Cheapskate Company Owner Thinks He Will Trick Consultant Into Working For Free, Ends Up Paying Double What Was Intended

Recently, a person shared an incident they had at a former job at a local TV station.

In a post that amassed 4.5k upvotes, the author wrote that “the owner was (and still is) the worst human being I've ever met. This guy has money, but he will cheat and lie, anything to get out of paying his bills.”

One day, the owner signed a contract with DirectTV to become part of their broadcast package, and this is when things started to get interesting.

Not only was the owner not willing to pay $15k for the system upgrade they had to do, but he made sure to spend as little as possible. In the end, things backfired big time.

Corporate greed has long been documented as one of the main problems of modern business. Economist Robert Reich, in his book The Common Good, argues that “when the only purpose of business is to make as much money as possible in the shortest time frame, regardless of how it’s done, the common good is easily sacrificed.”

According to him, “in pursuit of high profits, whatever it takes, CEOs and the corporations they run have ignored or circumvented the intent of laws to protect workers, communities, the environment, and consumers.”

Julian Birkinshaw, a Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the London Business School, has developed what he calls “seven deadly sins” of a bad manager that he concluded after seminars with executives discussing their experiences of good and bad management.

One of the first sins is greed, Birkinshaw argues. “A greedy boss pursues wealth, status, and growth to get himself noticed. In short, he is an empire builder, and we don’t have to look far to find examples of empire-building bosses.”

According to him, an example of it would be Eike Batista, the Brazilian entrepreneur who has made the EBX Group (energy, mining and logistics) into Brazil’s fastest-growing company and himself into the eighth-richest person in the world.