The small company where I worked when this happened was struggling with sales, due to the combined effect of a slow market nationwide and our prices being above the average, which made sales more difficult with customers not into all the quality details. Our products would mostly be installed by plumbers.

[Owner] thinks that a good move to boost our sales would be to start exporting to other EU countries. So, [Owner] hires a person with experience in marketing and proficient in the language of the target country.

Owner: “I have decided that we need to expand our commercial network to your country, and I want you to take that task.”

Marketer: “I understand. Considering that our products and brand are unknown in there, I think we should start with some advertising and maybe participating in expositions and fairs in the country, so that customers will learn about us and the company.”

Owner: “Fairs and expos abroad would cost too much for us to be present, between shipping materials and people there. I have a better idea: take the Yellow Pages for the biggest city and give a phone call to all plumbers you find in there and offer them our products.”

The marketer feigns a smile to pretend they are catching the joke.

Owner: *Continuing with a straight face.* “Then, move on to the next big city.”

I saw the marketer dying inside at the end of that sentence.

Client: “Take down the exterior photo of our store on our Twitter immediately. It looks like slum trash. Please put up a picture of the interior instead. We are high-end, I put $100,000+ into this business, and your picture doesn’t do us justice. What were you thinking?”

The client pays $300 a month for rent for their store. I’m not sure they’re as “high-end” as they think they are.

I was managing a client’s professional Facebook page. The owner encouraged me to post something myself, so I posted a link to a related YouTube video that his followers might find interesting. 

I swiftly got a message from the owner who just “wanted to give me a few tips”. After giving me some of the worst branding advice I have ever heard, he shared this little nugget.

Client: “Never give an external link to YouTube or Vimeo or anything like that unless it’s one or two hours long or very good content. If people leave the page to see the video on YouTube, they are surely not coming back to comment on it. If it’s two or three minutes, just upload it to the page!”

I asked him to clarify, just to make sure he was really saying what I thought he was saying.

Yes, he wanted me to illegally repost other people’s work. When I told him this was illegal, he vehemently argued with me until he removed my admin permissions.

I was not sad to see that page go, but I did track down the original creators of the videos in the page’s history and send them some emails about stolen content.

All of last year, I was the editor for a content marketing blog, managing a team of freelance writers. My work was done completely remotely, so when I wanted to ask for a raise at the beginning of this year, I emailed the company owner. I outlined the good work I’d done in the past year and reminded her that she’d mentioned the possibility of higher pay for efficient work when she hired me.

Two days later, instead of a personal response to my email, she sent a stock email to me and the entire writing team about how she was letting us all go due to a lack of funds, effective immediately.

Me: “I’m sorry to hear that. I’ll get my last invoice to you later today and get all existing content queued up for you.”

Client: “We just don’t have the money to keep it running. I should have told you last month, but I just couldn’t.”

Ever since, she’s been keeping the blog going on her own and emailing me weekly with questions because she didn’t learn how to use the system before firing me.

My company produced a high-end brand video for a client. They loved it, and it helped get them at least one client worth over a million dollars — and that’s just the one we know about. 

A year later, they asked for all the raw footage so that another company could use our work to make another video. Our contract clearly stated that the client only owned the finished video, not the parts. However, we didn’t complain. We asked them to provide us with a hard drive and pay us for the time it would take to get copy files from the archive (on LTO tape, in an archival vault across the country) and send them.

Their response? They threatened to sue us and slander our company’s name online unless we agreed to work for free. They also said they’d never work with us again and took some nasty potshots at our company. This from a company who claims its core values include “treating people with respect.” 

I have a sneaking suspicion that if I do pull that LTO tape from archive, I will find that it has somehow been damaged or erased in storage. Not so coincidentally, I’ve decided that one of our core values is never to work for bullies, and certainly never for free.