An Unfortunate Predicament
My blog unfortunately does concern itself with the abysmal state of where we are in the cannabis industry in the United States currently. Everyday it just keeps getting worse and with the “people” at the helm of government – if you can call them that – nothing is going to get better anytime soon.
None are quite so abysmal as Leafbuyer Technologies. Fucking scum of the earth. I had the displeasure of working for these cunts for a few months back in 2019. Where do I start? Let’s start with what this company is supposed to be. A repository to find the cheapest cannabis. Not a good start. We also sold ads that resided on our dog shit website if anyone would be foolish enough to stumble upon it.
The functionality of our site was complete shit and instead of addressing that, they liked to call meetings and say shit like, “Is our site perfect? No, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be in a good position to sell our products.” I’m stuck sitting there thinking, “Really?” Instead of spending our time trying to limp into pitches with a fundamentally horrible nonfunctional site, we should have been focusing on fixing our website, and until that was fixed we shouldn’t be approaching new clients, period. Talk about losing the plot.
Send in the Clowns
Secondly, we were encouraged by our sales manager Jon Valle (who smartly stays off LinkedIn or I would hyperlink to his profile) to basically say whatever we needed to on the phone to sell our products, whether it was true or not was not his concern, nor was generally competency or decency. Another guy who smartly stays off LinkedIn – maybe it’s a red flag if you can’t see people on that platform – is Chris Christianson, who would lie through his teeth whenever the opportunity presented itself. Often times I would hear him describe an attribute or feature of our products and I would naively say, “Oh that’s cool, I didn’t know we had that feature.” He would reply with some form of, “Oh we don’t, I’m just trying to make sales.” Fucking deplorable people. Not to mention extremely short sighted.
But wait there’s more! I haven’t even gotten to the most egregious aspect of these POS. This company was actively engaged in and systematically developed a process to steal commissions from their sales people. No I’m not kidding. This is how they did it.
First when I came to the company I realized the turnover was the worst I’d ever seen in any sales environment in my life. So I knew either the hiring manager was trash or our products were, or most likely – and as turned out to be the case – it was both. Because the turn over was so high and the average tenure of sales reps was probably three weeks, this company decided to come up with the harebrained idea of paying out commissions EIGHT WEEKS OUT. Yes you read correctly, 8 mother fucking weeks. The second they told me that I assumed they did it for wage theft.
This was their thinking; since our turn over was so bad and we treated our employees like shit, by the time the ex-employees were supposed to get their commissions they either forgot or had such a horrible experience with the company they decided to cut their losses. Well that probably worked for the endless rabble of 22 years olds they hired right out of college, but when they tried to pull that shit on me they got a rude awakening. As I previously stated I knew the eight week commission pay out was shady AF so at the eight week mark after I earned my commissions, I was ready. And what do you know, these pieces of shit didn’t put a dime of commission on my last check. They did this to me earlier also (I had a short stint with the company previously and came back simply out of necessity).
The Sketchiness Starts at the Top
After resigning from the company I got on Glassdoor.com I saw a review about the company from a former employee that said they experienced the same thing. The amount of staff, from the CEO, COO, sales manager and accounting department that had to be on board with this to pull it off was truly sickening. Let’s call these pieces of shit out.
Mark Breen – COO and Co founder – Not only a piece of shit, but also the biggest fucking asshole I’ve ever met.
Kurt Rossner CEO and Co founder – fuck this dude.
What do we Learn and How do we Proceed?
I’m so sick of these shady ass types of people running this industry. In any sane world these people would be locked up for white collar crimes. My last blog post was about the dichotomy created by legacy market players and white collar opportunists in the cannabis space. I didn’t think that I would experience white collar criminals to boot. Shit is wild. All we can do as people that are not pieces of shit is do our best to come to work everyday in a way that is responsible, kind and forward thinking, I wish others would do the same. But the puff game (British accent) was founded by brotherhood, community and sharing positive vibes, what I’ve seen in this industry over the past several years is none of these things. That gives me hope. Hope that one day we will get back to our roots, kind of like what you see in the alcohol industry now with craft beer. Right now though it seems the kings of cannabis are running things and “buttwiper” is an appropriate moniker. One love.
