Just a quick and long update...
Not been on here in a while but I think it's time for a little steam letting off...
Mostly shit about work.
Some details are absent but mostly here.
Well things has been going well..ish, until the new business arrived for selling FB ads, back a few months before Christmas, and they were selling them like hot cakes for a shitload of money [we'll get to this later], causing both directors to get flashy cars (a Porche and a Jag XK8), meanwhile the tech team, which consisted of 2 web designers, 2 seo peps and a system dev (PHP) were on low wages (for our roles). Everyone, apart from me being the chief/head/whatever, were on min wage, whereas I was on £14,400.
Now I wouldn't mind so much but I have a mountain of debt (pilling from the months off work and the no-gos on getting bills sorted through the dole through bills etc etc - don't ask!), a part done house and a boiler to get. Not only that, our company is a seo company and I'm the one with the majority of the knowledge, which neither director has.
Either way, the tech team (us), are pretty pissed off and we also have to pay for the tuxedo's for the xmas do, so before we sign our contracts I try (whilst failing) to get us all a pay rise.
We get told that it will be looked at around Jan - oh and we'll get a new starter for then. A starter that has "so much experience" - the running office joke, since I helped with one person and the rest were handled by management (the family) and all were failures.....
After Christmas we are moved into a bigger office and the sales room is doubled (mainly to sell more ads). We get 1-to-1's and I get a pay rise (w00t [£16k]), and as far as I know everything is fine....for a while [this is what is later called "The Honeymoon Period"]. The new starter arrives and, [surprise, surprise] isn't as great as they made him out to be. He's mainly a script-finding junkie, makes horrible schoolboy errors (esp in html...) and he's good at templates. To be fair to him he has improved a lot since then, but anyway.
Templates.
Now our two web designers are making sites from scratch (VERY good designs) and build it from there selling the sites at around £300-£500...something like that, but with the new guy, the family were getting him to do lots of things setting up server via linux (which I helped with in terms of getting a vnc server added etc) and more importantly find free templates to sell. These templates were the reason why those original web designers got the push and the new guy is now doing the job of both - maximising profits. The annoying thing is that our director was trying to justify (by pulling the wool over our eyes) getting rid of the original designers by saying:
"The thing with selling £500 websites is that you have to take out your clients golfing and to slap up dinners..."
Yes, that's what he said!
And y'know what I saw on the upsell board about a week later?
Yup £500 for a website......
Now I know what you are thinking...but James, that's the whole point. Getting more profit.
Really?
Does that mean that the directors could get themselves a second set of cars? BMW's in fact? Cos that's the recent one!
If they can do that, were is our profit? I'm sure the php system dev would love £18k!
You know, it's really depressing when you search your company name and the Google suggestion comes up with [company name] review and clicking on it you find previous clients scorning you becuase "you're shit", despite the fact that you tried everything you could, but couldn't do much because they were the 35 quid'ers [a term I fucking hate]; despite the fact that you've tried and tried and tried to tell your bosses how seo is supposed to be done with budgets and article writing and TIME to spend on clients sites getting everything right but get met with:
"We're not a charity y'know"
or
"The 35 quid'ers won't spend anymore money" / "Your spending too much time on the 35 quid'ers"
and general ignorance.
Is it my fault that £35 was your starting price? This was the price you started the company with and I knew no better then...but now I know a lot more. You should have just sucked it up and stuck with it (adjusting the price for later clients). Instead we have a negative review problem, which is probably why we aren't seemingly getting new clients. I tried to solve it by suggesting giving a discount to our best clients to get them to write us a review in said places...but that didn't happen did it?
Do I know what other seo companies do? Yeah, we go to the #mancseo meetups and ask them. Funny how they can use budgets and are doing massively better than us.....
Remember the FB ads from before? Well manangement got the seo page off the website which means that we don't rank for seo manchester and not as well for seo services manchester. That 8-10 months work of link building for our site down the drain for....wait for it....
"Commercial reasons"
When in fact, we think they are being investigated for the way that they sold the ads and want to hide, plus one of the negative reviews said that they were passing details of our company to the police for not getting a refund thanks to the verbal contract (again, don't ask).
The way that it was done was that they would sell a ad for some silly money (£599+) for "x" amount of impressions on FB. However, on first investigation of this, we found that you could get that amount of impressions within a day, which they would sell to the client for "6mths".
You can see where this is going can't you....
See it would be nice to be told what is going on, rather than being told shit....
We have been moved to a smaller room a month after we got moved to a bigger one and I think it's because of the fact that they aren't looking to expand our portion of the business. One of the seo guy's has left for another company and that leaves us with:
Me - SEO
Web Designer - Template guy
System Dev
That's it.
Which means that I didn't get to take an extended weekend to the nationals because I thought that I wouldn't get the day off thanks to us being a lot smaller and the recent departure of the seo guy (and a repeat of what happened last year). When I asked on the Monday after the nats (and I was quite knackered) about getting time off, I was told it was absolutely fine to do so....
Well, thanks for fucking telling me....
The previous year?
We had a Lithuainian and a Czech guy working with us. The Czech guy was like 7 foot tall, in comparison to the other, but anyway occasionally the Czech guy would make some low brow comment to the Lithuanian...the type were you think it's going to kick off. But the Lithuanian would laugh it off....until they started to work together.
Becuase one day (this being the time that I was due 7 days off work - not 5 but 7) the Lithuanian fucking kicks off with the Czech guy. They have an arguement and the Czech guy leaves.
The director was holding some holiday forms and went: "Well this changes things...."
So I end up having 4 days instead of 7.
But that's not all.
During this time I was doing some extra work for a client of ours, which I hadn't finished. He's a pain in the ass at times. So I did some at home. Bye bye goes two days. Two of the most stressful days ever!
He's complaining about this, that and the other. Saying how incompetant I am, despite the fact that I'm doing quite well with his god awful code that's had several web coders for. Saying that he'll sue my boss (the director), and me fretting that I'll loose my job that I've worked so fucking hard for. But in the end, I am proved correct. He then sends an email to me and my boss thanking me for all my efforts and he couldn't understand why I got stressed and that he must have got the stress from somewhere....
So yeah. I got 2 days from that one.
This isn't some huge corporation, it's just a small family business that I've been with since it was a room with me, a web designer and a director (in the tech room).
So I'm having a rather stressful time of it and yes I've been looking elsewhere. In fact, I have an interview with a company near Deansgate station on the 27th (thank god).
The last thing I need is more shit, although I think some brewed recently but I have no clue what the fuck about. Seems to be abaited for now but I bet it's going to flare up again.
Joy....
Mostly shit about work.
Some details are absent but mostly here.
Well things has been going well..ish, until the new business arrived for selling FB ads, back a few months before Christmas, and they were selling them like hot cakes for a shitload of money [we'll get to this later], causing both directors to get flashy cars (a Porche and a Jag XK8), meanwhile the tech team, which consisted of 2 web designers, 2 seo peps and a system dev (PHP) were on low wages (for our roles). Everyone, apart from me being the chief/head/whatever, were on min wage, whereas I was on £14,400.
Now I wouldn't mind so much but I have a mountain of debt (pilling from the months off work and the no-gos on getting bills sorted through the dole through bills etc etc - don't ask!), a part done house and a boiler to get. Not only that, our company is a seo company and I'm the one with the majority of the knowledge, which neither director has.
Either way, the tech team (us), are pretty pissed off and we also have to pay for the tuxedo's for the xmas do, so before we sign our contracts I try (whilst failing) to get us all a pay rise.
We get told that it will be looked at around Jan - oh and we'll get a new starter for then. A starter that has "so much experience" - the running office joke, since I helped with one person and the rest were handled by management (the family) and all were failures.....
After Christmas we are moved into a bigger office and the sales room is doubled (mainly to sell more ads). We get 1-to-1's and I get a pay rise (w00t [£16k]), and as far as I know everything is fine....for a while [this is what is later called "The Honeymoon Period"]. The new starter arrives and, [surprise, surprise] isn't as great as they made him out to be. He's mainly a script-finding junkie, makes horrible schoolboy errors (esp in html...) and he's good at templates. To be fair to him he has improved a lot since then, but anyway.
Templates.
Now our two web designers are making sites from scratch (VERY good designs) and build it from there selling the sites at around £300-£500...something like that, but with the new guy, the family were getting him to do lots of things setting up server via linux (which I helped with in terms of getting a vnc server added etc) and more importantly find free templates to sell. These templates were the reason why those original web designers got the push and the new guy is now doing the job of both - maximising profits. The annoying thing is that our director was trying to justify (by pulling the wool over our eyes) getting rid of the original designers by saying:
"The thing with selling £500 websites is that you have to take out your clients golfing and to slap up dinners..."
Yes, that's what he said!
And y'know what I saw on the upsell board about a week later?
Yup £500 for a website......
Now I know what you are thinking...but James, that's the whole point. Getting more profit.
Really?
Does that mean that the directors could get themselves a second set of cars? BMW's in fact? Cos that's the recent one!
If they can do that, were is our profit? I'm sure the php system dev would love £18k!
You know, it's really depressing when you search your company name and the Google suggestion comes up with [company name] review and clicking on it you find previous clients scorning you becuase "you're shit", despite the fact that you tried everything you could, but couldn't do much because they were the 35 quid'ers [a term I fucking hate]; despite the fact that you've tried and tried and tried to tell your bosses how seo is supposed to be done with budgets and article writing and TIME to spend on clients sites getting everything right but get met with:
"We're not a charity y'know"
or
"The 35 quid'ers won't spend anymore money" / "Your spending too much time on the 35 quid'ers"
and general ignorance.
Is it my fault that £35 was your starting price? This was the price you started the company with and I knew no better then...but now I know a lot more. You should have just sucked it up and stuck with it (adjusting the price for later clients). Instead we have a negative review problem, which is probably why we aren't seemingly getting new clients. I tried to solve it by suggesting giving a discount to our best clients to get them to write us a review in said places...but that didn't happen did it?
Do I know what other seo companies do? Yeah, we go to the #mancseo meetups and ask them. Funny how they can use budgets and are doing massively better than us.....
Remember the FB ads from before? Well manangement got the seo page off the website which means that we don't rank for seo manchester and not as well for seo services manchester. That 8-10 months work of link building for our site down the drain for....wait for it....
"Commercial reasons"
When in fact, we think they are being investigated for the way that they sold the ads and want to hide, plus one of the negative reviews said that they were passing details of our company to the police for not getting a refund thanks to the verbal contract (again, don't ask).
The way that it was done was that they would sell a ad for some silly money (£599+) for "x" amount of impressions on FB. However, on first investigation of this, we found that you could get that amount of impressions within a day, which they would sell to the client for "6mths".
You can see where this is going can't you....
See it would be nice to be told what is going on, rather than being told shit....
We have been moved to a smaller room a month after we got moved to a bigger one and I think it's because of the fact that they aren't looking to expand our portion of the business. One of the seo guy's has left for another company and that leaves us with:
Me - SEO
Web Designer - Template guy
System Dev
That's it.
Which means that I didn't get to take an extended weekend to the nationals because I thought that I wouldn't get the day off thanks to us being a lot smaller and the recent departure of the seo guy (and a repeat of what happened last year). When I asked on the Monday after the nats (and I was quite knackered) about getting time off, I was told it was absolutely fine to do so....
Well, thanks for fucking telling me....
The previous year?
We had a Lithuainian and a Czech guy working with us. The Czech guy was like 7 foot tall, in comparison to the other, but anyway occasionally the Czech guy would make some low brow comment to the Lithuanian...the type were you think it's going to kick off. But the Lithuanian would laugh it off....until they started to work together.
Becuase one day (this being the time that I was due 7 days off work - not 5 but 7) the Lithuanian fucking kicks off with the Czech guy. They have an arguement and the Czech guy leaves.
The director was holding some holiday forms and went: "Well this changes things...."
So I end up having 4 days instead of 7.
But that's not all.
During this time I was doing some extra work for a client of ours, which I hadn't finished. He's a pain in the ass at times. So I did some at home. Bye bye goes two days. Two of the most stressful days ever!
He's complaining about this, that and the other. Saying how incompetant I am, despite the fact that I'm doing quite well with his god awful code that's had several web coders for. Saying that he'll sue my boss (the director), and me fretting that I'll loose my job that I've worked so fucking hard for. But in the end, I am proved correct. He then sends an email to me and my boss thanking me for all my efforts and he couldn't understand why I got stressed and that he must have got the stress from somewhere....
So yeah. I got 2 days from that one.
This isn't some huge corporation, it's just a small family business that I've been with since it was a room with me, a web designer and a director (in the tech room).
So I'm having a rather stressful time of it and yes I've been looking elsewhere. In fact, I have an interview with a company near Deansgate station on the 27th (thank god).
The last thing I need is more shit, although I think some brewed recently but I have no clue what the fuck about. Seems to be abaited for now but I bet it's going to flare up again.
Joy....