statewide prep sports positions

The next honest statement Mark Ward makes about CoachesAid.com will be the first honest statement Mark Ward makes about CoachesAid.com.

rb

 

Is he the person to blame for the entire mess? I've wondered because a friend of mine worked for them and he was never sure if it was Ward, the oil guys or someone else.

 

I toss the blanket of blame over every one of the shysters in upper management/ownership.

 

But Mark was (is) upper management. He is the president of the company. He had the horrible job of being the messenger, but the ways in which he communicated certainly didn't help anyone or the situation. The ownership and hack group of investors are ultimately what did it in. They never even gave it a shot, to be honest. If I had the same lack of class as many among that group, I'd post some of the emails that went out when we complained after our checks for December and January were weeks late.

 

As a former content coordinator (let go in October), I'm asking you to have a lack of class.

 

I'd like to see some of those, as well.

 

Class is overrated

 

If/when I get some time, I will go through my e-mail archives (and yes, I keep ALL my work-related ones, for just such occasions ...) and pass along some of the doozies.

rb

 

My heart goes out to those of you who got screwed over by these folks. I know a lot of people on these boards --- self included --- have been laid off at one time or another (and many of us fairly recently). And when you are looking for work in a market where there are more buyers than sellers, its easy to grasp at straws.

What this whole story tells me is just how hard it is to run a for-profit business, especially in this economy. You can have the grandest schemes in the world and yet not be able to find people (investors, advertisers, customers) willing to fork over their hard-earned cash to buy into them. And isn't that what this is about? It's not really that the writing or stat keeping was inferior. It's just that the company couldn't make a buck and, thus, couldn't pay a buck. Haven't we all been down this road before?

One of the things we see now is a market correction of how much of a given product is really needed. With newspapers, TV, radio and other established media outlets all competiting for the same consumer's attention, at what point does one more web site become overkill? You damn sure better be able to offer something to separate yourself from the competition. All the more difficult as a startup.

As for freelancers, I seriously wonder if that is the wave of the future. If a company can get Joe Citizen to snap a few photos or write a few paragraphs on a high school event -- and my current paper does that on certain occasions -- why on earth would they pay a university-trained professional more than $30K per year to do the same thing? The suits long since ceased to care about quality of content. Just get something in and get the darn product out on time seems to be the MO.

Again, I'm sorry to those hurt emotionally or financially by this mess. Just realize that you are not alone and consider it a lesson learned.

Better luck to all.

 

Thanks very much for the thoughts Mark2010. The thing is, though, none of this had to do with the economy or lack of interested investors, advertisers and the like. This boiled down to terrible management and horrible lies.

As far as advertisers and sponsors go, there was no buy in because there was ABSOLUTELY no effort beyond Oklahoma to acquire accounts and sponsorships. In any economy, that plan wouldn't have worked.

As for the mismanagement, after just three months, the company had reportedly spent close to $5 million. On what? Who knows. I know they did cover all the company vehicles with CA wraps and fix up an old bus to use as a marketing tool --- which was taken on one failed trip, by the way. Other than the $150,000 or so they wasted on the company meetings in OK City, I'm still clueless as to what they could have wasted that much money on. This financial mismanagement led to numerous investors pulling funds immediately and the layoffs of nearly 80 percent of state editorial positions.

As for the lies, the whole franchise thing was their plan all along, despite a DIRECT QUESTION and comforting answer to and from the company's president. Figure this, when I was offered the job and lowballed with something I would have had trouble living with in Oklahoma, let alone the northeast, I asked for XX amount. There wasn't even hesitation before I was given what I asked for. Now that everything has played out the way it has, it's clear that I could have asked for 10 times the amount and still given a verbal agreement because they knew they wouldn't be paying me for a full year. They only paid me and the other good people until each site had some value. Once the value was there, they began trying to sell them off.

I know there has been a lot of chatter on this thread since the original job posting went up about anyone who was duped not looking into it enough, etc., etc., etc. Rest assured that all questions and concerns I thought of were asked and answered in a tell-them-what-they-want-to-hear fashion. Aside from a written contract (which everyone will agree is NOT the norm at the high school level in our industry), I had all of the answers I wanted to hear. So, please, don't judge any of us that did buy in. Knowing many of the good people who were also screwed over, I can tell you that most, if not all, did their homework before taking the job. I will say though, after reading Mark2010's post about the future of jobs in this business, etc. that everyone should have written guarantee that pleases them when taking a chance on a new job.

It's a shame, though, that it was all a bag of lies. The entire crew in Oklahoma should have to pay for what they've done and will likely try to continue to do.

 

Everyone time this thread bumps, I go check out the CA main site. Other than Oklahoma, do they even have any other states running? I ask because I checked some of the bigger states -- FLA, Texas, Cal, NY -- and found nothing.

 

At this point, Oklahoma is the only site still operating. I've heard that one of the states that was run extremely well (for the six months we were all in existence) may become operational again soon. After the franchising structure was put in place, Massachusetts, Arizona and Colorado were all franchised by one of the company's capable minds. That said, those three states remained for only two more months.