I worked in sales for over a decade of my career. Starting in high school, I worked in customer service and box office ticket sales at a local playhouse theatre. While going to college, I worked in a couple of different retail sales positions. One of those jobs was for an eyewear company where as a sales associate I was in the top 10% in the entire country. This is when I realized I may have a knack for sales and an ability to make a career in business.

As it was, I finished my major of Criminal Justice and Criminology at the University of Maryland, and instead of pursuing law school I started working in inside sales for an event company. Because it was a small business, I wore many hats. When understaffed, I would deliver heavy equipment as well as work and manage events after hours and on the weekends. In addition to which, I was booking a quarter of the company’s revenue.

It was a lot of hours and hard work, but it was my first job out of college. I felt that I was doing pretty well until one day when I was publicly chastised by the business owner in front of my colleagues. Even looking back at it now, his comments were inappropriate, inaccurate, and worst of all demotivating. I was a good, loyal, hardworking employee who was now questioning the corporate culture and thinking about my next career move.

The good news is that this was the catalyst for my advancement into my first outside sales position. You can make a nice living in outside sales, but getting your first job is difficult as the prerequisite is always “previous outside sales experience”. I interviewed with ten different companies until I found a good fit doing print advertising sales for a weekly community newspaper. For the most part, this was an enjoyable experience.

I came in as the youngest person on the sales team, and in my first 3 months I was the employee of the quarter. Month after month I was exceeding my sales goals, and after a year I was promoted to sales manager. I was in this position for over a year. I liked the job and was doing well, but I left for three main reasons in early 2009.

First, I saw the writing on the wall with what was happening in the print publication industry. People were shifting budgets from print to online and marketing mixes across multiple customer touch points, and unfortunately it was not the priority of our company to innovate fast enough to accommodate our customers’ needs. Second, at this time an ex-coworker reached out to me with a position that was a promotion with upward advancement opportunities.

If those things weren’t enough, the last contributing factor was a toxic employee. There was a lady who was responsible for non-profit organizations which made up the majority of our advertising base. It was the sweetest territory, and instead of being grateful about it, she was bitter and a bully in the office. This employee would poke fun at people’s physical appearance, spread trash about management, and threaten to delete company data and information.

Although I was in management, there were other executives above me. I am not one to get someone fired, but at this same time there have got to be professional boundaries upheld. She had been warned and talked to in the past, but her behavior never changed. I recommended she be terminated and her territory distributed amongst all of the sales representatives. Upper management kept her on as not to rock the boat even though she was negatively influencing the company culture.

I left there to become the Senior Sales Manager for a boutique hotel in DC. I was responsible for booking groups such as corporate meetings and organizations. I was here for a little over a year, but there were a lot of issues that became apparent right away. The building had problems that clients complained about and I couldn’t get the approval to get them fixed. Additionally, communication was pretty poor from the top down and with my direct manager. Also, to add insult to injury the advancement I was promised seemed less and less likely.

This experience led me to start out on my own, and I created a marketing consulting company with my brother and friend. These were exciting and sometimes stressful times getting this off the ground. For nearly two years we worked to create marketing campaigns for clients and were probably ahead of our time for what we were doing online for small businesses. My partners and I decided to move on to other things.

I left to become the Business Manager for a sales consulting firm. I learned a lot from this experience as a management consultant working with emerging companies generating more than $25-million in annual revenue. I served as a sales trainer, leadership developer, and manager of the sales hiring process. This was a mentally challenging job, and the expectations of me were extremely high. The pressure and lack of life balance burned me out. I resigned and got into something a little more fun and tangible, selling promotional products.

I was ramping up my territory, growing month over month, but this small husband and wife run business had some poisonous company culture. I should have known better than to accept the position when they told me they’ve been in court with a past employee. I was doing well, but no matter my results the metaphorical goal posts kept moving. Their expectations and rules changed on a moment’s notice.

When I took the job, we agreed that I’d work mostly out of the office. Then after a week they said they wanted me to work in the office from now on since they are paying me a base salary. After a few months, they took away my base pay. I stayed, and still worked from the office sometimes, but also worked more often from home. One evening I logged into our web based sales system, and I was locked out.

The next morning I walked into the COO’s office and told her that I could not get into the system. She looks at me like a deer in headlights and says, “you weren’t here yesterday”. I said, “no, I was meeting with clients”. She calls in the CEO who smugly says that I’m fired. He then proceed to yell and raise his voice at me. Then when I try to explain my position, he laughs and says, “I think it’s funny I get to fire you”. This is when I promptly walked out refusing to discuss this any further. They also held my $1,000+ commission check for over a month until my lawyer sent them a letter. This company demonstrated terrible leadership which resulted in a bad culture.

Although I’d experienced some negatives in the workplace throughout my career, this last one was the worst for reasons beyond it was the only time I was ever fired. That being said, it helped me come to some realizations and make some choices that have influenced the past 5 years of my life. I promised myself I would only work for companies who have a positive company culture. Additionally, I wanted to be in a place where my skills and talents went appreciated. And lastly, I wanted to do passionate work that created value.

This was when I decided not to work for anyone else, and to create my own business. Although I had previously owned a business, I was still pretty new to being an entrepreneur. As per the many people who give business advice say to, I decided to follow my passion so I started a business around poker. What started as a company doing charity poker events, eventually evolved into poker coaching and a mobile app. Then from there I spun off using poker concepts such as calculated risk to teach better decision making to professionals and entrepreneurs.

All of my experiences lead me to becoming the COO of MindTeam Solutions where I get to do all of the things that I committed to after being fired over five years ago. A positive, respectful, and collaborative company culture are extremely important to me and my business partner. Being responsible for the sales and marketing side allows me to stay in the lane of my prior experience. Most importantly, helping other organizations create high performance and engaged teams is very fulfilling.