Taken for a fool

Last month I uncovered that a very liked employee of mine, was a complete fraud. He lied, made up false email addresses, fake people and forged a potential client’s signature. I won’t mention his name as there are pending criminal and civil cases, but I do want to share the experience in a hope that you may also be able to weed out these fraudsters earlier than I did. 

I run a new tech company called CLIC Techologies in South Africa. It is a new content sharing platform that makes it easy for companies or institutions with multiple users to share content, personalise the content and create newsletters, all at a click of a button. I have been doing the business development myself, as one does when starting out a new entity, but when I saw the response I’d been receiving, I decided to scale up and hire two Business Development Managers. 

The set up

When I interviewed Bob (not his real name, and not because he lied to me, but because I’m not at liberty to use his real name) I was amazed at how smooth and polished he was. I remember coming out of the interview and telling the rest of the office that I think I found the guy. 

He had said that he had been working for his family business, with his brother and sister, but wanted a new challenge and to step out on his own and make a name for himself. Since it was his family, he was available immediately. 

Yes, reading this with the knowledge that Bob would eventually de-fraud me, you might be thinking that it is obvious things were too good to be true, but hindsight, as we all know, is a perfect science. I will leave some thoughts at the end on why I think I was fooled and how you can avoid falling into the same trap. 

Part of Bob’s appeal was that he is a thoroughly likable guy. Team player. Office energiser. Always motivating people, throwing big birthday parties for the colleagues, suggesting team building activities. He also seems to know a lot of people, name drops often, and can call a friend to set up a meeting. 

Since the sales cycle of CLIC is a medium sale, about 10 weeks, his initial performance couldn’t be gauged on pure sales, and I had to manage the input, instead of output. We put in place the usual weekly reports, I was invited to a few meetings initially to join him so that he could learn from me, and I could monitor his behaviour with clients. The one or two clients I did meet with him were his friends, which I was happy with at the start, refine your pitch on your friends, and then tackle the bigger clients.

The Dupe

The first alarm bells started to sound for me when the first few meetings that were set up got cancelled at the last minute. Now for someone like myself who has been in business for over 20 years, I know that meetings get cancelled, but Bob’s cancellation percentage on meetings was very high, close 80%. I started insisting that I get invited to meetings, even if I didn’t attend. He would send me a separate meeting request and not the one to the client. I questioned this and he said forgot. 

He also started taking sick leave regularly, and many times on a Friday or Monday. 

As part of the regular management of staff, and particularly in a probation period, I met with him after a month and gave him feedback, explained that his performance is below par and gave him advice and tips on how to improve. I also mentioned that he needs to improve or his probation period may be terminated. 

After 6 weeks, I called him on his “bulls@#t”. I told him that I’d seen all the tricks that he has been trying before, and that he had the potential to be great if he just focused. I once again stipulated that he needed to improve or stand a chance of losing his job. 

A week later, Bob signed up two new clients. One even called while I was in the office, I heard him talk to the client, and we cheered and celebrated. I was feeling relieved and I worried that I was micromanaging him too closely. Maybe a guy like this needed his space, and as long as he was bringing in the clients, did it matter that his meeting cancellations were high? 

After the celebrations had died down, I now needed to see the signed cost estimate from client, so that we could process the order and on-board the client. After days of asking for the paperwork and getting frustrated with the delay, Bob, who was once again sick, said that he received the paperwork and he would mail it when he got back to the office. 3 days later, when he got to the office, his Inbox had mysteriously suffered a malfunction and several of his mails that he received the week before had been deleted or disappeared.

I had to attend a conference out the country and insisted that Bob call the clients and ask them to resend. Another week had past while I was away, but I eventually received two signed cost estimates from the clients. Once again, my concerns were alleviated. I even received an email from the one client who thanked me and asked to meet when I returned. 

The next step in the process is that the clients are to pay a deposit and sign-on fee. This once again took 2 weeks because the clients were traveling. The one client mailed me and apologised.   We even had a meeting scheduled that the client requested of me, but had to cancel. 

The reveal

Eventually after a further 6 weeks (12 weeks in total) after I had called Bob on his “bulls#@t”, I finally decided that I am too trusting. Bob was once again sick, so I investigated the two companies that he had signed up. I used the phone numbers that he had provided for the clients, and the numbers did not exist. I Google searched Company A’s address, and it was not the company address. I even searched social media and LinkedIn for the two client representatives. One I found, and the other just did not exist. No sign of this person that Bob had been talking to. 

I called around and found out that Company A had closed down 3 years ago. 

Company B definitely existed, I found the CEO on LinkedIn, and I had been emailing him. I was going to meet him on this day I was researching, but he had mailed me to reschedule and apologise. I then checked the email addresses and found that the address that the CEO of Company B was mailing me from was a Gmail address.  I hadn’t noticed that before. I did some research and found an alternative address with the [email protected], and I copied that address in to the reply of the meeting reschedule. The real CEO called me immediately. 

He called me and said that he had never heard of CLIC and that the Gmail address I was mailing, was not him. I sent him the signed cost estimate and he said that was not his signature. 

He did however say that he knew of Bob, and had worked with him a few years ago, where he had been fired from that job for defrauding them. 

To end the long story, I had totally been duped, by someone who I trusted, who I liked and who I had given way too many chances. He had taken the time to create false email addresses, fake signatures and pretend to have clients. He had even promised to pay back another staff member R1500, he had pretended to do a money transfer, but the money never came. The staff member was new and didn’t want to cause problems, so he hadn’t mentioned it to me. 

The lessons

So, where are the lessons that firstly I have to learn, and second hopefully you can learn from too:

1.      Slow down. When we start companies or when we are running companies, we tend to be too busy. Slow down, and do the basics properly

2.      If someone looks too good to be true, research the hell out of them first because they may just be. 

3.      Call all references. I didn’t call because the story was that he had been working with his brother and sister for years. They were the references on his CV, and I thought that calling family was not going to be worth much

4.      Trust your gut. I knew there was something wrong when I first picked up the high meeting cancellation rate. Investigate early. 

5.      For sales people, establish early on that you, or another company will be calling people on the weekly reports to make sure that meetings were actually held and people were legitimate humans. 

Apart from the lesson above, I’m still left with a few questions too:

A.     Did I trust too soon

B.      Did I fall for Bob’s charm within the office

C.      Did I push him too hard for sales and meetings, and he faked it rather than lose his job

D.     Will this experience make me a better manager and leader, or a more entrusting skeptical one

In the end, Bob was dismissed for Gross Misconduct and for illegal activities, and I lost 12 weeks of sales time in Cape Town, and possibly 6 weeks of salary that he ended up getting for the fact that I didn’t terminate his employment after he “signed” up new clients.  

There is a saying that you don’t ever lose, you either win or learn. I must admit that feel a bit like a loser at the moment, but probably not as much of a loser as Bob.