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When one company buys out another one, you can be certain that some people will lose their jobs.

That is what happened to the guy in this story, and his new manager came in and fired him on the first day after the purchase was completed. He was told that they had their own guy to run things, and that he wasn’t needed, so he packed up all his things and went home.

The next day, he started getting calls from that manager asking him questions about how to run things that only he knew. He charged them huge consultation fees every time they called for more information, making himself thousands.

This is a great example of why you should never fire someone until you know exactly what they do for the company. Read through the full details below and see what you think.

New management FA by not caring about any prior performace and FO after bringing in the new guy as a replacement.

About twenty years ago, my brother was let go from a major cable channel when it was bought out by a major cable network.

That is awful that he lost his job.

He was the producer for the daily one hour news show, the most watched program on the channel. When he showed up to meet the new management, he was ready to show how productive his team was.

They, however, announced they were bringing in their own person and he would be escorted to his office to gather his belongings and then out the door. He was old school and still used a Rolodex (with back up at home). A useless antique in the eyes of the escort who didn’t bat an eye as he put it in the proverbial box.

He knows how to get things done.

It contained every single needed contact that was needed such as who to ask permission to use clips of other content providers along with names of accounts, the account passwords, vendors and all sorts of info needed to actually produce the show.

The next morning the calls came in. Unanswered. Until the next day when he did answer. Telling them that the consulting fee for provding a someone’s contact data or what company did such and such was $500 each.

He is making a mint on this.

The calls kept coming in. He later told them, due to the constant harassment, the consulting fee was now $1000. The same pattern continued briefly and they were warned the fee will rise to $1500 if they kept at it.

The management then thought they would do some sort of end run around that. They pressured his prior subordinates, who he was very friendly with and talking to all along, to make the calls to supposedly ask my brother to help THEM personally by providing the info.

The quality is going down fast.

One of them agreed to tell the management that their former boss got mad and told her to tell management that the consulation fee was now $2000 each because management is bringing people he knows in to it.

Meanwhile, social media, taking off at the time was riddled with comments about how the news show went downhill, that it is all just announcers reading news and such and there is no point in watching it and so on.

It is crazy that they had no other way to get this information.

Due to the nature of the channel, it needed the daily round up news show. They eventually panicked enough to cough up $10,000 for the five most critical bits of information.

Just enough to keep the show on the air supposedly. It took a year for the show to gradually recover fully to show all the usual content and such.

Things are not going as they had planned.

In the meantime, a couple competitors smelled blood in the water and promoted a dedicated half hour news round up for the same topic since they had some of the broader general industry contacts.

So, it took even longer to get much of the audience back. The subordinates were able to keep their jobs, but a couple got transfered to other departments. The news producer management brought in got let go however. No word on why.

It is crazy that he was able to make so much money off of this. Why was it impossible for the new company to look up the information somewhere else?

Read through what the commenters have to say about this story.

This is true.

Milk them for every dime.

These stories really are the best.

This commenter is exactly right.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a manager who wonders why productivity dropped after he banned overtime with no exceptions.

And the town thought they were saving money.

They really should have thought things through before firing the guy. What makes this story even better is the fact that he almost certainly got some type of severance when they let him go.

This means that they paid him to leave, then paid him again to get the information they wanted.