Manipulation Of The Appeal Towards Entrepreneurship
I wanted to share a couple of examples of experiences I’ve had with people who try to take advantage of ambitious entrepreneurs. While this does happen mind you, doing free work is a staple to building your business starting out and getting recommendations.
Someone contacted me wanting me to work with them. I wanted to share my experience around this to let you know why you shouldn’t do this and why I think this is a very sketchy business practice that many will far for. People who are really concerned about mentoring others, want your money. This agency boasts working with every top brand in the world, yet their website is on Wix has awful SEO, they have no social channels, proof of anything, or any employees when they claim to have 40+. Upon inquiring about any information instead they say no you must come to meet with us in person, we want to show you. All of this should be publicly available for their own good, but it’s not simply because it’s not true. When I repeatedly push for this information, they just start calling me trying to get me on the phone so they can convince me to just not worry about it. Funnily enough I recognized this, not only because it’s super sketchy but because I’ve had this happen before with an SEO company that was so bad I contacted them to help them with their SEO and thus they offered me an unpaid internship when I simply needed money and had no job while in debt in university. They boasted how they would pay me handsomely after I graduate, but that was just too sketchy.
You see…, when someone tries hard to get you to work for free for them, I would say they aren’t doing too well. Now when you want to work for them for free, it’s obviously because you think it’s worth doing and I think if you need convincing it’s rarely worth it. Keep in mind I have done so much free work, capitalists would be shaking. The point here is that there will be a lot of people taking advantage of the influx of entrepreneurs and the newfound appeal to the space. Instead, you should reach out to companies you want to work with, and hey I can’t say anyone asking you to work for them has bad intent so why not try some out, but most of the time it’s not for your benefit. Navigate wisely on your journey, but always learn from mistakes. Lack of transparency is the biggest giveaway. If you were interested in a company and wanted to learn more about it on your own, they would be thrilled, not concerned.
Watch for the signs. Some people may read and watch this and say, obviously that is sketchy, but there are many who will get caught up in the moment and fall for it and get swindled into free work or even paying them to work for them because they’ve got you under the guise of receiving a great mentorship. There is a chance they may even read this, but I never name names or call anyone out, the point here is for people to learn from these experiences and I think this is relevant for new entrepreneurs to be aware of. In a world where having this boast-worthy information only helps you, you know it’s illegitimate if they need to explain in person who works for them rather than showing you the proof online or talking to me about their social media rather than giving me a link.
After pushing a third time for information, really just for the point of this blog he actually quote on quote said: “I can’t expose everything to you without getting to know you first and make sure you understand the basics of the industry I work in.” To me, that translates to something like “I need to convince you to join me and then tell you what’s really going on after you’ve invested your time and energy so you may get tripped up in the sunken cost fallacy. So for now, I can’t let you know that this whole thing is basically a mentorship marketing pyramid scheme.”
In our final exchange, I simply asked for their social media links and he refused. I mean the SEO title for their WIX website literally said “MySite” at the top of the browser, wow. I’ve been marketing for 5 years and my information is all online and all my follower base, pitch decks, EVERYTHING is out there. If someone wanted more information and I said “I don’t trust you enough yet,” would they really consider working with me? No. Again this may be obvious, but I felt I had to share this ridiculousness.
