During the recession that began in 2008 and lasted well into 2010, the United States came to realize that there was a cost to the go-go nature of trying to run an economic engine on full gas and hot for too long. The Bush tax cuts along with the banking industry’s fun-and-games with toxic housing assets ran the economy straight into the ground. The unbudgeted costs of war in Iraq and Afghanistan were sucking the country dry as well. Eight years of daft governance under Bush resulted in healthcare insurance costs rising by 96%. In the face of all that worldly turmoil, our family situation and finances bumped along from month-to-month as I got dumped from the job at Dukane because the company lost revenue and had bills to pay for its failed capital venture into Student Response Systems.

Our friends stood by us through all that, helping out where they could, and that turned out to be almost everywhere. Most of all it was making our monthly mortgage and expenses that was tough during period when I was technically out of work and freelancing to make ends meet. My wife totaled up our bills one night and came up with an amount of $3500 to cover expenses over several weeks. That evening we said a little prayer and I put her to bed after a chemo treatment that day.

In the morning, I got up early to fix her oatmeal and heard a thump at the front door. Someone had dropped off a package. Often we received cards and food provided by people following our needs through the Lotsa Helping Hands online portal. That morning I picked up the envelope and opened it to find $3700 inside. We had not spoken a word to anyone about our bills, but that money covered them all.

Then I found work again in late winter. The challenge this time was the commute, as the agency where I landed a job was in Palatine thirty-plus miles away. That meant driving there early in the morning through traffic that was often snarly at the many stoplights.

Filling out the paperwork that first day on the job, I completed the forms for healthcare insurance. Of course, it asked for any current health conditions, and I did not want to lie. In the space for dependents, I added my wife and children and filled in the slot next to her name with the words, Ovarian Cancer.

The HR director at the company was the wife of the firm’s President. I thought about the supposed protections of HIPPA laws that are supposed to protect healthcare privacy. I proceeded with the paperwork realizing that technically my wife was categorized as a person with a “pre-existing condition.”

I’d been hired as an Account Executive thinking that I’d be assigned to manage existing business. Instead, I was sent out on the road to generate new business. Effectively that made me a salesperson, and the main strategy for approaching potential B2B accounts was going door-to-door dropping off bottles of premium incentive pepper sauce that aligned with the company branding.

By 2010, the world of sales and business development was rapidly changing, and rightly so. No one was going door-to-door anymore. Sales development was migrating to online prospecting and qualification, but there we were, another couple of salespeople and I, embarrassing ourselves barging into businesses with pepper sauce in hand. The cognitive dissonance of a marketing agency ignoring the advancing nature of business development was not lost on me.

It was clear that I wasn’t hired with any purpose in mind but the hopeful notion that my long business experience would compensate for their own lack of sales strategy. Recall that the business climate in those days was less than healthy. As a result, the sales cycles were quite long given the reticence of companies to invest in marketing when their ROIs were not looking good. “That’s when they need marketing!” the saying always goes. “Go after the ‘low-hangin’ fruit!”

I’ve always hated the expression “low-hanging fruit.” It is an insult to any potential client, suggesting they’re some sort of easy pushover or just waiting to be sold. I’ve also sat in many internal agency meetings where clients were being mocked or criticized. “You shouldn’t talk like that,” I’ve tried to advise. “That attitude comes through to the client sooner or later.”

For these reasons, I’ve often not been fond of outright cold-calling businesses. Where is the respect in that? Yet that is the “old school” way of selling that some companies wer still using early 2000s.

Challenges

The people I met were smart enough to challenge our entire proposition. One of them went so far as to hit me right where it hurts when it comes to the costs of marketing. “What do you even know about our business?” he demanded. “What makes you think you can sell our products better than we can?”

Now, the interesting part of that question is the rebound it represented when I thought about it. That agency actually did some nice work for its clients using integrated marketing strategies and tactics including online, direct response, email, newsletters and the like. But when it came to marketing the agency itself, the tactics reverted to cold-calling and sending out bottles of the pepper sauce to potential clients. In other words, the agency wasn’t listening to its own good advice.

In fact, it was worse than that. Any clients that came in through the mail marketing campaign were “off-limits” to the Account Executives and sales team. The odd psychology was that the agency’s own marketing was in some form “separate” from its sales efforts. That’s yet another example of cognitive dissonance, yet it is far more common than one might think that marketing agencies and the like don’t pa attention to their own expertise. I’ve seen that multiple times and was even hired recently on the premise that I’d get to help the agency do its own marketing. That never happened and guess what? Any leads that came in through the company’s website were “off limits” to anyone but quite-separate domain of the “business development” team.

That meant introducing account executives all over again to any new accounts. Plus, that marketing agency had not customer relationship management (CRM) software, so everyone working on account service was using their own communications methods to work with clients and conduct internal dialogue. The result was a perpetual shitshow of emails, Teams threads, video calls, client meetings and project management processes that required dozens of checks and balances to get even one thing done right.

Crazy difficult

This is all to point out that it’s easy for people in a competitive business environment to feel like they’re the crazy ones. When I proposed to that most recent company that it might make sense to have a CRM system that works for both Client Service Managers and Account Executives––whose functions crossed quite often and were frankly ill-defined––I was told to keep quiet because the Operations Manager had a past experience with a CRM system he didn’t like and basically didn’t want to risk any funding or affect the profit margin for which he might want to take credit. Plus, he didn’t want anyone telling him what to do.

So it wasn’t me that was crazy in that situation. It was the “don’t rock the boat” quotient at work. While many companies claim to like people that “think outside the box” that is a patent lie in most circumstances. That is particularly true for people whose brains work differently than the rote performance of routine executive functions. Folks that find new ways of doing things, or who ask questions of clients that seem outside the province of “business at hand” because it actually stimulates creative thinking are often frowned upon. That culture of conformity is massive in American business. True creativity and most types of neurodivergent thinking are deemed suspicious, even costly to consider.

Employees developing a reputation for divergent thinking or questioning the company line are often ushered out the door. That approach is the opposite of openly competitive thinking. When I worked in the newspaper business and developed a massive literacy program reaching 375,000 families, the people running the newspaper could not grasp the potential of a market exceeding the paper’s circulation by 200,000 households. Granted, it would have taken some effort to serve and develop that market, but it might have provided an alternative business model. Instead, the company focused on desperately flailing away at the churn of departing subscribers by offering new discounted sales. That was necessary, but it wasn’t progressive.

Winning ways

As a longtime distance runner and endurance athlete, one of the things I learned along the way was that there are multiple ways to compete in any event. You can win a race by taking the lead and challenging anyone to catch you, but that strategy won’t always work. You can also win a race by hanging back and “kicking” to surge past competitors at the end. The middle ground is more complex, involving tactics like drafting in the wind or water, or working with teammates to gain some sort of competitive advantage.

The cognitive dissonance of always doing things the same way because “it worked in the past” is the most dangerous and dumbest strategies of all. Yet over the years, that’s the so-called strategy I’ve seen time and again.

Fixed perceptions are also a problem in business that can gut or undermine an operation. A friend of mine once ran his own firm and that included managing the company’s health insurance program. When his wife had health issues that resulted in surgeries, his partners revolted against him, accusing their family of driving up health insurance costs. When my friend looked into the issue, the agent managing their program made it clear that the real reason why their premium costs went up was that other partners’ wives fell into an actuarial age for childbirth. That is considered a high-risk, high-cost proposition in the insurance industry.

As demonstrated, company perceptions of what causes rising healthcare rates are often wrong. When the company I worked for in 2010 unceremoniously dumped me for “non-performance,” the Pink Slip included a defensive offer to pay out $1500 for healthcare coverage going forward. This was a cynical ploy to cover up their fears and perhaps avoid being sued. Clearly, they’d freaked out about my wife’s cancer, yet small companies with under twenty employees can basically fire people for any reason without ramifications. I spoke with lawyers at that point but Illinois is a RightTo Work state and that means companies can fire you for any reason they choose.

By 2010 the controversial healthcare legislation branded Obamacare was passed on March 23. My wife’s “pre-existing” condition was technically no longer a competitive liability in the workplace. That hadn’t stopped me from being excommunicated yet again from the work world. Several companies in a row made life difficult if not impossible to manage working and caregiving at the same time. I thought to myself, “I’m not afraid to compete in this world, but at least the rules should be fair.”

However, the lessons weren’t over. The cognitive dissonance of corporate America included a healthcare system where the structure and business model of coverage were essentially a mistake of history. Add in the cynical corporate mantra “thinking outside the box” is the path to success and it all felt like a giant ruse of lies and conspiratorial conformity.

The honesty of genuine, open competition in the work world felt far away in those days.