I wasn’t let go - I was working my notice period before leaving of my own choice (after just 6 painful months). The CEO was so annoyed, that he didn’t speak to me. Anything he wanted, was given 2nd hand from the accountant. Apparently I had to stick around and not say anything about leaving, in front of the overseas senior management who were coming for a visit. I later found out that staff retention was one of his KPIs, and I would be the one to cause him to fail that KPI.

Another KPI of his was profit margin, and he’d done some underhanded things to claw that back, like getting an IT consultant to rewrite code in the quoting program, so quotes would automatically generate a higher sell price at our location compared to others. We quickly found this, as many of the reps kept old emails, and old quotes printed out in folders, and they were able to compare them. They got clever and asked an interstate buddy to quote the same thing, and sure enough, 2 different sell prices. This was the tip of the iceberg.

We also found out he lied about a major contract. He caused the loss of that business by getting greedy. We knew our international guests would be asking about it, because they were the #2 customer, and they dropped off the radar real quick. He falsified sales reports in Excel to show they were still at #2 with an improved margin year on year.

I had to sit through 3 days of this rubbish, and not utter a word. But he was hopeless with computers, so the accountant asked me to use my laptop to run the projector in the board room, and he gave me each of the CEOs reports and slide shows to present on the projector.

At the end of each one, if I wasn’t involved in the conversation about updating signage or other crap, I’d just sit there & do emails & the like, with the projector switched off.

One of my emails was from the purchasing manager (PM) of that #2 company. They were hit with a 15% price increase 2 months prior, and argued back & forth for a week about not accepting it. The CEO basically told them to put up or shut up, so they stopped purchasing from us because of this. The dodgy reports he showed HQ had fake numbers in it to hide this loss.

The PM must have had some supply issues from their other vendor, as he emailed me asking me to go into bat for them against my boss (the CEO) and see if I could get that 15% increase reviewed to a reasonable level.

I wrote back to him apologising, saying I whilst I agreed that 15% was a large increase, I wouldn’t go up against the CEO as I was leaving the company, and had given my 4 weeks notice some 2 weeks back.

The afternoon session that followed was every state’s top 3 customers, and how they were doing. He made a huge fuss about how they asked for a cost down, and he told them they would be copping a 15% price increase, or they could walk. He then claimed they came crawling back, begging us to take them back, and they would pay the increase. Now this was the opposite of what I’d read earlier, so I just happened to “accidentally” flick to the email to “check” what that PM had written - all of it mirrored on the projector screen.

Yes, they saw both things I wanted them to see - that I was leaving, and that he was a liar. They started to question him, but half of us (including me) were told to leave the room and close the door. I never heard a peep from that CEO for the rest of the 2 weeks I had left there.

But that was really just a petty thing, and I never heard if there was anything that came of it or not, so I never got any closure on that topic. However, my real revenge came when I got them busted for illegal accounting practices, and we all got a bit of a bonus in our superannuation accounts that had been “overlooked” by devious management who were fiddling with the books to increase their bonuses.

That CEO eventually got fired over a whole raft of things, and has never been able to get a job in management since, because nobody is willing to give him a reference.