Morgan: I’m Morgan Friedman, and this is Client Horror Stories. Hey, everyone! Welcome to the latest episode of Client Horror Stories. I’m very excited to have with me Bryan Wetzel today. How are you doing? And what are you drinking today, Bryan?

Bryan: I’m doing good, and I’m keeping it old school. I’m going with Guinness.

Morgan: You can’t go wrong with Guinness.

Bryan: You cannot. It’s a good thing to mix stuff in as well. And I’m representing a local brewery here in Georgia with my T-shirt. That was one good thing about owning a restaurant and bars: you get lots of free T-shirts from every vendor. For a long time, people probably thought the only thing I wore were T-shirts with alcohol on them.

Morgan: “Is that guy an alcoholic?”

There’s an old business saying that no one ever got fired for hiring IBM. It’s a powerful business point: people will cover their ass by hiring the best, most prestigious, most famous company. If anything goes wrong, they can say, “Dude, I hired the best. Don’t blame me.”

I feel like there’s a drunken analog to that when it comes to ordering Guinness. You can’t go wrong. There’s no risk that you’ll order some flowery drink that your friends will make fun of you for. It’ll always be good. It’s like the IBM of beers. It’s consistent, and no one’s going to say, “Well, I’ve never heard of that.” Every bar will have it.

Bryan: That is exactly right. We used to do this thing where you’d drop a shot into whatever you wanted to drink, and it would make it that much more potent. We had a Christmas one with Maker’s Mark that was maple-syrup-flavored. When you took the top off the bottle, it smelled like maple syrup. We’d do a shot and put it in the Guinness around the holidays. It was delicious. Too delicious. It raised the alcohol content quite a bit, and it would sneak up on people. We’d have to warn them.

Morgan: With that drunken preface to get us in the right mood, I’m excited to hear your craziest client experience. Tell us a wild story.

Bryan: I’ve got a lot I could have picked from after 25 years or more of having my own business. But probably the craziest one involves a community in North Georgia called Big Canoe. It’s an all-inclusive community, and it’s beautiful. I still go up there now. I love it.

Back in the ’90s, I started doing their advertising work for them: taking pictures, doing commercials, and shooting promotional videos that would run in their real estate office. I thought I was well-liked up there until the person in charge of advertising retired.

One day, I got a call from the owner’s daughter, who had taken over right out of college. She said, “We want to do a very, very nice video, a 10-minute video with a helicopter flyover.” This was before drones were a thing. Helicopter flyovers! We wanted music, too.

Morgan: Let me interrupt you for one second with a funny observation. You had a great relationship, and then there was a change in marketing leadership. Before we even see what happens with the video, I want to point out an interesting religious analogy.

I’m viewing the Bible as literature here. Pretend we’re talking about Shakespeare, so there’s no religious implication.

The first book of the Old Testament is about the Jews escaping from Egypt through the Red Sea, settling in Israel, and Joseph saving the Jews and helping them escape Pharaoh. Then the Book of Exodus opens with a sentence that, paraphrasing because I don’t remember the exact words, says that Pharaoh died and a new Pharaoh came to rule, one who didn’t remember all the good things Joseph had done.

The change in marketing leadership reminded me of that. There’s a powerful pattern where you’ll work with an institution and have a great relationship. Things will be going well, and then an employee changes. The new person doesn’t know you, and that introduces a whole other set of risk factors.

Bryan: On that note, I’ve had that happen several times. Sometimes you lose the gig entirely. The new person comes in, and they don’t want to do what the previous person did. They want everything done their way, with their people and so on. There’s really nothing you can do about that. You try to be as friendly as you can to the new person.

But I’ve also had situations where someone came in and tried to undo everything the previous person had done, including things the company had already paid for. You’re thinking to yourself, “Is the leadership of your company really comfortable spending money to redo something that was already finished?”

You have to step back and say, “You know what? They’re paying me. If they want to redo it for eight months, we’ll redo it for eight months.”

My old house was called the Coca-Cola house by my kids because of a project I did for Coca-Cola Enterprises. It was supposed to be a month-long project. It went on for 17 months.

I’ve had this happen many times. The top people approve a storyboard for a video or approve the script, then give it to the lower-level people to execute. But the people in the C-suite want their fingerprints on the project, too. They want to be able to say, “See that line? That was me. I added that line,” or, “We changed the background colors. That was my contribution.”

So we kept changing and changing and changing things. It got ridiculous. Finally, the C-suite approved all the changes, and I finished the edit. It went back to the top executives for approval, and they looked at it and said, “This isn’t what we approved at all. Make it go back.”

Fortunately, you back things up. All the time.

I didn’t tell them this, but I went back to the previous edit from 17 months earlier, restored it, tweaked it, and added some of the things they did want to keep. But I got paid. Instead of a four-week project, it was 17 months of work, on and off. I put the down payment on our house with that paycheck, which is why my kids called it the Coca-Cola house.

A project that was probably supposed to cost $5,000 ended up costing close to $50,000 over those 17 months. It was getting ridiculous. We were hiring voice-over professionals, and this is something I always try to explain to people: one of the easiest ways to keep a project cost-effective is to use my voice as a scratch track until we’re sure the script is staying the same. There’s no reason to pay a professional if you’re not sure the script is final.

But we kept paying a professional, and then they’d change the script. They’d say, “Well, he’s already been paid. Don’t you think he’ll just come in and do one sentence?”

I’m like, “No, that’s not how contractors work. If I call him back to the studio for an hour, he’s charging us for his time.”

The project manager who ran that gig lost their job because the budget blew up. I assumed the whole time that they were getting everything approved, which wasn’t true. But I didn’t work for Coca-Cola, so it wasn’t my responsibility to clear all that stuff. I was just doing what I was told.

Anyway, back to Big Canoe.

I was doing work for them, and I loved it because I could barter some of my time for stays in their cabins. My wife and I could spend a weekend in one of the cabins, and I’d barter half of my pay and get some time at their beach area and pool. It was a good arrangement.

That went on for about four years. Then the owner’s daughter called and said, “We want to do a big project. It’s going to have helicopter flyovers. We want professional voice-overs and a professional script. We’re going to hire an ad agency to write it.”

It was going to be a much more expensive project than anything I’d done for them before.

I said, “We’re going to take a third down, which is my standard, a third on the day we show up on-site, and the final third when we’re finished.”

They paid the first third. I hired the helicopter pilot and reserved the helicopter. I hired the writer and someone to handle the music. I booked all the production assistants. Everyone was booked for the four-day shoot.

Then, the day before we were supposed to shoot, she called and said, “A new TV channel has come to us and said they’ll do it for free, as long as they can run this video at no cost.”

I said, “Okay. I hate that, because I’m losing the job.”

But then she added, “So send back the money we gave you.”

I said, “Well, that’s not how it works.”

She replied, “Your contract says we can cancel within five days of production, and production starts tomorrow.”

I said, “No, no. It doesn’t say production. It says from the start of production. That means the day I put people on the books. The contractors I hired are going to want to get paid anyway. They reserved those dates and can’t book other jobs now. We’re only one day away from shooting. I’ve already reserved a helicopter pilot and hired a writer. They’re all getting paid something.”

So they took me to court.

I represented myself, and I beat them.

Morgan: You represented yourself and beat them?

Bryan: I’ve represented myself four or five times. If it’s a big case, I have a good friend who’s a lawyer. He’ll look at it and say, “You can do this,” or, “No, you don’t need to go.”

Especially if it’s state court, you don’t want to go into a higher court without knowing the procedures and rules. Otherwise, stuff will get tossed out.

But when it comes to magistrate court, at least in the States, you can represent yourself. If you get a little off procedure, the judge will nudge you back over and say, “You need to do this.” That’s what magistrate court is set up for.

When you get to state court, you’d be foolish to go in there by yourself if you’re not an attorney. The other side will have a good attorney who’ll try to get everything you want to do thrown out.

In any case, I won. I got to keep the money, and they actually had to pay me a little extra because I demonstrated that I had more in bills from booking people than the one-third payment covered.

They weren’t happy about that. They originally threatened to appeal, but they dropped it.

At that point, I was kind of banished from the place. I didn’t hear from them for a while.

One day, I was producing a Beach Boys concert in the basement of the Ritz-Carlton in Atlanta. Here’s a funny story about that. I was in the back, going to the bathroom. I was at the urinals, and two Beach Boys came in. Two of the more famous ones were peeing beside me.

I went out into the hall afterward and called my mom. I said, “You’re never going to believe this. I just peed between two Beach Boys.”

She’s like, “What are you talking about?”

I said, “I just peed next to two Beach Boys.”

Morgan: That’s hysterical!

Bryan: I had to describe to her what that meant. That’s probably not something anyone had ever called her to tell her before.

While I was there, I got a phone call from Big Canoe. I didn’t answer because I didn’t know what they wanted, and we weren’t on good terms.

That night, after the job was done, I listened to the voicemail. It was a woman who said, “I just joined Big Canoe. I retired from an ad agency, and I’m living here. They’ve asked me to take over advertising. I looked at all the old stuff you created, and I liked it so much better. I know you probably don’t want to hear from us, but I’d love it if you came up and had lunch. I’d like to meet with you.”

I was a bit hesitant, but I went up. She made me feel at ease. She was taking over, she knew what she was doing, and she appreciated the work I’d done.

Morgan: How many years after the court case was this?

Bryan: About five. By that time, I’d figured I’d never hear from them again. I was probably banished from even driving past the gate.

But I ended up doing work for them for the next 16 years, until she retired and the owner sold the company to a corporation.

They treated me really well from that point on.

I remember the owner of the place was a big, imposing guy. He used to play for the Raiders, and later became a developer for several areas around Charleston and other places.

I remember him walking up, shaking my hand, and saying, “Welcome back.”

I thought, “That was your daughter who fired me. Why are you telling me this?”

I never really found out what went on behind the scenes. Apparently, the video they’d gotten for free wasn’t very good, and they weren’t using it. So I got the call because I’d stuck to my guns. I’d done a great job for them before, and they recognized that.

That’s a rare outcome, though. It’s unusual for someone to call you back after you’ve been in a court battle.

But Ann had left, I think, Ogilvy & Mather’s agency. She was pretty high up. She saw what she saw and said, “You know what? I want that guy, and I don’t care what the rest of you say. This is what we need.”

So it began a great relationship. They were probably a quarter of my income for a good 16 years.

Morgan: Wow! This is a great story, and there are a whole bunch of lessons in it. Let’s share some of them.

The first lesson that comes to mind is that your enemy today could be your friend tomorrow. You never know how much things can turn around. Someone you truly want to tell to go to hell and disappear could literally become your best friend five years in the future.

As a consequence, when you’re in a fight with someone, be careful. You don’t want to get too dirty or personally insult them. You always want to be professional, even in a fight, because you might need them five years in the future.

Bryan: You never know.

My take on it is that I could have been a real jerk about it. I could have been rude when we were dealing with each other.

I remember being outside the courtroom before the bailiff let everyone in. I walked up to them, their lawyer, and the people I’d been dealing with and said, “Look, I love working for you guys, but I’m standing up for myself as well as the people I have to pay. I’m paying them on your behalf. To me, this is only fair. I’m doing this because it’s the right thing to do, and I’d love it if you paid me because it’s the right thing to do.”

I have no idea whether that mattered. But I wasn’t dealing with the same person when I came back.

I’m sure that if I’d been really rude, it might have made a difference. Maybe Ann would have been told, “No, we’re not even calling that guy. We can’t have him around.”

I could even have been a jerk when I returned. I remember walking around the area where the offices were. It was fairly small, with walkways between the different buildings, and I ran into people I’d seen in court.

I told myself, “Look, you’re just going to be yourself. You’re not even going to bring up the past. There’s no point in hashing it out again. If you want to do work here, you need to let them move on, and you have to move on as well.”

Morgan: Before we get back to the lessons, I have a question. This might relate to the lesson, too.

When you came back the second time, did you insist on different terms because of what had happened before? For example, instead of being paid a third up front, did you ask for 50% up front or some other measures to minimize the risk?

Bryan: What’s interesting is that Ann said to me, “We’re going to do 50% up front, always.” She also said, “If we cancel, it’ll be on us.”

She recognized that I might be gun-shy about doing business with them.

One thing I think she recognized that Big Canoe, or the rest of the people there, hadn’t recognized was that they’d pulled a big job from me. I’d prepared to work on it for the next two months, including editing. That’s not really fair. I’d booked myself and turned down other gigs, and now I had no work for that month or two.

She recognized that and was sensitive to it.

When we first sat down, she let me know, “I know what happened, and I know how you see it. Maybe you don’t want to do business with us anymore, but hear me out.”

I heard her out, and she seemed genuine. She also seemed apologetic about something the company had done, even though she hadn’t been involved in it.

She won me over. Of course, I wanted to do the work, but if I’d felt they weren’t going to be fair, I wouldn’t have done it.

If I’d gotten up there and they’d said, “Look, we’re going to give you more work, but we want you to take the one-third we already paid you and apply it to the next job,” I would have said, “Okay, well, I’m going to go home.”

Sometimes we forget that the way we handle ourselves, even when someone else is being a jerk to us, can come back to bite us in the end.

Honestly, people coming back to you after five years is probably rare, but it does happen, and you should be prepared for it.

You should also remember that if you’re dealing with a corporation or an agency, you never know when the person you’re working with will move to another company. If they do, you want them to hire you at their new place.

But if you act like a jerk about something that’s going on, they’re going to say, “I don’t want to work with that person. It’s too much.”

I know another friend of mine who had an issue with a marketing firm. They were being very difficult, and he wasn’t happy with how things were going. The woman who was the project manager left and went to another marketing firm, and she hired him there.

She hired him because she liked working with him and recognized that the drama at the previous company wasn’t his fault. It was caused by the people who worked there.

But let’s flip that around. If he’d acted over the top, he probably wouldn’t have gotten work when she left. She’d seen a side of him she didn’t want to deal with again, and she couldn’t guarantee there wouldn’t be drama at the new job.

When it comes to customer service and clients, I always try to look at a complaint from the other person’s point of view first. Even when I had my restaurant and someone complained about the food, I’d ask myself, “Did we screw this up, or are they being unrealistic?”

When Big Canoe canceled the gig and wanted the money back, they were being unrealistic, so I had to stand up for myself.

But if it had been an issue where I thought they had a point, I might have reconsidered and said, “Let’s negotiate. I’ll give you some of it back,” or something along those lines.

I often tell people that you never know who you’re going to run into in life or who’s going to hire you, so you’ve got to be careful.

When I was younger, I had a much quicker temper, and that wasn’t always a good thing. You start to realize that it’s a small world. Especially if you work in a single industry, you’ll run into the same people more than once.

And people talk.

Let’s say the people at Big Canoe had started talking to other places where I might have been able to get work. If I’d been really difficult, that might have gotten around.

As it turned out, when I went back to Big Canoe and started doing work, I picked up other gigs from another nearby community. Then there was a place opening down the road that was going to be a sort of museum. I got a job from there because the guy running it lived in Big Canoe.

You never know where those tentacles are going to lead to more work and recognition. And you can cut those off by the way you act.

Morgan: That’s a great lesson. It’s not just that if you act badly toward the people you’re fighting with, they might not come back to you. They won’t if you act badly. But the people who work there will move on to other jobs and talk to other people. Other people will see you, and that’s how reputations are made.

I’ll put it differently: your reputation isn’t made by how you act when things are going well for you. Your reputation is made by how you act when you’re under severe stress.

It’s precisely a test of your character.

Bryan: A lot of people aren’t built for stress, either. Sometimes people melt down or get overwhelmed quickly.

When my production company was doing a lot of bigger projects, we might have more than one project going on at a time. Maybe there was a small, half-day shoot, and somebody who’d just started working for me would say, “I want to do it.”

I wouldn’t say this directly to them, but what I was thinking was, “I really want to see you under pressure first before I let you go and do something where I’m not there to fix it.”

I need to see how they handle things because one of the things I always tell people about production is that nothing ever goes according to schedule. Somebody’s going to show up late. A hairstylist won’t arrive on time.

I had a huge gig once where the audio board from one of the biggest production rental companies in Atlanta just stopped working. Half the board died in the middle of a concert.

Morgan: Yes.

Bryan: The concert had to stop for 30 minutes while they drove down the road, got a new board, brought it back, and started plugging everything in. They didn’t have time to do a sound check because we were already supposed to be done. This was being filmed to be sold as a video and aired on BET a week later.

I wasn’t responsible for the audio equipment, but the whole situation was stressful. You’re thinking, “What’s about to happen?”

Morgan: This is also a colorful example of a different lesson. You don’t realize how many parts there are behind the scenes of anything that’s needed to make it run well. Some little technical detail that nobody even thought about goes wrong, and suddenly you’re screwed.

Bryan: Yeah, you are.

I remember shooting a reality show on a golf course. I hired guys who could not only run the cameras but also take them apart and fix them if they had to. That had to be done a few times. They’d get out their screwdrivers and start taking things apart to fix something that was stuck or wasn’t working.

I learned a long time ago to hire people who are good under pressure and stress, and who are doers instead of just people who wait for someone else to fix things.

I had a gentleman named Patrick. He was a good-looking kid fresh out of college, and all the girls who worked for me liked Patrick. He was a good worker when you were with him.

But if something went wrong, he’d just sit down and wait for someone to come help him. That’s not the kind of person you need when time is critical.

In production, time is an issue. You have to get things done on time. Everybody shows up at a certain time, and everything has to happen according to schedule. There’s very little room for saying, “Maybe we’ll just do it tomorrow,” because that means paying everyone for another whole day.

You need people who work for you to be able to say, “You know what? I’ve got a workaround for this. I can fix it.”

I had a gentleman working on a live show once, and a plug kept coming unplugged. They’d lose the camera feed to the screen behind the stage. He rigged something up using his belt buckle, and I was amazed.

Morgan: Wow!

Bryan: He finished the concert. I went up to him afterward and said, “I need to see what you did, because I need to know how to do that in the future.”

Morgan: I love the story within the story here. There’s a great Brazilian slang word in Brazilian Portuguese: jeitinho, or jeitinho brasileiro. It means having the ability to figure something out when a problem happens. You take your belt buckle and figure out how to make things work.

People in Brazil joke that the entire economy runs on jeitinho—everyone figuring out improvised fixes for everything.

Bryan: Well, I once had a boss tell me, “When you hire people, look for whether they’re problem solvers or problem identifiers.”

I’ve taken that lesson with me throughout my life.

I know this is a little off the subject of customer service blunders, but it’s a good lesson for everybody listening.

When my boss told me this, it was a very awkward moment. The man who hired me had hired me for a job, but four weeks later, I took his job, and he was moved into my former position.

The person who hired me brought us both into the office to tell us we were switching roles. The gentleman who’d hired me was freaking out. He was asking, “What? Why? Why is this happening?”

The boss explained, “Because Bryan is a problem solver, and you are a problem identifier. Bryan just fixes the problems. You drive me crazy all day long by coming to me with problems I don’t need to know about.”

I asked him about it later, and he said, “Your workplace will be so much more pleasant if you hire people who are problem solvers.”

I’ve always remembered that.

Even when I had my restaurant, I had a couple of people in the kitchen who wouldn’t skip a beat if something wasn’t working. They’d say, “We’ll fix it later. We’re going to do it this way.” I wouldn’t even hear about it until the end of the night.

I love that.

Morgan: I agree with this 100%. This is somewhat tangential to the original story, but it’s super useful, and I love it.

My question is this: I also try to hire problem solvers rather than problem identifiers. When you’re interviewing people and considering hiring them, have you developed any tricks over the years to help you identify whether someone is more likely to be a problem identifier or a problem solver?

Bryan: My only really good trick is that I often ask them to tell me about a situation they were working on that didn’t go as planned, how they handled it, and what they learned from it.

What I’m listening for is whether they say, “I fixed it,” or whether everything was somebody else’s fault.

If they’re blaming everything on someone else, that’s a key indicator to me that they’re not taking responsibility. That’s particularly important if I’m hiring them for a position where they’ll be managing projects or people.

When you’re at the top and something goes wrong, it’s on you. You have to take ownership, even if someone below you made the mistake. You’re supposed to be managing all of that.

If I hear someone blaming everything on other people, that’s a red flag.

I want someone who can say, “I should have been watching more closely.”

The funny thing is that sometimes candidates think admitting they could have managed something better will make me less likely to hire them. They think I’m looking for perfection when I’m not. I’m never going to find someone who’s perfect. I’m not perfect.

If you pretend you’re perfect, I’m probably going to be hesitant to hire you. Everybody makes mistakes. Just admit it, and let’s move on. Don’t throw your people under the bus.

Morgan: I love that advice. I follow a very similar philosophy and advise people along the same lines.

One way I like to frame it is with a quote from Voltaire. One of his poems ends with a phrase translated into English as, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”

What that means is that if you want things to be perfect, guess what? Nothing is perfect. You’re not perfect. If you pretend you’re perfect or aspire to perfection, it’s not going to happen. It can be disastrous.

If you claim to be perfect, you’re probably a liar.

We have to aim for the good. Then what I try to do is aim for the good while implementing processes and ways of working that constantly tweak and improve things, so we can get increasingly close to perfection.

Bryan: Vince Lombardi, the famous football coach, once said that we’re always in pursuit of perfection, but we know we’ll never get there. As long as we’re always trying to better ourselves in that pursuit, hopefully we’ll be the best we can be every week.

Morgan: I’ve never heard that quote before, but that’s a less pretentious version of the same philosophy.

Bryan: Sometimes when I’m hiring, I’m also conscious of not wanting somebody who’s too narcissistic. I’ve found that narcissistic people have trouble with employees.

The reason is that employees doing the actual work know who’s getting credit and who isn’t. If someone is too narcissistic and never takes responsibility for anything, they’ll quickly lose the respect of the people they’re managing.

The people below them see what’s happening, typically.

Morgan: One hundred percent. That’s another lesson: you might think people lower in the hierarchy don’t realize what’s happening, but they know what’s happening.

Bryan: They do.

I always tell people to treat everybody nicely. We occasionally worked with celebrities, and I’d tell my people, “The crew works much harder than the talent. Be nice to them.”

It’s easy to be nice to a celebrity because that’s our culture. Sometimes we get excited when somebody is famous.

Having worked with many famous people, I can tell you they’re not all the same. Some are very nice, and some aren’t. That’s just like the general population.

Even when my kids came to a set, I’d tell them to be nice to the crew. I’d tell young people I was working with who were the talent, “Do not crap on the crew. They’re the ones who make you look good and sound good. They’re the ones who keep this thing going. You’re a cog in this just like they are. You shouldn’t see yourself up here and them down here.”

But sometimes, especially with younger celebrities, that’s hard for them.

If I were 20 years old and someone gave me millions of dollars, I’d probably be a jerk, too. You think you’re special when you’re young. You don’t see that in five years, you might be broke again.

Morgan: These are so many words of wisdom on so many different angles. I love how we used your original story as an opening point to get into so many other wonderful lessons.

This has been super interesting, fun, educational, and even a little tipsy.

Bryan: Well, this is a higher alcohol content than some beers!

Morgan: This has been great, Bryan. Thank you for your time and for sharing your words of wisdom.

And to everyone who’s been watching, thank you for watching. We hope you’ve enjoyed this as much as we have and learned a bunch along the way.

Bryan: Thank you for having me.

Morgan: Until next time!