Leading Route Cars has had a manic journey these past few months. A lot has happened and a lot is yet to happen.
Ok so lets take things back to June of this year where we suffered our first (and last) taste of corporate espionage. Who knew it could happen to a small company in the minicab industry? Well it did!
We had one girl working for us doing part-time evening shifts in this time (for those avid followers, yes its the same girl I was praising a few months prior). Well to cover the shifts she’d lost with us due to business being slow, she asked my permission to work elsewhere with a rival firm. At this point, I thought it was a given since she needed to feed herself and a few evenings a week from me wasn’t going to be nearly enough. So I gave her the go ahead whilst also thinking it would be beneficial for me as her ‘learning’ in the same job would continue and that would be good for Leading Route Cars in the long-term.
So a few weeks passed and one evening, she tells me one of her friends is doing some financial outsourcing in Dubai and would like some pointers with their website SEO and design. I love helping, so of course said yes.
So the guy calls me up and arranges an appointment to come and see me at the office. With his ‘financial’ website on my screen, I talk him through the best way to get good rankings on a search engine for this and any other business. I talk on-page and off-page, I talk with examples of how its working very well for www.leadingroutecars.com. Both him and his business partner (here on holiday but seeking to invest in a business in the UK, or so he said) thank me and offer to take me to lunch. I had plenty to get done that day so kindly decline with “another day perhaps”. He leaves his number as they leave. I find myself doing some call-backs and come across a name/number on a post-it note from last week. It turns out its the same guy that came today.
I figured lets see what this guy has done, so I google him to find his name associated with “PCO driver job vacancy” ads on Gumtree. To say I was shocked would be an understatement. I was immediately on the phone to my controller who had forwarded my number to this ‘supposed’ friend.
Anyway to cut a long story a bit shorter, I ended up getting rid of her on the grounds of trust in that I didn’t. A few weeks later and lo and behold, the ‘other’ minicab company had made almost every on-page SEO change I had suggested. Trouble is I would probably have advised regardless of them being a competitor, but now I felt hard done by.
Imagine then my further rage, when one of my oldest drivers tells me that he was approached by my old controller to leave Leading Route Cars and move to them instead. A few calls later, I find that three more drivers had been approached!
Good riddance to bad rubbish! We learn and we move on…and I thought the espionage between Pepsi and Coke was bad.
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Really sorry to hear about that Anand. Makes you really question the amount of faith we place in fellow human beings. It also makes you more paranoid about trusting others in the future. Having said that, a certain level of paranoia is healthy. Especially when it comes to business.
Thanks Mark – its was so surprising when I realised what had happened. The difference was I would’ve helped this guy out in any case.