There is a quiet weirdness afoot in the business world today.
Across almost every industry, a surreal new management template has taken root: People are being hired into roles with zero onboarding, zero communication, and zero structural support. They are being dropped into corporate vacuums, left to guess what success even looks like, only to be judged when they can’t read the minds of checked-out management.
We are not building businesses anymore; we are running ghost ships. And a few weeks ago, I accidentally stepped aboard one.
But to understand how I got there, you have to understand where I was.
I was a disaffected, 30-year marketing veteran operating a security gate, working a gig to pay the bills while watching the advertising industry choke on its own algorithmic slop. I had quit playing the game.
But then, one day while out driving the patrol truck, I heard a radio ad.
The ad was for a sales and marketing role at a local, regional radio station. “No experience necessary. All training will be provided,” the voice over the airwaves promised.
In my mind, a spark lit up. Radio is supposed to be a vibrant, local, living thing. I recognized it as perhaps the last healthy ecosystem in advertising today — a place where real human connection still mattered, and a perfect fit for my three decades of copywriting and direct-response experience.
I imagined it could be my way back in. My second chance at a professional career in marketing, doing marketing the “right” way.
I applied, I was interviewed, and I was hired.
But it didn’t take long for the illusion to shatter. It turned out my hire was not born of a strategic need to grow a business. No. I believe it was a cynical, low-risk gamble by a station management team that did not give a single fig for whether I succeeded or failed.
I learned during the interview that they already had a full staff of “account executives” (fancy radio-speak for advertising salespeople). My hire was absolutely superfluous. The mentality was pure “Human Lottery Ticket” — hey, if the guy happens to make us money, we’ll take it. If he doesn’t, the ticket goes in the trash.
On top of that, they offered a commission-only pay structure, which meant the financial risk was entirely mine. Sure, there was a three-month probationary period where I wouldn’t have to pay back my draws against earnings, but the simple truth was I was on my own.
When I asked about training — hoping to spend a few hours shadowing an experienced rep or learning their specific workflow — I was told: “We expect that the moment you have business cards, you are good to go.”
And that was the extent of the training.
From that moment on, I received zero feedback. Almost none of my questions ever received an answer. I was literally left alone to fend for myself in an office that felt less like a media company and more like a rigged game plagued by operational decay.
The lack of basic structural support was almost comical. Due to the ever-present reality of crazed fans or unpredictable strangers busting in to bother the on-air personalities, the station’s front doors stayed locked at all times. Yet, I was never given a key.
Every single morning, I had to swallow my dignity, stand outside, and ring the doorbell like an uninvited guest just to show up early for work. It was so demoralizing and such a hassle that I regularly skipped taking lunches outside the office, entirely because I didn’t want to bother anyone to let me back into my own workplace.
The dehumanization didn’t stop at the front door, either. I was never given access to the company’s public servers. Hell, I was never told about them. Two and a half weeks in, another rep offhandedly mentioned I should have access to a shared digital drive, as well as company email set up on my phone. To this day, I have no idea what resources were on those drives.
They treated me as if I was not a real hire at all.
Even so, I worked my ass off to build a launch pad for success. Because that is what a professional does.
On my third day, the station owner handed me 29 prospective client accounts to follow up on. (Unlike the other reps who had the benefit of arriving earlier, I received not one active account that was currently making money.) The information about these accounts was all hand-written on literal, physical note cards (!).
To drag their tracking into the modern era, I immediately built a functional, from-scratch CRM system in Google Sheets. I then sent the owner an email showing him how I had meticulously prioritized the top eight accounts, proposing a concise marketing strategy for each. I asked for his advice, his suggestions, his feedback. Was I doing this right?
The response I got was a prickly email — the only email I ever received from him — telling me I was overthinking things. “You are very thoughtful and conscientious,” it read, wrapped in the classic corporate tone that treats critical thinking like a disease. The owner made it clear that while a lack of ad sales at this early juncture might not be grounds for failure, a lack of “meetings” would be. (In the radio racket, the only metric that matters for new hires is booking that initial 10-minute face-to-face with a decision-maker.)
Fine. If they wanted meetings, I’d get them meetings — but I was going to do it with brains, not just blind shoe leather.
I ignored their outdated note-card philosophy and deployed “unconventional” methods of my own. I researched elusive decision-makers on LinkedIn and connected with them directly via InMails, offering actual value in exchange for their response.
I designed custom folders, leave-behinds, and strategic one-sheets explaining the cross-media math of how adding localized radio to an existing outdoor billboard campaign is statistically proven to increase the ROI of that investment.
I wasn’t just dropping off a business card. I knew the reality of the street. As another rep at the station had joked to me: “I play a game when I leave a business: guess how many seconds before my card hits the wastebasket.”
I refused to play that game. But it didn’t matter.
I secured a meeting with a flooring contractor on my very first phone call. Then had a hard time getting the owner to share his schedule with me so he could join and lead the discussion. (He insisted on attending every meeting a new hire brought him. “That’s where the learning happens,” he opined more than once.)
This lack of engagement was constant.
When I was on the verge of selling a live-remote event — itself a minimum $2,000 sale — I emailed the owner and general manager asking basic questions to help me close it.
Absolutely not one reply. Silence from the top. Silence from the middle.
Eventually, it hit me: These people did not want a “consultant-sales professional” — the high-minded industry term used by the Radio Advertising Bureau and paraded around in my job interviews.
They wanted a disposable door knocker.
They didn’t want strategy, or insight, or 30 years of marketing expertise. In direct contrast to their exact words, they did not want a “business development strategist” who took the time to understand the prospect’s needs. They wanted a warm body to mindlessly burn shoe leather on the pavement until the law of averages finally paid out or sheer exhaustion set in.
It took me precisely 15 days in that toxic, stagnant environment to decide that it was entirely unhealthy, unworkable, and completely beneath my dignity.
Then I flipped over the game board.
I made up my mind to resign. But I didn’t just walk out empty-handed. On my final day, on one of my last stops, I paid a visit to the owner of a new Chinese buffet restaurant — a high-value prospect that I’d been working for a few days to nail down. In less than two minutes, I locked in a meeting with the owner for the following week.
I drove back to the office. In the very email that announced my resignation, I handed them that high-value meeting on a silver platter. I proved beyond a doubt that I could do the job (as if there was ever any question). But I was choosing, with total clarity, not to do that job for them.
I scattered the pieces and walked out into the sunlight feeling a mix of relief and disillusionment.
I kept thinking: I reject this broken system.
I reject the casual, lazy dehumanization of modern management teams who treat human beings like cheap scratch-off lottery tickets and keep them locked outside the front door.
I reject the lack of standards, civility, and normal human decency that we all used to take for granted when being onboarded into a new job role.
I reject the unwillingness of employers to appreciate the talents and efforts of valuable employees, simply because recognizing them means management might actually have to consider upping their own game to drag themselves out of the dark ages.
I spent 16 days of furious solo-building inside a malfunctioning machine. But walking away wasn’t a defeat. It was a line in the sand and a manifesto for self-respect.
Sometimes you have to completely clear the wreckage of a bad situation to make room for something new, different, and actually worthy of your time.
If this experience has shown me anything, it’s that I hadn’t left marketing because I had tired of marketing strategy; I had left because I was fed up with the broken, hollow state of marketing itself.
For better or worse, I still love the thrill of producing great marketing. So, if you value real, human-driven strategy over note cards, and substance over corporate slop — and you want a 30-year veteran who actually knows how to swing a hammer — drop me a line.
I just might be up for a project.
Help fight Big Tech censorship. If you see something you like here at The Cranky Creative, please share it with others. It costs you nothing, but it makes a big difference to me.
Go to blog home page | See all Cranky ad reviews | Subscribe for free
Discover more from The Cranky Creative Blog
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
The problem is … management. Most “managers” I encounter nowadays fulfill the prophecies of the “Peter Principle” – they have been promoted on the basis of prior performance to a position of incompetence. Most managers have no managing skills whatsoever.
As a long time fan of your blog I think this installment is the most disheartening of all I’ve ever read. I believe this because it shows in real-time the too common erosion of the American business model. What you experienced has become a common refrain from skilled job seekers. A total lack of support. A disinterest in one another. You did the smart thing–you refused to play the game.
We know there are great business models out there that provide their employees every opportunity at success and job satisfaction. Business environments that treat employees as shareholders with a stake be it financially, culturally and/or psychologically, in positive outcomes. But what grieves me about your experience is that it is so very common. That what once was the norm now exists only sporadically. A shared responsibility to success is as rare as the proverbial hen’s teeth now. That an employee must go searching for such an experience is an indictment on the apathy and inertia of what past successes have wrought. People failing upward.
I’m not one who views the past through rose colored glasses but I cannot help but bemoan what once was typical, rightfully expected and provided for is no longer deemed intrinsic to a strong infrastructure. As we descend further and further down the rabbit hole of technological advances such as AI, I fear human beings are becoming more and more expendable. Fear and lethargy are paralyzing the rabbits. The Ship is not down yet, but it’s floundering.
The problem is … management. Most “managers” I encounter nowadays fulfill the prophecies of the “Peter Principle” – they have been promoted on the basis of prior performance to a position of incompetence. Most managers have no managing skills whatsoever.