Hey there. I know we haven’t been posting here much lately; some of it has just been being really busy, some of it has been being sick (I’m still recovering, Kristi’s down hard with it now), and a lot of it has been dealing with an out-of-control client drama that took a turn for the absurd.
I wrote about the latter briefly a few posts back, about the long time client who has a bad habit of going off the reservation: he suddenly gets the urge to do something really stupid, and then gets pissed off when we tell him (nicely, tactfully) that it’s not a good idea. In the past, he’s eventually figured out that we were right and then come back to his senses.
About four weeks ago he subscribed to an online service that promised to automate his marketing, make him tons of money in a short time with very little work, and let him spend all his time on the golf course while his business built itself. This service is also deeply in bed with a particular online marketing guru guy who runs a media empire that’s essentially an MLM sales cult. I’d run across this particular con artist and his ilk before – he’s the last refuge of the dying small business, the final desperate move small businessmen make before shutting their doors for good. The advice he gives is nonsense, at best only relevant to a particular type of business (which our clients’ isn’t), and everything he pushes is saturated in hyperbole and logical fallacy. His schtick is selling newsletters, information products, seminars and affiliate programs: he’s basically an online Amway.
This client of ours – despite a productive yearlong relationship, successful projects and real, tangible returns – got sucked in by these guys in early February and in very short order went insane, talking in buzzwords and language that don’t really mean anything outside of this guru’s system. Getting more combative, hostile and insulting at every turn. Confounding us completely, pitching sales ideas that made absolutely no sense and that would clearly damage his business more than help it. Finally earlier this week he canceled our remaining projects and informed us that he planned to turn over the marketing of his business to The Guru’s Awesomely Great System.
Last night we finally learned what the issue really was, after some Googling of a few of these stupid buzzword terms he was throwing around. We found some of the guru’s “teachings” using these buzzwords, and discovered that in his great and holy theology, the guru brands people like us – marketing folks who aren’t on board with the Guru’s Awesomely Great System – as the Great Satan, intent on corrupting honest businessmen and stealing their money. And our client is just soaking it all in.
We’re pretty much at the end of the road now with him. I’m burnt out and tired and just don’t want to work with the guy anymore. It’s one thing to have not produced any results, but we produced really good results for him: as a result of the work we did, he was presented with a major deal with one of the nation’s largest mortgage bankers. He screwed it up by not following up, instead letting it die on the vine while he was out on the golf course.. but of course, that’s not his fault. It’s ours for not producing results, right?
The sad part is that this really will damage, if not destroy, what remains of his business. We know the kind of stuff he wants to do. We know the stuff the Great Guru pushes. We also know our client’s market, at this point probably better than he himself does. These guru guys will bleed him dry while encouraging him to thoroughly ruin himself. I suppose the upside is that he’ll end up having to do less work after all, while freeing up his time to go play golf more often; that seems to be really what he wants, anyway. That’s pretty easy to achieve when you don’t have customers.
I’m trying to wrap up late deliveries for our energy company client and a New York ad agency today. Tomorrow Kristi has a photo shoot at the Salvation Army Red Shield community center and I have a launch call for a website job with an old telecom client. Then we plan to be off to Half Moon Bay for an afternoon and sunset at the beach. We both need some salt air, a nice dinner and some restful space.