Dan didn’t raise his voice when he did it.
He didn’t have to.
He leaned back in his chair—the one with the high leather back that looked like it belonged behind a judge’s bench—and tapped my contract with two fingers like it was a dead fly.
“Well,” he said, almost cheerful, “an actual agreement is only worth the paper it’s written on.”
Then he looked up at me with that shiny-salesman grin that always made me feel like I needed to check my pockets afterward.
“You don’t make any sales,” he continued. “You haven’t built the business. So why would you get a cut?”
I felt my jaw lock. My hands stayed flat against my knees. I was proud of myself for that much.
Dan let the words hang, savoring them.
“You don’t get a cut,” he repeated, like explaining a simple rule to a child. “If you don’t like it… you’re welcome to leave.”
There it was. The same line he’d used any time someone questioned him. The company’s favorite escape hatch:
If you don’t like it, leave.
Only this time it wasn’t about a budget request or a marketing campaign. This time it was about the shares.
The pool of shares Dan had just given to every salesperson on his team—shares that were suddenly worth real money because the company was being acquired.
Shares I’d been verbally told, back when we had a real marketing manager, would be shared across the whole team.
Shares Dan decided I didn’t deserve because my work didn’t have “sales numbers” attached to it.
I stared at him, expression neutral, stomach turning hot and cold.
“Understood,” I said.
Dan’s grin widened.
He thought he’d won.
He thought he’d broken me the way he’d broken other people—with a smirk, a threat, and a door marked exit.
What Dan didn’t realize was that I’d already made my decision.
I was going to leave.
I just wasn’t going to tell him.
And when I left, I was going to do it exactly the way he ordered.
The Job I Loved Before Dan Got His Hands On It
I graduated university a few years back and immediately did what every entry-level marketing graduate does: applied to everything, got ignored by most of it, and watched my savings shrink while LinkedIn told me to “stay positive.”
When I finally found a role that was a hybrid of marketing and sales support, I took it. It wasn’t my dream job, but it was in my field and it paid the bills.
The company was a medium-sized business specializing in recruitment, contractor hiring, and headhunting. They also subcontracted work for a recruitment technology provider—the kind of platform that builds the front end for job postings and candidate pipelines.
That tech piece mattered to me, because I’d always been digital-first. I liked systems. I liked optimization. I liked the clean logic of a dashboard that told the truth even when people didn’t.
The role was split.
About half my time was marketing—events, suppliers, campaigns, social, website stuff.
The rest was sales support and billable work.
Billable work meant building custom job sites that hosted the recruitment system front end. Simple site builds. It was a steep learning curve, but I had web developer friends who helped me get familiar with the basics. Enough to be useful. Enough to deliver.
And for about eighteen months?
Things went swimmingly.
Not because the company was perfect. It wasn’t.
But because I had one manager who made it tolerable.
The marketing manager—my kindred spirit—actually understood marketing. She defended budgets. She cared about the work. She treated people like people.
The sales manager?
That was Dan.
Dan was late forties, old-school sales, arrogant and headstrong. The kind of guy who lived for “closing” and bragging about it. He wore shiny shoes and carried himself like the hallway was a runway.
He sneered at anything digital. To Dan, social media was a waste of money. Website optimization was “fluff.” Multi-channel marketing was “noise.”
But we could justify digital spend by offsetting it with billable website work, so it wasn’t an argument worth burning energy on. We kept the peace. I did my job. We hit targets.
Then the marketing manager moved on to bigger and better things.
And instead of promoting me or hiring a replacement, the company did what companies do when they don’t value marketing:
They dumped marketing onto Dan.
That’s when everything changed.
“If You Don’t Like It, You Can Always Leave.”
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