had to be shut down and that the first thing to go had to be staff of which there was only myself and the sales girl. As a nod to keeping things professional, we took a vote on the issue and this was where the ‘sleeping’ director came in handy, as my boss knew he would.  I was outvoted, the operations director felt we should shut down too, so all were against me and I had to comply. My boss didn’t even try to salvage the situation and after the meeting ended and I went home and had a chance to digest the whole situation, I realised that he had orchestrated the entire thing.  My boss knew that if he told the sleeping director about the increased financial burden, he would panic.  Having been so close to bancruptcy and nearly losing his home, he was highly likely to advise my boss to cut his losses fearing that he too could end up bancrupt.  The third director had his own sucessful business and was only working part time for our company, so although he was sorry, it didn’t mean that much of a loss to him.

I called the boss the following day and said I would like to discuss things further, that everything had happened far too quickly without much thought, or so I thought, and he agreed to meet me.  When I arrived, the first thing I noticed was that my desk was blocked by some boxes and I couldn’t get to it.  The second thing I noticed was that the sleeping director was present when I had not asked for a directors meeting.  It was clear then, where we stood.  He had brought in the other director for back up, was too cowardly to meet me on his own and had blocked my desk, presumably, in case I should have a fit of temper and wreck all the work I had done, or perhaps copy some documents.  Who knows but it was the most insultig thing he could possibly have done to me. 

So instead of trying to persuade him to try harder at the company, we ended up talking terms.  It was near to Christmas and an awful time to be out of a job with no money.  I persuaded him to keep on the sales girl as I felt a duty towards her and we were friends.  The boss agreed to give her a job in his house, cleaning and painting or something while she found another one.  I was not so lucky.  I got a couple of months pay based on far fewer hours than I would have worked.  As I am lousy at figures I hadn’t realised this at first and signed away any rights to ask for more money or anything else from him.  I was told that the company would fold after the following winter, when they hoped to recoup some of the money.  Since I was leaving that day, it was obvious that he wanted rid of me and I later learned that he had given my job, unofficially to my sales girl having made me redundant.  Personally I wasn’t too sure that he could do that, either the job was redundant or it wasn’t and if it wasn’t, it should not be given to anyone else.  I felt stabbed in the back by the sales girl too, since I had insisted that the boss keep her on in some way, but didn’t expect him to give her my own job.

What hurts is that it seems to me, the entire thing was an elaborate ruse in order to get rid of me.  Why you may ask?  Why indeed?  We had a good relationship right up to the point when I started to compain about the lack of money I was earning.  Considering the amount of responsibility I had taken on over the two years and my significant input into the company, I felt I had been thoroughly let down.  Worse, it is hard to explain to people that the real truth is that, like that other couple, he had grown bored with me.  Whilst I was the bees knees for the first couple of years, it seems that the boss has a habbit of getting bored with people.  I know of four other people who have been involved in business ventures with him that have all ended badly.  I conclude that it is his fault.  He lets people down.  He takes an irrational dislike to them and then sets about sabotaging his relationships.  He always said, that he particularly wanted this business to be a sucess so he could put the fingers up to his father in law, who clearly viewed him as a loser.  It gives me some satisfaction to know that he will have to have admitted yet another failure.  That must hurt.

Since leaving a year ago, I have not had the courage to see if the website is still up.  If it is, he lied and kept the business going and the whole sorry story was simply a way to get rid of me.  All he had to do, was communicate with me, tell me what was wrong so we could then have either put it right or gone our separate ways without all the subterfuge.  I was tempted to write to companies house and complain about this man, to warn them about his underhand business dealings and show him up for the serial company wrecker that he surely was.  But I didn’t.  People have told me I should have sued him but I am not that way inclined.  It seems better to move on and forget people like that.  They aren’t worth my time and effort.

I seem to be one of these people who if I didn’t have bad luck, would have no luck at all!

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