Dan was demoted.
He was decoupled from marketing.
His budget was reduced by half.
A new, separate marketing function was created—because leadership finally understood something Dan never did:
Marketing isn’t sales support.
It’s not “nice-to-have.”
It’s an engine.
Dan’s sales team was put under review and forced to carry out their own reporting, tracking, and metrics—the stuff I’d been delivering with coherence and consistency.
Their capacity dropped.
A couple of them left.
They missed key deals.
And in the fallout, they completely dropped the ball on the client website builds.
They went to market trying to recruit someone who could fulfill those builds.
Dan was astounded to discover experienced technical marketing staff were hard to find and expensive.
They couldn’t fill the role.
So the builds were taken back in-house by the tech provider.
The tech provider that now had an experienced resource to deploy.
That resource was me.
Dan would have seen the funding arrangements.
He would have seen my day rate.
And my day rate was substantially higher than his.
He had to live with that for twelve months—bearing the displeasure of superiors, holding his demoted position, waiting out the time requirement so he could claim his share payout.
Then he resigned two weeks after the anniversary of the purchase.
The company enforced a six-month notice period.
Then slapped him with another twelve-month noncompete clause.
Which meant he couldn’t work for a competing company or start his own.
So any benefit he got from share payouts was basically consumed unless he switched industries or moved cities.
The last time my IT buddy checked, Dan was on the job market.
And me?
I was living the life of a contractor.
I got paid the hours I worked.
I worked the hours I wanted.
The funniest part isn’t that Dan lost his marketing power.
It isn’t that he had to call me and leave voicemails like a man drowning.
It isn’t even that I ended up billing the tech provider at a rate he had to approve as sales lead, knowing every invoice was money he could’ve saved if he hadn’t tried to treat me like disposable.
The funniest part—the part that still makes me smile—is that Dan didn’t lose because I screamed.
He lost because he spoke too clearly.
He gave me an ultimatum.
He thought it would scare me.
And I followed it exactly.
“If the signed contract is not on my desk on Friday, don’t even bother coming to the office on Monday.”
Okay.
I didn’t bother.
Sometimes I think about the advice my old marketing manager gave me—“each job pays you twice”—and I realize Dan helped pay me too.
Not with the shares.
With the motivation to build skills that made me unreplaceable elsewhere.
With the push I needed to stop waiting for permission.
And with one beautifully stupid sentence that let me walk away clean while he set his own career on fire.
THE END
See more on the next page
Advertisement
