Doing The Right Thing. Does It Even Matter?

When I was first coming into to the market place in 2007, I had recently graduated from San Jose State University without any clue as to who I was and what I wanted to do with my life.

I had a goal of diving into a ministry life and preaching the gospel all over the world, but door after door was closing and I had a big life change rapidly approaching me; I was getting married in a few short months, and I had no job or job prospects to speak of.

It wasn’t until exactly 2 months before our wedding date, that I landed my first real job (I even had to wear a suit and tie). It was November 5th, 2007 and I was the newest door to door sales rep for Cbeyond, a phone and data service provider for SMBs. As an athlete, all I wanted to do was win and be the best: to do the job right. I had a pure heart towards my job and a clear head. Those first 6 months of that job, I was the top producer and rose up to #2 in the company, nation wide. No one could quite understand how I was doing what I was doing out there; getting small business owners to signup for our services on the first cold call (I set the company record at the time with 11 of those).

But to me it was simple, I wanted to do the job right. I followed the company script, I hit the doors, I did the work, and I prayed pretty much non-stop for help. That was my secret formula. Work hard. Pray harder.

Fast forwarded through many ups and downs and I was standing at another major life crossroads. I had just been fired from a job at an Internet marketing startup that I had moved our young family 1800 miles across the country for. I had been doing very well at the company over the 4 years I had been there, so to say I was unprepared and bewildered by the sudden change in employment status would be an understatement. I was suddenly left with no job prospects or sources of income. We were rapidly running out of money and I had to make a decision, would I look for another job, or do something on my own?

As I reached out to potential employers, I was met with a very warm response. But before I could land any of the job opportunities in front of me, my former employer swooped in and blocked my employment with threats of legal action against the companies looking to hire me. My wife and I were devastated. We were so hopeful that all would workout in our favor and that God would give us the justice we thirsted for. We felt powerless and hopeless.

We entered into a dark and painful time. We not only felt abandoned and betrayed by a company we moved our life for, we now felt neglected by a God we had seen do so many amazing things for us. I felt confused, disoriented, and angry. I had to do something.

For a short time, I was brokering traffic for some clients of mine, but I was not seeing much fruit from my efforts there. Then one day, a business associate of mine who was really doing well with his Internet business, reached out to me and told that if I wanted to make REAL money online, I needed to have my own products.
I took the bait. I was so thankful for a mentor that I just dove in head first to get myself up and running. The whole process of getting my own product, creating my own brand, getting merchant processing, and building up all the other aspects required to run a private label company successfully was like a big puzzle to me. I loved the challenge and just HAD to figure it all out.

As I was getting closer to really getting all of my ducks in a row and getting my first offer up and running, I started to have to make some decisions that didn’t sit right with me. They were grey area decisions. Ones that weren’t necessarily illegal, but still didn’t feel right. I was too close to the finish line and too far down the road with no plan B or plan C to turn back, so I keep going. But the further I pressed ahead, the more grey areas I had to navigate.

The funny thing about that little voice that tells you right from wrong is, when you ignore it, the voice gets muted and muddled over time.

Just 4 months after starting my own product, I launched my first marketing campaign. I was doing hundreds of sales per day in no time at all. People had warned me about starting off too fast, but I was too smart for them. I knew I was too smart to fail, so I pressed on at a dangerous rate of growth.

For the next 12 months, I would do about $2M in revenue and accrue a ton of debt. That little voice was telling me to stop, over and over again. I was mentally exhausted and on the brink of financial disaster, but I had to keep feeding the beast.

There was one day in January of 2018 where I remember getting my biggest strategic breakthrough. I had finally figured the whole business out. I knew exactly how to push the company to $10M in rev that year with a 30% margin. I was so excited, but equally as depressed.

You see, I had figured out to that to make the business work, and make a profit, I needed to violate my conscience even further. I couldn’t do that. Enough was enough. I knew what I had to do. I went to sleep that night with a decision to close everything down. I was pulling the plug on the beast that had mentally consumed me for a year because I was getting eaten up inside from the insane stress.

When I woke up that next morning, I jumped my computer and started writing all of my traffic vendors to stop traffic. My sales stopped that day and I would go on to find out that most of my sales had come from sources that originated in fraudulent celebrity endorsement. Up until that point, I had never asked what the pages looked like that were sending me so many sales. The truth was, I didn’t care. I wanted sales, and didn’t bother to ask the hard questions.

When I found this out, I shut down all of the customer subscriptions as well and stopped collecting money. I knew deep down that these people didn’t fully understand that the products they had purchased were not just a one time order, but on a monthly auto-order. It was wrong to keep billing them. The major affiliate networks I was working with knew all along what was going on, and they kept pumping sales and they kept demanding money from me, even though I was losing money on every sale because of the fraud.

When I finally pulled the plug, I was half a million dollars in debt, with portions on our personal accounts.

I was devastated, but resolute at the same time. I knew I was taking a step in the right direction by shutting this monstrosity of a business down, but I also knew it was be near impossible to dig myself out of the mess.

As about a year has passed since that decision was made, I have had a solid amount of time to reflect on what went wrong. The moment I felt a little off about a decision I was making, but ended up justifying it to attain the higher goal I had, that was the moment I stepped off the right path and into disastrous territory.

I can remember having the hard conversations with all of the affiliate networks I was working with and telling them they were not going to get paid for the bad traffic they sent. Wow! That was eye opening. I was essentially bankrupted by their product, and one of them had the nerve to ask me if I owned a home because he thought I should take a second mortgage out on it and pay them off. It was all so clear looking back, these are the type of people you will encounter when you are not working on a righteous path. The saying rings truer than ever to me now, “when you make a deal with the devil, there will be hell to pay.”

I am not clear from any of this chaos that I brought upon myself over these last 2 years, but I do know this, doing the right thing, it really does matter. Trust your gut and don’t take the short cut neither in business nor in parenting. It is simply not worth it.

Note: Further details on author David McMenomey and the Dadstrong company are found at www.GetDadstrong.com.

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