Introduction and Dan’s Mission
In the complex world of employer-employee relationships, transparency often feels like a distant dream. Dan Goodman, LinkedIn Top Voice and founder of Dan Goodman Employment Advisory, is on a mission to change that narrative. With a keen eye for deceptive practices and a passion for empowering employees, Dan sheds light on the importance of transparency in the workplace.
The Importance of Transparency in Employer-Employee Relationships
“Question everything,” Dan advises. Blind loyalty has no place in today’s workforce. Employers may not always have your best interests at heart, and it’s crucial to approach every situation with a healthy dose of skepticism. Transparency, Dan emphasizes, is the cornerstone of trust.
Deceptive Practices: Restrictive Clauses, PIPs, and Severance Agreements
Behind closed doors, employers often wield restrictive clauses, performance improvement plans (PIPs), and severance agreements as tools of manipulation. These practices, while legal, can have devastating effects on employees. Dan urges workers to challenge these tactics and negotiate their employment agreements to safeguard their rights.
Navigating the Challenges of Accessing Financial and Industry Information
Accessing financial and industry information is no easy feat, but it’s not impossible. By asking intelligent questions and reading between the lines, employees can gain valuable insights into their organization’s standing. Dan provides strategies for navigating these murky waters, empowering workers to take control of their careers.
Negotiating Employment Agreements for Protection
“If you want the job, get it in writing,” Dan advises. Employment agreements are not set in stone, and there’s room for negotiation. From salary to severance terms, every detail matters. Dan encourages employees to advocate for themselves and secure agreements that prioritize their well-being.
The Value of Standing Up to Wrongdoing and Advocating for Change
In the face of wrongdoing, silence is not an option. Dan urges employees to confront issues head-on and advocate for change. References from employers may not be as valuable as they seem, and it’s essential to prioritize fairness and transparency above all else.
Conclusion
Transparency is not just a buzzword—it’s a necessity. In a world where information is power, employees must arm themselves with knowledge and stand up for what’s right. With Dan Goodman leading the charge, a future of fairness and equity in the workplace is within reach. It’s time to unveil the veil and create a culture that values transparency above all else.
Watch and listen here. Don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review!! ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
Transcript:
Mary (00:01.126)
Dan Goodman, welcome to Recruiting Insider.
Dan (00:04.285)
Thank you, it’s great to be here.
Mary (00:06.564)
For nearly three decades, Dan has been a fierce and passionate advocate for employees. As the founder of Truecommish, an audit service for salespeople, and more recently, Dan Goodman Employment Advisory, Dan is dedicated to empowering individuals to stand up against wrongdoing in the workplace. Dan’s mission is simple, yet profound, to ensure that you, the employee, are armed with the information you need to navigate the often murky waters of employee -employer relations.
Too often, employees find themselves in situations where they’ve been coerced, misled, or taken advantage of due to a lack of transparency or misinformation provided by their employers. Dan believes that no one should have to endure years or decades of regret for being mistreated and doing nothing about it. In today’s episode, we’re diving deep into the topic that your employer does not want you to know about.
We’ll be shedding some light on the morally and legally questionable practices that some employers engage in and how you can protect yourself against them. Let’s start broad. Can you share some categories of information that employers might prefer to keep under wraps from their employees?
Dan (01:18.717)
I mean really that’s a very general question. I mean it’s a set of the truth that’s across the board. I mean it’s almost every interaction that you have with them. Whether it’s your employment agreement, whether it’s your restrictive clauses that they make intentionally. I mean often times they make restrictive clauses with no intent of enforcing them. They’re just written so that they’ll scare you from ever doing anything. You know, when you’re put on a PIP, you know PIPs are supposedly to improve performance but they’re not really intended that way anymore if they ever were.
they’re really a clear message that we don’t want you here anymore and we’re looking to reduce separation costs and we’re giving you a heads up for you to go start looking for a job rather than being truthful and transparent and honest and say, hey, it’s not working out. We’re gonna give you a couple of months while you’re still an employee to go look for a job. And if you haven’t found one that time period, we’ll give you a month or two months of severance, whatever makes sense. And an employee would love that rather than sitting here guessing about whether or not they actually have a chance to beat the PIP. And if they do beat the PIP, will they lose their job anyway? And…
Why is my manager treating me differently? And why is he blowing off all these meetings? And what type of training and coaching am I really getting with this PIP? It’s across the board. The whole idea of severance. They suggest that severance, they dress severance up as almost they’re doing you a favor. That they do it because they’re nice or that they feel bad. It has nothing to do with that. You have something that they seek and they’re willing to pay you a lot of money for it. And that’s your signature on a release of liability to promise to never sue.
and release them any claims that you may have against them, past, present, future, known and unknown. That’s the sole reason why they give it. By its nature, it’s something that should be negotiated. They’re not doing you a favor. They’re seeking something that you have that they want and they’re willing to pay you money for it. So when I talk about that, and there’s so many other examples, I could give dozens and dozens of them. I’ve given you four or five just now. You need to look at it with a grain of salt. What they tell you is not necessarily reality or what’s going on.
and you need to question everything and not be blindly trusting and loyal.
Mary (03:19.197)
Absolutely. That’s a great starting point. Transparency is key in any healthy relationship and employer -employee relationships, you know, the dynamic is no different. But there are categories of information that some companies might be hesitant to share freely. So today we’ll be diving into things like financial details, safety concerns, and even potential legal issues. So the question is why would employers keep this information under wraps?
and how can employees navigate these situations effectively?
Dan (03:51.293)
Well, I mean, they want to keep it under wraps because they want you to have as little information as possible. When you have as little information as possible, you can’t make informed decisions and it’s more of an opportunity for them to kind of pull a fast one over you or reduce costs or separation costs or what have you. I mean, another example of something they really don’t want you to know too much about is comp plans. You know, when you’re interviewing, most employers won’t provide you a copy of the comp plan in advance until you get there. But yet if you’re in sales, 50 % of your income comes from your compensation.
your variable compensation, your commissions, but you’re not entitled to understand how you can earn off of it before you leave a prior employer to commit to this one to go there. I just think it’s wrong. You need to know what your rights are. You need to stand up. The reason why they get away with this and do this is because this is how people have been raised in society to not question things, to be blindly trusting, to not be confrontational, to avoid confrontation at all costs. And employers and society in general has been
create on that and take advantage of people as a result. So know your rights, you’re a person just like they are, you go to work every day, you put your pants on one leg at a time, they’re no better than you are. And don’t be afraid to question things, don’t be afraid to stand up to things and call things out and have transparency and visibility. If you don’t understand something, get clarity. And if you feel like they’re bullying you or intimidating you because you’re doing it, that’s on them, not on you.
Mary (05:17.336)
Sometimes silence speaks volumes. So what are some nonverbal cues that might suggest your employer isn’t giving you the full picture?
Dan (05:27.069)
Well, I mean, I put a post about this recently with this whole thing with pips, where it’s kind of one thing and really it’s something else. And one of the things I tell people to do to see if they really have a shot at the pip, which in most instances they don’t, is is your manager on board? Is your manager feel bad that you even got in the pip in the first place and therefore it’s being driven by senior leadership and he’s sort of stuck in the middle having to enforce this? Or has your manager really wanted you out all along and they’re sort of using this pip?
in a retaliatory punitive way to kind of get you to leave. So what you want to do is you want to look at how has the behavior of the manager changed towards you? Does he have a different opinion of you? Is he less accessible to you? Are you getting fewer opportunities than you had before or leads either before or compared to other people on your team? Is he blowing off meetings all the time and not scheduling those coaching calls that he’s supposed to be doing?
So if those things are happening, the PIP is likely already predetermined and you’re just kind of going through the motions with them. I recommend, depending on your specific situation, there’s an opportunity to potentially bring this to a head so that you’re not sitting here dragging forward with this negative PIP that has this dark cloud over your head and you know you have no chance of it anyway. So depending on, you’d have to do it tactfully because technically in most instances you’re an employee at will.
And if you share with them that you’re unhappy there, then they’ll just let you go because they don’t want to have unhappy employees working for them and they have every right to let you go. But so you got to be careful with it. You got to kind of call it out. You know, use facts to back up your claim so that they can’t sort of gaslight you and dismiss it. You know, kind of call out what’s actually going on. It’s really clear. And they’re just trying to pull a fast one on you. And so that, you know, you’ll kind of say, hey, you know, you told me my performance is no good. I’m an employee at will. You put me on this PIP.
You don’t want me here anymore so I guess I should just leave or I’ll take the termination and whatever little severance you give me, I don’t really have a leg to stand on because I’m an employee at Will and you told me I’m no good. This is literally the mindset that everyone has been brainwashed into believing. They lie about performance, they lie about pips, they treat you differently than others because they’ve targeted you and want to let you go and they dress it up as one thing, in reality it’s something else and then you think that you’ve done wrong, that you don’t have any rights, that you should just kind of go off.
Dan (07:43.901)
And you do. And the company ends up with either zero or very little separation costs. And you’re left wondering why and how this happens.
Mary (07:52.336)
So let’s say your manager starts to act a little bit different. And how would you approach your manager to make sure that these things don’t happen?
Dan (08:05.245)
I mean, I’m in a different stage of life than a lot of folks are and I just don’t have a lot of patience for BS. One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that honesty and truthfulness is always the best thing. That trying to get one over on someone else or be smarter than the next guy and pull a fast one or trying to interpret things between the lines. I have a tendency to kind of make people feel uncomfortable. I want to bring the issue to a head.
You know, if the manager is doing something deceitful behind the scenes, then I’d want to call him out on it and say, hey, you know, what gives? And then, of course, they’ll gaslight you and deny it, but then come back with actual facts. Say, you did this, you did that, you did this. This is different than how you’ve treated me in the past. This is different than how you are treating people right now. It seems like, you know, there’s an issue. You know, I would rather know things honestly and upfront so I can either plan my exit.
or know what I really need to do to improve and find out if that’s a possibility.
Mary (09:04.748)
So for those listeners that don’t have as much experience or maybe not as much confidence as you do, and they start to pick up on some of these nonverbal cues, how would you recommend that they approach a manager who starts to show some different, yeah.
Dan (09:20.893)
I guess what you need to do is assess what’s going on. I mean, you’re living it every day. Sometimes it’s tough to see the forest through the trees. You’re in a better position than anyone else to kind of really tell what’s going on. How have they treated people in the past when they were letting people go? Are they setting you up for a termination or do they really care and they’re looking to invest in you? If it looks like the writing is on the wall, then I would start looking for a job as soon as I can.
You don’t want to be left caught by surprise, get terminated, being blindsided, think that you actually have a shot at keeping your job. I’ve seen so many people that thought they could beat the PIP, invested all their time and energy to do it, beat the PIP on performance -based, and then they just made up some BS about why they’re letting them go that had nothing to do with the performance and some ridiculous micromanaging thing that they included in the PIP that was…
They’ve never been asked to do before, they’ve never been judged on, they’ve never been compensated on. Now all of a sudden they’re being micromanaged by the manager about it every day and then ended up being terminated even despite meeting the goals that nobody has achieved in the past.
Mary (10:28.232)
So it’s a competitive world out there, so I’m curious, what kind of information about your company’s financial health or industry standing even might they be hesitant to share with employees?
Dan (10:40.765)
Well, I mean, if it’s a publicly traded company, all that information is available out there. I mean, this is a great point that you bring up, actually. I’ve had many conversations recently with people who were sold a bag of goods about, you know, a runway and how much money is in the bank and how secure the job will be as they’re considering taking this role versus several others that they’re considering or leaving a secure job that they, you know, might, that they’ve been at for a long time. You know, when it comes to private companies, they’re not going to share the information with you.
All I can suggest is asking some really intelligent detailed questions, seeing how they respond to it and having good follow up questions and you’ll be able to kind of read between the lines a little bit about whether they’re telling you the truth, how challenging the times are, sales cycles and things like that. What I tell people is that if you’re interviewing for a job and you really want the job, get it in writing.
Have them extend the offer, put it in writing, and then once you’ve got it in writing, now flip the tables. Ask all those tough questions that you were afraid to ask because they might not offer you the job if you did. So you can even ask hypothetical questions like say that there’s an experience that you personally experienced previously in another company where someone in leadership did an unethical thing against you. You can run this scenario by leadership in the new company and ask them hypothetically, what would they do in a scenario like this?
You can ask them questions like, do you guys change the comp plan historically mid -year? Do you do retroactive comp plan changes? Do you use windfall clauses to claw back large deals that people have won? All the things that you have been bothered by throughout your career when things have been poorly done, ask how they deal with them here. I mean, I don’t know if you’ll get a truthful answer or not, but you’ll get some insight. And you’ll probably be able to read between the lines based on how they answer it.
whether they’re offended by your question, whether they think it’s a really smart question. I tell people to stand up and ask things a lot, and it actually is two -fold. It’s to help you set yourself up for success and get an idea, but it also presents you in a different light to the employer, that you’re not someone who’s just naive and innocent, that you can ask tough questions, that you’re not afraid to do so. They might have more respect for you and might be less willing or likely to take advantage of you down the road.
Mary (13:08.289)
So you mentioned that companies might be hesitant to share details. Can you elaborate on that just a little bit more? Are there specific aspects of financial health, like declining profits or upcoming debt restructuring that employers might be particularly tight -lipped about, even if it could impact employee morale or job security?
Dan (13:30.396)
I love the questions. I’m a finance guy by nature. I started off my career as an undergraduate degree in finance and was a budget and finance analyst for a while and all that stuff. Great questions. They’re not going to disclose this information to you. They have no obligation to. The type of stuff that you’re suggesting, frankly, 95 % of all the employees in the company who work there do not have access to this information and would not be allowed to know this information. You want to just basically ask,
Mary (13:33.377)
Mm -hmm.
Dan (13:59.453)
general questions that will give you an idea. When was the last time you’ve raised money? When are you expecting to raise it again? What criteria do you need to meet as a company to get to the point to raise money again? How much money is in the bank? I’d ask that question. They won’t tell you the dollar amount, but they’ll tell you what the runway is, which may or may not be truthful. You can ask, how much rope do I have here? What’s my ramp time?
I mean I just had a call with some guy who went on a six month, a three month ramp actually, my apologies, a three month ramp and in less than 30 days off of ramp was already put on a pre -pip and this was an enterprise AE with a six to 12 month sales cycle. And he went from the pre -pip to the pip, beat the pip and now he’s wondering what’s going on because they were already interviewing and posting his job before he was even put on the.
Mary (14:43.169)
peace.
Mary (14:58.881)
Wow.
Dan (14:59.389)
Yeah, and this is not unusual. I hear this all the time.
I hear about people who are told that they’re put on a riff because they’re in a protected class, like maybe they’re over 40, therefore their termination has to be justified. They tell them that they’re being riffed, okay, well what can I do about that? But yet they’re the only one being riffed, so there’s no reduction in force for a single person, that’s a target of termination. And, you know.
How do you interview for a job if it’s a reduction in force? It’s not a reduction in force. You’re terminating somebody and replace them with somebody else.
Mary (15:36.673)
As an employee, how can you fight back against something like that?
Dan (15:41.533)
It’s been such a one -sided situation since the beginning of time. That’s literally why I exist, why I’m out here every day posting twice a day, engaging with the audience every day, making people aware of the things that are going on. You need to call it out. You need to make people aware of it. You need to warn the next person. We can’t sit silently anymore and allow these folks to continue to get away with the abuse and trauma negatively impacting people’s lives and trajectories.
Mary (16:12.577)
Are there any legal or safety related issues that employers might downplay or neglect to mention entirely?
Dan (16:22.781)
Yeah, I mean, they purposely do that. I mean, they literally have you sign an employment agreement as a person of color, as a minority, as an over 40 worker in multiple protected classes, that they make you sign an employment agreement with standard language that states that you’re an employee at will, and that you acknowledge that we can terminate you anytime we want. It’s just so not true. And that’s standard.
Mary (16:48.577)
Sounds like they have all the power.
Dan (16:50.429)
Yeah, that’s standard language in almost every employment agreement. Just like in almost every comp plan that they have you sign to give you the impression that it’s a legal binding contract, but in the back of the comp plan, it says in almost every single one that we can change the terms of the comp plan any time we want, with or without notice, with or without cause. How is that a legal binding contract? It’s not. In order for them to make any change, you have to, or the other party has to agree to it.
And if there’s a financial impact, they need to be compensated for it. But yet they want to dress it up as a legal binding contract requiring your signature. And if you don’t sign it, then we can’t pay your commissions. It’s complete BS.
Mary (17:32.801)
That’s shocking. And it really, it puts it squarely on the job seeker to dig for information that should be readily available. So what are some ways that listeners can protect themselves in these situations?
Dan (17:48.445)
Well, I always tell people, identify if you have leverage. When you have leverage, identify it and know how to use it. If you don’t have leverage, then in some ways you’re a little stuck. You know, if you’ve been out of work for six months, your bills are piling up, you’re worried about where the next check is coming from, you’ve got a job offer in place, and it’s horrendous, it’s terrible, it’s one -sided, what are you gonna do, not take it and continue for maybe the next three months with no income?
I tell you to take the job and continue to interview as if you’re still unemployed. Do the job to your best ability, see how it works out. Maybe it will turn out to be a great opportunity. Maybe they’re just kind of testing you out. But you gotta such yourself up for success. You gotta plan your exit before you arrive. If you can’t leave a good job that is secure and you’d still be at,
for lies and deceit and promises that they never have any intention of honoring. So I tell people, if you have leverage, set yourself up for success. Negotiate your severance as part of your employment agreement. If you terminate me within the first six months, then you’re gonna pay me a six month severance. If you terminate me before my one year cliff vest at 11 months, then you’re gonna auto vest that equity.
You know, if I’ve got a bonus due to me at the end of the year and you terminate me at 11 months, then you’re going to pay me a prorated portion of it. If I sign a signing bonus and you put some ridiculous clause in it that says I got to pay it back, well I don’t have to pay it back if you terminate me. And if I choose to leave on my own, I only have to pay back a prorated portion of it. You know, these are the types of things that you need to do. I mean, you need to know what’s going on. I mean, I’ve been doing this for a long time. I’m a fighter. I just, how I kind of came out of the womb.
I question everything and I call it out. And I’ve been doing it since I was a kid. And people need help in this and understanding how the game is played. That’s exactly why I created this employment advisory to be an advocate for the people so that they have someone who can be in their corner rather than going at it alone. The employer has lawyers who write one -sided legal agreements that you have no idea how it works.
Mary (19:39.489)
Yeah.
Dan (20:04.733)
They have human resources people that have gone to school for this, that have studied this for years and decades and have done hundreds if not thousands of these. You’ve never seen it, you don’t know anything about it. It’s a game that’s being played and they take advantage of you. So I have stepped up to be that advocate to balance the scales, to be someone who will be in the corner of the employee and help guide them through this maze.
Mary (20:26.753)
As employees, we need somebody on our side like that. How can company culture or internal policies create a situation where information gets siloed or even hidden?
Dan (20:40.989)
That’s how they purposely set it up. I mean, now you’re bringing up a topic of mine that is near and dear and goes back 30 years. I mean, that’s kind of why I started this true commission as a commission audit service. I’ve been working with friends and family for 30 years to help them identify and recover literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of earned but unpaid commissions and bonuses. That employers intentionally make comp plans overly complex so that you can never validate whether your pay is right.
It’s a guessing game. It causes anxiety and stress. I work so hard, the client tells me that they’re going to pay me this much on a deal. You know, months and months and months later when the deal closes and the customer pays for it, is it what they originally promised? Is there an employer in the entire universe that actually reports back on what the customer initially promised versus what they invoice the customer? I mean, it’s wrong. They purposely withhold comp plans during the interview process.
They tell you, trust us, why is nobody else asking for this information? They make the data difficult to access. I mean, if you’re in a low transaction, high transaction volume, low transaction value setting, and you’re being paid on a per deal basis with a variable rate, it’s literally impossible to check. And I know a lot of people in that environment.
Mary (22:01.092)
Could you give us some specific examples, perhaps a time you witnessed it firsthand or even a common scenario that listeners might encounter?
Dan (22:09.853)
in terms of like a commission loss or something?
Mary (22:14.627)
Yes, in terms of how the company policies, when they create information that could be siloed or hidden, could you give just a specific example of that?
Dan (22:25.181)
Sure, I had a client I worked with around a commission issue. They had come into the company at mid -year. They got a half -year cop plan, so six months, and they were killing it right off the bat. They were now a month, five and a half, two, three weeks before the fiscal year ends, and now it looks like they’re about 50, 60K short of meeting that quota, getting a $25 ,000 bonus.
and going on President’s Club trip to Aruba for beating quota. So it looked like they were done. So they reached out to me. The biggest challenge was getting the data. The company refused to provide it. So what you need is a bookings report and you need a commission file. You need the initial deal that was booked that the customer agreed and you need the final invoice that the customer was billed and paid on. And then you need to compare the two, identify the discrepancies,
And it’s a manual process because companies don’t automate this, although they clearly have the ability to do so, they purposely don’t. Which is why I created TrueCommish to automate that process. You upload your bookings report, you upload your commission file, you create a unique identifier to cross -reference the data set, and you compare the two numbers at the deal level. So what happened was is that we finally got all the data. They purposely gave us data that made no sense.
they gave us the output of a general ledger that had over 5 ,000 rows associated with maybe 1 ,000 lines of data. Okay? So you had to sort through all that, make sense of it, and basically for every, it was a value -added reseller, so they basically were offsetting every business cost with every revenue coming in and then having to net that out, calculate that, and then compare it to what you were expecting. Are you starting to get the picture? They purposely made it.
Mary (24:04.515)
Jeez.
Mary (24:18.659)
there.
Dan (24:20.221)
a nightmare to figure out. Well, I dove into it deep and identified 12 deals that were of issue, five of them that the rep should have been paid on that supposedly went to a house account, so they never got credit for it. There was a large, large deal that the rep was forced to split the deal with the most senior rep in the company in return for onboarding and training them, of which that senior rep never spent five minutes with them.
had nothing to do with closing the deal and this rep was required to hand over $60 ,000 in commission to this other rep because he was the senior male rep there and she was new and was pushed to do this. So while it was agreed that she wouldn’t get credit for the commission that month, she was supposed to get year to date credit for her quota and it was never given to her, it was applied to the other rep. So between uncovering that, uncovering these five deals that never were assigned to her,
finding five additional deals that they were not paid fully on them, we ended up finding $120 ,000, needing only 60 to achieve it. They ended up getting more than $37 ,000 in unpaid earnings that they never would have had if we hadn’t checked the commissions. Went on the club trip to Aruba, got the bonus, and was praised by the entire organization for ramping up and meeting quota as a brand new employee.
Mary (25:44.931)
Wow. Are there any ethical considerations employees should keep in mind when navigating information that their employer might prefer to keep hidden?
Dan (25:56.765)
I don’t know about that, but I want to take your question and kind of jump off it and somewhere else. Everyone is always worried about, you know, will I burn a bridge? You know, if I challenge something or call it out, you know, will I hurt my reputation in the industry and not be able to get a job somewhere else? You know, will I be shooting myself in the foot? You know, will I be burning my chance at getting references? You know, a lot of times they’ll tell you if you…
Mary (26:00.407)
Sure, sure.
Dan (26:22.941)
behave yourself and be a good person or a good little girl or boy and do what you’re told that will help you get a job through one of our PE companies, portfolio companies. You know what? It’s been told hundreds of times, no one’s ever gotten a job from it. Literally. Those references, don’t sit there and bite your tongue and do what you’re told and not stand up to the wrongdoing because they tell you that you might get a good reference down the road. You won’t get one. And if you do,
Mary (26:40.726)
Cheers.
Dan (26:52.509)
It doesn’t mean much. Okay. Most companies will only confirm start date, end date, and last job title. I’ve got a client that was promised references, signed everything, and then when push came to shove, they’re told that they just confirm that information. I put very little value on the references. I mean, frankly, you could just simply tell someone that I’m a current employee there and I’m concerned with them learning that I’m leaving and give references from previous places. You know, whatever it is. Don’t be beholden to the BS,
and lies to coerce you into doing what they want based on promises that they’re not going to deliver.
Mary (27:29.812)
What do you want the listeners to take away from the episode today?
Dan (27:34.877)
to stand up to wrongdoing. That we collectively are allowing this to continue, are allowing it to happen. It’s getting worse every single day and it’s because we enable it. We do nothing about it. We are stolen from, gaslit, lied to, mistreated, and we walk away with our tail between our legs. We don’t warn anybody that it’s happened. We don’t warn the next person so they don’t suffer the same thing that we did. These people are narcissists, they’re bullies, they’re not good people.
You know what narcissists do when you stand, the boys do when you stand up to them? They cower every single time. They don’t even know what to do because they’ve been getting away with this their whole life. So stand up to it for yourself, for your mental health, for your family, to not have years or decades of regret for how you’ve been treated, for the next person who comes behind you, and to put an end to it. To not make it financially beneficial to the employer to do the wrong thing anymore.
Mary (28:31.153)
That’s powerful. What’s next for you, Dan? What are you working on now and where can we find you on social media?
Dan (28:37.373)
So I am only on LinkedIn. I don’t do social media anywhere else. So the people are telling me to go to different places. I’ve never been a fan of social media, but I wanted to come out and share what’s going on in the workplace, warn people, be that advocate, be that resource, help people and try to help change the wrongdoing that’s going on. I am just, I’m growing the business. I have automated my backend. I have a full CRM in place. I have a team in place now with me. Right now I have a…
Mary (28:40.401)
Heheheheh
Dan (29:06.493)
consultant that works with me hand in hand. I have got a couple of people in the back end that are helping to build so that we can scale this thing. And my goal here is that in 14 months, I’ve helped 850 paid clients. My goal in 2024 is to scale that to over 1500 or 2000 people that we can help this year. And hopefully beyond, hopefully I’m being overly conservative. We need to stand up to wrongdoing. I’m really passionate about this.
I have seen the pain, the harm, the trauma that it has caused people. I have had more than a half a dozen clients who have told me that they’ve either contemplated or attempted suicide based on how they’ve been treated. This is real life stuff. It has to stop.
Mary (29:49.898)
Thanks, Dan.
Dan (29:51.549)
It’s been my pleasure, Mary. Thank you for having me.