I work for a small company. Our main thing right now is a small finance podcast. It’s tiny. We’re talking two employees other than the boss and his partner (in life and in business). I’m the project manager/assistant producer/scriptwriter/copywriter/editor (words only)/PR. My coworker does the social media. We both get paid 20/hr (which is basically minimum wage in our HCOL area) No paid lunch, 4 sick days a year, no benefits. We did however win a hybrid work schedule recently.

My boss loves for us all to be involved in his meetings, so we both show up early on Friday. It’s a meeting with a funneling marketing guy. We go through the meeting and I realize this is not new info to me and this guy is basically a con artist. He’s presenting my homework from when I was in business school and pretending it’s groundbreaking. THEN he gets down to business and starts discussing rates. It’s 300/hr for 90 minute “brainstorming” sessions (there must be at least 5 of these), it’s $10,000 for this SWOT analysis that he claims took months but I know that’s impossible because again I felt like I was looking at my business homework. Now all of this is upfront costs before any funneling actually happens. Once the funnel starts, he’ll take 10% off the top of those profits.

Now my coworker and I BUST OUR ASSES 5 days a week to make this show a success. While they generally ignore what we say even going so far as to completely change the scripts I’ve spent time working on researching and creating a great show in favor of more boomer tactics. They think the show is perfect and genuinely don’t understand HOW we don’t have many listeners.

They agreed to this guys plan which means they’re going to pay him approximately a third of my total 2 week pay check to CHAT. My boss “feels really good about this” and is “so excited.” He’s so happy and expects us to be happy too, when down here on earth I would not be financially ok if it weren’t for my parents and my coworker wouldn’t be if it weren’t for his wife. Not to mention this money is going into the ether because we don’t have regular listeners, we have an embarrassingly low follow count ACROSS social media platforms so who will be buying a $500 course or maybe a fancy $5,000 workshop in Hawaii?

I just couldn’t believe that he was so willing to literally rub our noses in the fact that he was about to make some rich guy wealthier. This guy said “the first funnel I did was for a friend and all told I was probably paid about 30/hr and I just COULDNT live on 30/hr”

And now I have to burn up $6/gallon gas to drive there. It’s an hour drive.