May 19, 2024 • 24 mins
In this week's edition of The Super Unemployable Podcast, I talk about my experience working at a Vancouver based tech company - Contac Services.
Arguably one of the worst CEOs I have ever encountered. However, it taught me a lot about how to focus, how to be responsible with cash flow and it was the job where I came up with my groundbreaking theory called The Tree of Granularity.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
32 jobs, 10 times being fired, and 22 times leaving under suspicious circumstances.
I am the Super Unemployable. Welcome to my podcast.
Today I'm going to be talking about a job that I had in 2010.
It by far was one of the biggest eye-openers that I've ever had in terms of
(00:23):
the type of CEO that I never wanted to become.
My job at that time, the place that I applied to was a company in Vancouver
called Contact Services.
Now they started out actually as a pretty great company. They were a print services company.
They had strong revenues. They had a solid team that had been there for a long time.
(00:44):
And to be honest, I don't even actually know who was running it under its contact services.
But what I can tell you is the guy who was running it when I joined. And his name was Riaz.
Now, Riaz, he was a fascinating guy, and I'll get to his story in a second.
But to give you some context, context, where I started was not for the print
(01:08):
division, but I started for their new technology division called My World.
Now, My World was a really fascinating concept. I was really excited to be part of it.
What it was were personalized URLs.
They called them pearls. worlds. And those personalized URLs came to you after
you booked some sort of travel or adventure booking.
(01:29):
Let's say you booked an airline ticket. And after you finished your booking,
immediately after you would get a personalized URL with your name,
your itinerary, your tickets, and details about where you were going.
So let's say you're going to Las Vegas, you would see the current weather.
You would be able to buy tickets to shows.
You'd be able to buy tickets to tours. Now, a lot of these services exist today,
(01:53):
but back then this was a really novel idea and I was really excited to be part of that team.
And so this MyWorld team was growing and it was growing fast and they'd raised
investor money and the company looked like it was poised to be hugely successful.
Some of their clients included Flight Center, Air Emirates, Air Canada,
WestJet, Carlson Wagonlet, like a whole bunch of big names at the time.
(02:18):
And so I thought, wow, I'm going to be at the cutting edge here.
And I love to travel. I was a backpacker for many, many years.
And so travel and technology was the perfect intersection for me.
So I did the interview and during the interview, I remember they asked me my
salary expectations and I gave some stupid number like $67,124.32.
(02:41):
I thought if I was that specific, it really showed I knew my worth and that would help me stand out.
I did end up getting a job offer. It seemed like kind of they were half laughing
when they said, well, we're just going to give you $68,000. How does that work for you?
And I said, okay, great. You know, I'll take it. And so they hired me on as
the marketing manager for my world.
(03:03):
And I was really, really excited my first day. I came in, I was strutting.
You know, it was probably my fifth or sixth job in my career that I'd been able
to walk into and really feel confident about and say, you know what? I know what I'm doing.
And I really liked the people that were around me. They were awesome.
We had such a good time together. There was so much intelligence and passion in that place.
(03:26):
But then there was Riaz. Riaz was the CEO. Now, I never met him in my interview process.
However, when I researched on Glassdoor, what I found was a lot of negative reviews.
And they all centered around Riaz.
People thought he was a jerk, that he had no vision, that he was not nice to
(03:46):
people, that there was no room to progress.
But you know, sometimes with Glassdoor, you do have to take it with a grain
of salt. assaults. There are
disgruntled employees who have their opinions about the way things went.
And especially if you get fired, you don't feel so good. So people can kind of take it out there.
But I tried to do my due diligence and I reached out to the secretary,
(04:07):
it was his direct secretary and asked about those reviews.
And she said, I'm aware of the reviews, but I can say that I've never seen any
of that behavior in my time working here, which two or three years.
I think you can imagine how naive I was reaching out to his personal secretary
to get this piece of advice.
Turns out she was lying. She was lying big time. She was a really nice girl.
(04:30):
She was just young and I think also intimidated by this CEO.
Now, Ries, what kind of guy was Ries? In a lot of ways, I envied Ries.
He was the guy that could go to a conference, sit down at the bar and talk to
anybody who who was around him and captivate them and gather their interest
in what he was talking about.
(04:52):
I heard a story where there was a big conference in Whistler that he wasn't even invited to.
And so that's exactly actually what he did was he went to the bar where everybody
went after the conference was over and started chatting people up like he wasn't in Ted D.
It did not intimidate him whatsoever to approach strangers.
He had this dogged confidence in himself and who he was.
(05:17):
That he could do those kinds of things. And I envy that. I try to be that person.
I struggle to be that person.
But those types of people often do succeed because you don't get if you don't
ask. And he was never afraid to ask.
Now back to MyWorld. MyWorld was growing. As I mentioned, there were a lot of
big brand names working with MyWorld.
(05:40):
We had Air Canada, WestJet, Air Emirates, Flight Center, et cetera,
et cetera. The list goes on and they were all interested in this technology.
It was a great technology.
Not only was it good for the airline to create an improved customer service
experience, but in those personalized URLs,
there were upsells to tickets and tours and all these other kinds of events
(06:03):
that a consumer, when they visited that location, would likely be interested in.
And so that was really fascinating to me because this was seemingly limitless potential.
Now, when I started, they tasked me very early on to write press releases and
update the website and do all kinds of very important things as the marketing
(06:24):
manager. And I did, and I executed.
The problem was that same guy who had the confidence to walk up to total strangers
and tell them about himself was the same guy that had a godlike complex.
Riaz thought there was no one bigger or better. I remember one time I wrote a press release.
It was a good press release. I don't know if it was the best press release,
(06:47):
but it was certainly a good first draft.
And I was asked to bring it down to Riaz. And I brought it down and I said,
Riaz, and I sat at his desk and I said, here's the press release.
He took it from my hands and in front of me without saying a word,
took a red pen and just started crossing off entire paragraphs in front of me.
He basically crossed off 90%
(07:08):
of my press release, sat back, put his feet on the desk in front of me.
So I was maybe two feet away from the base of his dirty shoes pointing at my
face, read the rest, put it back and said, I'll rewrite it.
What a jerk. I mean, seriously, I've had people hand me bad work in my career.
(07:33):
But never in a million years would I take such an approach to tell them that
I was unimpressed. But that was Riaz.
The stories continue from there. There was a analytics manager.
His sole job was to run analytics for all of the different business units and present them to Riaz.
(07:54):
He ended up becoming a direct report of mine during my time there.
And in that time, I was told very early on that his name was Malcolm.
That Malcolm was going to be fired and I was going to need to fire him.
But I looked at Malcolm and he was smart and he was hardworking and he was ambitious.
He was all the types of things you would want.
(08:14):
And so I thought to myself, I've got to get to the bottom of this.
So I took Malcolm out for coffee. We chatted and we talked.
And what became abundantly clear was that Malcolm was a phenomenal data scientist.
But because he was so deep into the data, he struggled to simplify what he was telling people.
(08:36):
And what I've learned is that with people like Riaz, when given a complicated
answer to what he sees as a simple question, his assumption is that that person
doesn't know what they're doing.
And to be fair, there's some truth to that.
So I taught Malcolm what I call the tree of granularity.
And the tree of granularity dictates that just like rocks and sand passing through a sieve.
(09:03):
The larger rocks stay at the top.
And as the sieves, various grates of sieves get smaller and smaller,
only the finest sand makes it through to the bottom.
I actually had a job in Brisbane, Australia, pounding rocks through progressively
smaller sieves for sampling.
That's actually what inspired the idea in the first place was that backpacking
(09:26):
job, terrible job of just spending hours a day pounding bigger rocks into smaller rocks.
But it applied perfectly to this situation and I've carried it with me,
this philosophy through life.
Now, if you imagine these rocks, you've got the largest rock at the top and
the finest sand at the bottom.
(09:48):
That rock at the top is very clearly identifiable what kind of rock it is.
But as you get progressively lower and It gets more and more granular.
There can be all types of different rocks, sediments, or little particles all
combined together that look like one mass.
What Malcolm was doing was he took that tree of granularity and he flipped it upside down.
(10:09):
He was presenting the finest granules and all their details first,
and then trying to work his way down to the simplest, easiest to understand
concept, which was the largest rock.
Over the course of the next two weeks, I trained Malcolm to turn his tree the other way around.
And when asked a question, he gave the very top of the tree of granularity,
(10:32):
that single rock, which is yes, no.
Okay. The top of that tree, when asked a question, are we growing?
Instead of saying a whole convoluted answer that means yes, he would simply say yes.
Then the next level is because.
So the next level of the tree is because, because, and one sentence.
(10:55):
And at that point, you stop and you allow the person asking you the question
to guide you how deep into the granularity they want to go.
And for most CEOs, they stop at the first two layers. Yes, because.
Some people will go to a third layer where they want a little bit more detail
and very, very few will get to the bottom. But I taught Malcolm to stop going
(11:20):
all the way to the bottom first.
And sure enough, he never made it to the bottom again.
I'll remember, I remember, it was probably three months after Malcolm and I
worked on that exercise.
He came back up to the office after having a meeting with Riaz and he was shaking.
And I thought, oh my God, what has Riaz done today? And he looked at me,
(11:43):
and he had a tear in his eye, and he said, for the first time in two and a half
years, Riaz said, good job.
And I remember feeling elated for Malcolm.
Malcolm finally got the recognition he deserved, and I was able to avoid having to fire him.
(12:05):
The irony is I was fired shortly after this conversation and Malcolm went on
to work with the company for another year but we'll get to that now Riaz.
He had a lot of things he wanted to do, and he spent a lot of time trying to do those things.
He had a print company, he had MyWorld, and he had a number of other things on the go.
(12:30):
Now, while Riaz was really good at making relationships, he was very,
very bad at running business, staying focused, and keeping his costs under control.
It was about five or six months into my time at the company where I was invited
out to the AGM. we flew from Vancouver to Toronto to meet with their largest investor.
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Now I thought we're going to go and we're going to share all the great things
that we're doing with the company.
And I was so proud to be a part of this, but it turns out that investor was
there to run a summit with the senior management and leadership team of the
my world project to get the costs under control,
and to get the vision focused.
(13:13):
Now, those are two things that I've carried with me as an entrepreneur.
The greatest companies on the planet can go down the toilet because of either
lack of focus or inability to manage expenses.
Oftentimes, they go hand in
hand. Now, I will never forget, the investor asked, what does my world do?
(13:35):
And nobody could answer the question according to my tree of granularity.
And he kept going around and around the room. And finally, when he got to me,
I said, honestly, we have never defined that question and put it into a simple answer.
And I told him what I thought it was.
(13:56):
And this big name investor, to be honest, I can't remember his name.
He said, now that is what we need more of.
Oh boy, did that ever make Riaz turn a little bit sideways? I don't think he
liked other people getting praise.
Certainly not from people that he perceived to be in a authoritative position.
(14:19):
Riaz at the end said, oh, wow, you sure got the attention of whatever his name,
we'll call him Bill. Sure got the attention of Bill.
And I looked at him and I saw envy in his eyes.
And I felt a little bit threatened at the time. I know I shouldn't have,
but I did. And I gave a bit of a quippy response and I said, jealous, are you?
(14:39):
As you'll see later in the story, that didn't play out all that well.
Now it was day two of the summit and the investor,
after spending the first day, Bill, after spending the first day defining the
company and trying to create focus for the team, he wanted to spend that second
day talking about getting finances under control.
Now he started early on and he made a joke. He said, we're going to be looking
(15:02):
at everything, every expense that's going on, all the way down to when the lights
are on and how often we turn on that fire.
There was a gas-powered fireplace in the boardroom.
Now, of course, he was joking. These were pennies, and we were talking about
tens of millions of dollars.
But while he is talking, I notice across the table, this is one of those large
(15:23):
boardroom tables, Riaz kind of slowly gets up.
He kind of pulls up his pants in the way he used to. You know,
he's got one of those bellies, pushes his pants down, him, pulls his pants up
a little bit, tucks it at the back, and he slowly starts inching towards the
edge of the room while he's listening.
Nobody's really paying that much attention because he was a guy that tended
to get up and move around.
(15:44):
But all of a sudden, I see the hands behind his back. He starts dimming the
lights, dimming them down and down.
It gets to the point where I could barely see the paper.
And then the next thing I know, he flicks off the fire.
Riaz had taken so seriously what this guy was saying, so literally,
I should say, not even seriously.
(16:05):
He took it so literally that he essentially put us in the dark for the rest of the day.
Oh, Riaz, I will never, ever forget that. We get back from Toronto and Riaz
had taken seriously what the bill, the investor had said, but he didn't really
take to heart the message.
He understood we needed to create focus, but all he heard was,
(16:28):
well, let's create a video explaining what we do.
So he tasked me to hire a video production company to do a video on our company
and create essentially an elevator pitch.
I brought the team together. I brought Riaz into the room as well as the production company.
I'd explain to them what we were going to do.
(16:49):
And they came with a very, very well polished pitch on how we could do an elevator pitch style video.
It was excellent. It was about 30 seconds, 45 seconds video.
It explained exactly what my world was because it's not a complicated.
It's not a complicated product, and it certainly wasn't complicated for the companies to use.
(17:12):
But for Riaz, he did exactly what I tried to train Malcolm not to do.
All he could see was the granular nature of his business.
And so when it was his turn to speak, which he made sure was right away,
he threw out their pitch, said that's not enough, and went into detail about
(17:33):
all the things that the video should include.
In the end, it became apparent that he wanted a five-minute elevator pitch video.
The production company made note of that and said, are you sure you want it to be five minutes?
To which he said, we have to explain everything.
To which my response was, Riaz, do you want this to be an elevator pitch, correct? Yup.
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How tall is your building?
I'm not sure that that landed in the way that he appreciated.
And to be fair, I was giving him a bit of a direct threat to his decision making.
But in no world is a five minute video an elevator pitch. I'm sorry,
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but it does not matter who you are or what company you run.
A five minute video can never be considered an elevator pitch.
The drop-off guaranteed almost 80% of people would have dropped off in the first minute.
We had just left a conference about how we needed to focus.
We needed to narrow our message and make everything super clear.
(18:44):
Now, this wasn't the only challenge that I made to his program,
but it was certainly the most public.
At this time, I was getting just tired of working for Riaz. He was rude, condescending.
He believed he was the only person in the room that mattered.
And I struggled to keep up with that style of working. And it just wasn't working for me.
(19:09):
But I believed in the product. I believed in the product so heavily that I stayed.
And I continued to put in good work.
Bill, the investor, continued to send emails about how impressed he was with
how the messaging on the website had gotten better. Our newsletters were stronger.
And our overall outreach was at the best he'd seen.
(19:34):
Now, little did he know, all of that work came from me and my department.
So those things were things that I bypassed Riaz on to get over the line.
And then when the praise came, Riaz claimed it as his own.
But I didn't mind because it was moving forward the mission.
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A couple of days later, though, I was brought into the office.
Riaz was not there. HR was there. My direct manager, the VP, he was there.
And I was told that I was not going to be working at the company anymore.
This was a bit of a shock because everything I'd been doing up to that point was getting praise.
It turns out that it all stemmed from that elevator pitch comment.
(20:18):
Riaz didn't like it. He wasn't interested in it. I was out the door.
I can't say I was upset, but I wasn't happy that those were the terms I was going to go out on.
I would so much rather go out because my work sucked, not because I couldn't get along with the CEO.
But such is life. They handed me a contract. It was one of those non-confidentiality
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sign it before you leave things, which by the way, you do not have to sign. I did not.
I never signed the contract. It said I would never say anything disparaging
about the company, blah, blah, blah.
My reputation is worth more than one of those pieces of paper.
I'm not going to go around disparaging the company while they're still active.
As of this point, contact services does not exist anymore. My world failed.
(21:07):
I heard through former colleagues that Riaz had actually been using the money,
funneling it to another business, one of his family members.
The company that invested, you can look this up in online, it's all public.
They actually ended up taking over the company because they could no longer
(21:28):
service their debts and they went into some sort of liquidation mode.
This company with so much promise, with so many great people doing so many great
things was taken down by a CEO who had a godlike complex and an inability to focus.
And if everything that I've heard is true, an ethical boundary that was far
(21:53):
shorter than most people's.
Again, I don't know because I wasn't there exactly how that money was funneled,
but it would not surprise me.
It was such a sad thing to see go down.
But as the super unemployable, you are always going to see what's going wrong.
That is what makes you an entrepreneur.
(22:16):
Entrepreneurs solve problems. They identify problems.
And then from there, they create solutions. And when you have a really receptive
leadership team, they will rise you up.
But the vast majority of them will take you down.
I would actually encourage all of you to look up the story of the founders of Home Depot.
(22:38):
They worked for another very successful hardware store.
I can't even remember what the hardware store's name was that they worked for
because they don't exist anymore.
But their upper management saw their potential, saw their problem-solving abilities,
and actually tried to hold them down and I think ultimately fired them before.
And then from that, they went off and co-founded Home Depot.
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The world's greatest entrepreneurs are also the world's most super unemployable.
I'm still around, building new businesses.
Riaz has fallen in. I don't even know where. He's disappeared.
Together as a super unemployable, we can be really proud of stories like this.
(23:22):
Like I said at the time I went home, I wasn't super sad my wife was pissed.
This wasn't the first job I had lost recently, that I'd been fired from.
Coming home and telling my wife that I'd been fired had become kind of commonplace
at that point. I think she was pretty concerned if I was ever going to become anything.
Pretty sure at one point she told me I was either going to be in jail on some
(23:45):
sort of assistance program or a super successful entrepreneur.
But at that point, I'm not really sure she was convinced I was going to be successful.
That's the hardest part, I think, isn't it? Going back and telling your loved
ones, your family members, whoever it is that you couldn't cut it.
And be fair, it's not that you couldn't cut it. Getting fired doesn't mean that
you are not talented, smart, or able.
(24:09):
It just means that you weren't in the right place. Certainly you weren't there at the right time.
That is what it means to be super unemployable. It's a badge of honor.
And that was my time. I would like to, I encourage all of you to reach out to me.
Anybody who feels super unemployable or has a super unemployable story, I want to hear from you.
I'd like to do it at you to join me on my podcast and tell your story,
(24:34):
your getting fired story,
you're leaving under suspicious circumstances, reach out to me at dean at superunemployable.com
and we'll set up a meeting. We'll chat.
And if everything goes well, we'll have that conversation on the podcast.
I look forward to seeing you all next time. Take care.
32 jobs, 10 times being fired, and 22 times leaving under suspicious circumstances.
I am the Super Unemployable. Welcome to my podcast.
Today I'm going to be talking about a job that I had in 2010.
It by far was one of the biggest eye-openers that I've ever had in terms of
(00:23):
the type of CEO that I never wanted to become.
My job at that time, the place that I applied to was a company in Vancouver
called Contact Services.
Now they started out actually as a pretty great company. They were a print services company.
They had strong revenues. They had a solid team that had been there for a long time.
(00:44):
And to be honest, I don't even actually know who was running it under its contact services.
But what I can tell you is the guy who was running it when I joined. And his name was Riaz.
Now, Riaz, he was a fascinating guy, and I'll get to his story in a second.
But to give you some context, context, where I started was not for the print
(01:08):
division, but I started for their new technology division called My World.
Now, My World was a really fascinating concept. I was really excited to be part of it.
What it was were personalized URLs.
They called them pearls. worlds. And those personalized URLs came to you after
you booked some sort of travel or adventure booking.
(01:29):
Let's say you booked an airline ticket. And after you finished your booking,
immediately after you would get a personalized URL with your name,
your itinerary, your tickets, and details about where you were going.
So let's say you're going to Las Vegas, you would see the current weather.
You would be able to buy tickets to shows.
You'd be able to buy tickets to tours. Now, a lot of these services exist today,
(01:53):
but back then this was a really novel idea and I was really excited to be part of that team.
And so this MyWorld team was growing and it was growing fast and they'd raised
investor money and the company looked like it was poised to be hugely successful.
Some of their clients included Flight Center, Air Emirates, Air Canada,
WestJet, Carlson Wagonlet, like a whole bunch of big names at the time.
(02:18):
And so I thought, wow, I'm going to be at the cutting edge here.
And I love to travel. I was a backpacker for many, many years.
And so travel and technology was the perfect intersection for me.
So I did the interview and during the interview, I remember they asked me my
salary expectations and I gave some stupid number like $67,124.32.
(02:41):
I thought if I was that specific, it really showed I knew my worth and that would help me stand out.
I did end up getting a job offer. It seemed like kind of they were half laughing
when they said, well, we're just going to give you $68,000. How does that work for you?
And I said, okay, great. You know, I'll take it. And so they hired me on as
the marketing manager for my world.
(03:03):
And I was really, really excited my first day. I came in, I was strutting.
You know, it was probably my fifth or sixth job in my career that I'd been able
to walk into and really feel confident about and say, you know what? I know what I'm doing.
And I really liked the people that were around me. They were awesome.
We had such a good time together. There was so much intelligence and passion in that place.
(03:26):
But then there was Riaz. Riaz was the CEO. Now, I never met him in my interview process.
However, when I researched on Glassdoor, what I found was a lot of negative reviews.
And they all centered around Riaz.
People thought he was a jerk, that he had no vision, that he was not nice to
(03:46):
people, that there was no room to progress.
But you know, sometimes with Glassdoor, you do have to take it with a grain
of salt. assaults. There are
disgruntled employees who have their opinions about the way things went.
And especially if you get fired, you don't feel so good. So people can kind of take it out there.
But I tried to do my due diligence and I reached out to the secretary,
(04:07):
it was his direct secretary and asked about those reviews.
And she said, I'm aware of the reviews, but I can say that I've never seen any
of that behavior in my time working here, which two or three years.
I think you can imagine how naive I was reaching out to his personal secretary
to get this piece of advice.
Turns out she was lying. She was lying big time. She was a really nice girl.
(04:30):
She was just young and I think also intimidated by this CEO.
Now, Ries, what kind of guy was Ries? In a lot of ways, I envied Ries.
He was the guy that could go to a conference, sit down at the bar and talk to
anybody who who was around him and captivate them and gather their interest
in what he was talking about.
(04:52):
I heard a story where there was a big conference in Whistler that he wasn't even invited to.
And so that's exactly actually what he did was he went to the bar where everybody
went after the conference was over and started chatting people up like he wasn't in Ted D.
It did not intimidate him whatsoever to approach strangers.
He had this dogged confidence in himself and who he was.
(05:17):
That he could do those kinds of things. And I envy that. I try to be that person.
I struggle to be that person.
But those types of people often do succeed because you don't get if you don't
ask. And he was never afraid to ask.
Now back to MyWorld. MyWorld was growing. As I mentioned, there were a lot of
big brand names working with MyWorld.
(05:40):
We had Air Canada, WestJet, Air Emirates, Flight Center, et cetera,
et cetera. The list goes on and they were all interested in this technology.
It was a great technology.
Not only was it good for the airline to create an improved customer service
experience, but in those personalized URLs,
there were upsells to tickets and tours and all these other kinds of events
(06:03):
that a consumer, when they visited that location, would likely be interested in.
And so that was really fascinating to me because this was seemingly limitless potential.
Now, when I started, they tasked me very early on to write press releases and
update the website and do all kinds of very important things as the marketing
(06:24):
manager. And I did, and I executed.
The problem was that same guy who had the confidence to walk up to total strangers
and tell them about himself was the same guy that had a godlike complex.
Riaz thought there was no one bigger or better. I remember one time I wrote a press release.
It was a good press release. I don't know if it was the best press release,
(06:47):
but it was certainly a good first draft.
And I was asked to bring it down to Riaz. And I brought it down and I said,
Riaz, and I sat at his desk and I said, here's the press release.
He took it from my hands and in front of me without saying a word,
took a red pen and just started crossing off entire paragraphs in front of me.
He basically crossed off 90%
(07:08):
of my press release, sat back, put his feet on the desk in front of me.
So I was maybe two feet away from the base of his dirty shoes pointing at my
face, read the rest, put it back and said, I'll rewrite it.
What a jerk. I mean, seriously, I've had people hand me bad work in my career.
(07:33):
But never in a million years would I take such an approach to tell them that
I was unimpressed. But that was Riaz.
The stories continue from there. There was a analytics manager.
His sole job was to run analytics for all of the different business units and present them to Riaz.
(07:54):
He ended up becoming a direct report of mine during my time there.
And in that time, I was told very early on that his name was Malcolm.
That Malcolm was going to be fired and I was going to need to fire him.
But I looked at Malcolm and he was smart and he was hardworking and he was ambitious.
He was all the types of things you would want.
(08:14):
And so I thought to myself, I've got to get to the bottom of this.
So I took Malcolm out for coffee. We chatted and we talked.
And what became abundantly clear was that Malcolm was a phenomenal data scientist.
But because he was so deep into the data, he struggled to simplify what he was telling people.
(08:36):
And what I've learned is that with people like Riaz, when given a complicated
answer to what he sees as a simple question, his assumption is that that person
doesn't know what they're doing.
And to be fair, there's some truth to that.
So I taught Malcolm what I call the tree of granularity.
And the tree of granularity dictates that just like rocks and sand passing through a sieve.
(09:03):
The larger rocks stay at the top.
And as the sieves, various grates of sieves get smaller and smaller,
only the finest sand makes it through to the bottom.
I actually had a job in Brisbane, Australia, pounding rocks through progressively
smaller sieves for sampling.
That's actually what inspired the idea in the first place was that backpacking
(09:26):
job, terrible job of just spending hours a day pounding bigger rocks into smaller rocks.
But it applied perfectly to this situation and I've carried it with me,
this philosophy through life.
Now, if you imagine these rocks, you've got the largest rock at the top and
the finest sand at the bottom.
(09:48):
That rock at the top is very clearly identifiable what kind of rock it is.
But as you get progressively lower and It gets more and more granular.
There can be all types of different rocks, sediments, or little particles all
combined together that look like one mass.
What Malcolm was doing was he took that tree of granularity and he flipped it upside down.
(10:09):
He was presenting the finest granules and all their details first,
and then trying to work his way down to the simplest, easiest to understand
concept, which was the largest rock.
Over the course of the next two weeks, I trained Malcolm to turn his tree the other way around.
And when asked a question, he gave the very top of the tree of granularity,
(10:32):
that single rock, which is yes, no.
Okay. The top of that tree, when asked a question, are we growing?
Instead of saying a whole convoluted answer that means yes, he would simply say yes.
Then the next level is because.
So the next level of the tree is because, because, and one sentence.
(10:55):
And at that point, you stop and you allow the person asking you the question
to guide you how deep into the granularity they want to go.
And for most CEOs, they stop at the first two layers. Yes, because.
Some people will go to a third layer where they want a little bit more detail
and very, very few will get to the bottom. But I taught Malcolm to stop going
(11:20):
all the way to the bottom first.
And sure enough, he never made it to the bottom again.
I'll remember, I remember, it was probably three months after Malcolm and I
worked on that exercise.
He came back up to the office after having a meeting with Riaz and he was shaking.
And I thought, oh my God, what has Riaz done today? And he looked at me,
(11:43):
and he had a tear in his eye, and he said, for the first time in two and a half
years, Riaz said, good job.
And I remember feeling elated for Malcolm.
Malcolm finally got the recognition he deserved, and I was able to avoid having to fire him.
(12:05):
The irony is I was fired shortly after this conversation and Malcolm went on
to work with the company for another year but we'll get to that now Riaz.
He had a lot of things he wanted to do, and he spent a lot of time trying to do those things.
He had a print company, he had MyWorld, and he had a number of other things on the go.
(12:30):
Now, while Riaz was really good at making relationships, he was very,
very bad at running business, staying focused, and keeping his costs under control.
It was about five or six months into my time at the company where I was invited
out to the AGM. we flew from Vancouver to Toronto to meet with their largest investor.
(12:51):
Now I thought we're going to go and we're going to share all the great things
that we're doing with the company.
And I was so proud to be a part of this, but it turns out that investor was
there to run a summit with the senior management and leadership team of the
my world project to get the costs under control,
and to get the vision focused.
(13:13):
Now, those are two things that I've carried with me as an entrepreneur.
The greatest companies on the planet can go down the toilet because of either
lack of focus or inability to manage expenses.
Oftentimes, they go hand in
hand. Now, I will never forget, the investor asked, what does my world do?
(13:35):
And nobody could answer the question according to my tree of granularity.
And he kept going around and around the room. And finally, when he got to me,
I said, honestly, we have never defined that question and put it into a simple answer.
And I told him what I thought it was.
(13:56):
And this big name investor, to be honest, I can't remember his name.
He said, now that is what we need more of.
Oh boy, did that ever make Riaz turn a little bit sideways? I don't think he
liked other people getting praise.
Certainly not from people that he perceived to be in a authoritative position.
(14:19):
Riaz at the end said, oh, wow, you sure got the attention of whatever his name,
we'll call him Bill. Sure got the attention of Bill.
And I looked at him and I saw envy in his eyes.
And I felt a little bit threatened at the time. I know I shouldn't have,
but I did. And I gave a bit of a quippy response and I said, jealous, are you?
(14:39):
As you'll see later in the story, that didn't play out all that well.
Now it was day two of the summit and the investor,
after spending the first day, Bill, after spending the first day defining the
company and trying to create focus for the team, he wanted to spend that second
day talking about getting finances under control.
Now he started early on and he made a joke. He said, we're going to be looking
(15:02):
at everything, every expense that's going on, all the way down to when the lights
are on and how often we turn on that fire.
There was a gas-powered fireplace in the boardroom.
Now, of course, he was joking. These were pennies, and we were talking about
tens of millions of dollars.
But while he is talking, I notice across the table, this is one of those large
(15:23):
boardroom tables, Riaz kind of slowly gets up.
He kind of pulls up his pants in the way he used to. You know,
he's got one of those bellies, pushes his pants down, him, pulls his pants up
a little bit, tucks it at the back, and he slowly starts inching towards the
edge of the room while he's listening.
Nobody's really paying that much attention because he was a guy that tended
to get up and move around.
(15:44):
But all of a sudden, I see the hands behind his back. He starts dimming the
lights, dimming them down and down.
It gets to the point where I could barely see the paper.
And then the next thing I know, he flicks off the fire.
Riaz had taken so seriously what this guy was saying, so literally,
I should say, not even seriously.
(16:05):
He took it so literally that he essentially put us in the dark for the rest of the day.
Oh, Riaz, I will never, ever forget that. We get back from Toronto and Riaz
had taken seriously what the bill, the investor had said, but he didn't really
take to heart the message.
He understood we needed to create focus, but all he heard was,
(16:28):
well, let's create a video explaining what we do.
So he tasked me to hire a video production company to do a video on our company
and create essentially an elevator pitch.
I brought the team together. I brought Riaz into the room as well as the production company.
I'd explain to them what we were going to do.
(16:49):
And they came with a very, very well polished pitch on how we could do an elevator pitch style video.
It was excellent. It was about 30 seconds, 45 seconds video.
It explained exactly what my world was because it's not a complicated.
It's not a complicated product, and it certainly wasn't complicated for the companies to use.
(17:12):
But for Riaz, he did exactly what I tried to train Malcolm not to do.
All he could see was the granular nature of his business.
And so when it was his turn to speak, which he made sure was right away,
he threw out their pitch, said that's not enough, and went into detail about
(17:33):
all the things that the video should include.
In the end, it became apparent that he wanted a five-minute elevator pitch video.
The production company made note of that and said, are you sure you want it to be five minutes?
To which he said, we have to explain everything.
To which my response was, Riaz, do you want this to be an elevator pitch, correct? Yup.
(17:59):
How tall is your building?
I'm not sure that that landed in the way that he appreciated.
And to be fair, I was giving him a bit of a direct threat to his decision making.
But in no world is a five minute video an elevator pitch. I'm sorry,
(18:20):
but it does not matter who you are or what company you run.
A five minute video can never be considered an elevator pitch.
The drop-off guaranteed almost 80% of people would have dropped off in the first minute.
We had just left a conference about how we needed to focus.
We needed to narrow our message and make everything super clear.
(18:44):
Now, this wasn't the only challenge that I made to his program,
but it was certainly the most public.
At this time, I was getting just tired of working for Riaz. He was rude, condescending.
He believed he was the only person in the room that mattered.
And I struggled to keep up with that style of working. And it just wasn't working for me.
(19:09):
But I believed in the product. I believed in the product so heavily that I stayed.
And I continued to put in good work.
Bill, the investor, continued to send emails about how impressed he was with
how the messaging on the website had gotten better. Our newsletters were stronger.
And our overall outreach was at the best he'd seen.
(19:34):
Now, little did he know, all of that work came from me and my department.
So those things were things that I bypassed Riaz on to get over the line.
And then when the praise came, Riaz claimed it as his own.
But I didn't mind because it was moving forward the mission.
(19:55):
A couple of days later, though, I was brought into the office.
Riaz was not there. HR was there. My direct manager, the VP, he was there.
And I was told that I was not going to be working at the company anymore.
This was a bit of a shock because everything I'd been doing up to that point was getting praise.
It turns out that it all stemmed from that elevator pitch comment.
(20:18):
Riaz didn't like it. He wasn't interested in it. I was out the door.
I can't say I was upset, but I wasn't happy that those were the terms I was going to go out on.
I would so much rather go out because my work sucked, not because I couldn't get along with the CEO.
But such is life. They handed me a contract. It was one of those non-confidentiality
(20:44):
sign it before you leave things, which by the way, you do not have to sign. I did not.
I never signed the contract. It said I would never say anything disparaging
about the company, blah, blah, blah.
My reputation is worth more than one of those pieces of paper.
I'm not going to go around disparaging the company while they're still active.
As of this point, contact services does not exist anymore. My world failed.
(21:07):
I heard through former colleagues that Riaz had actually been using the money,
funneling it to another business, one of his family members.
The company that invested, you can look this up in online, it's all public.
They actually ended up taking over the company because they could no longer
(21:28):
service their debts and they went into some sort of liquidation mode.
This company with so much promise, with so many great people doing so many great
things was taken down by a CEO who had a godlike complex and an inability to focus.
And if everything that I've heard is true, an ethical boundary that was far
(21:53):
shorter than most people's.
Again, I don't know because I wasn't there exactly how that money was funneled,
but it would not surprise me.
It was such a sad thing to see go down.
But as the super unemployable, you are always going to see what's going wrong.
That is what makes you an entrepreneur.
(22:16):
Entrepreneurs solve problems. They identify problems.
And then from there, they create solutions. And when you have a really receptive
leadership team, they will rise you up.
But the vast majority of them will take you down.
I would actually encourage all of you to look up the story of the founders of Home Depot.
(22:38):
They worked for another very successful hardware store.
I can't even remember what the hardware store's name was that they worked for
because they don't exist anymore.
But their upper management saw their potential, saw their problem-solving abilities,
and actually tried to hold them down and I think ultimately fired them before.
And then from that, they went off and co-founded Home Depot.
(23:02):
The world's greatest entrepreneurs are also the world's most super unemployable.
I'm still around, building new businesses.
Riaz has fallen in. I don't even know where. He's disappeared.
Together as a super unemployable, we can be really proud of stories like this.
(23:22):
Like I said at the time I went home, I wasn't super sad my wife was pissed.
This wasn't the first job I had lost recently, that I'd been fired from.
Coming home and telling my wife that I'd been fired had become kind of commonplace
at that point. I think she was pretty concerned if I was ever going to become anything.
Pretty sure at one point she told me I was either going to be in jail on some
(23:45):
sort of assistance program or a super successful entrepreneur.
But at that point, I'm not really sure she was convinced I was going to be successful.
That's the hardest part, I think, isn't it? Going back and telling your loved
ones, your family members, whoever it is that you couldn't cut it.
And be fair, it's not that you couldn't cut it. Getting fired doesn't mean that
you are not talented, smart, or able.
(24:09):
It just means that you weren't in the right place. Certainly you weren't there at the right time.
That is what it means to be super unemployable. It's a badge of honor.
And that was my time. I would like to, I encourage all of you to reach out to me.
Anybody who feels super unemployable or has a super unemployable story, I want to hear from you.
I'd like to do it at you to join me on my podcast and tell your story,
(24:34):
your getting fired story,
you're leaving under suspicious circumstances, reach out to me at dean at superunemployable.com
and we'll set up a meeting. We'll chat.
And if everything goes well, we'll have that conversation on the podcast.
I look forward to seeing you all next time. Take care.
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