throwawayagency

Indeed, the fact that the founder can be so unaware is disturbing in itself and does encourage me at many moments to find another company.

I will certainly bring evidence. The type of work not completed can still be audited by the founder. This indeed will be crucial in his realization of the issue.

Thank you very much.

Thank you for your questions.

All of the over-billing is coming from supposed ongoing work (and of course not a retainer situation). It doesn't happen in any initial phase where it would be difficult to fake something.

The agency is small enough that we all have access to each other's client hours, invoice information, etc. and we often correspond directly with clients regarding their invoices, etc.

Interesting way of posing the situation to the founder. Thanks for this.

Thank you for this insight. Bringing up the problem as it relates to business goals is important.

This is an important point, thank you. I actually received no followup from the founder. Despite these two senior employees heading the account I was working on, I was actually responsible for much of the work of the client's budget, yet despite this I was never approached regarding account performance. Thank you very much for reminding me about this fact.

Thank you for your response. (Though amusingly enough I am satisfying clients enough to bring in over 3x my salary. Makes me wonder if I should just freelance, haha...)

I certainly don't think of him as lazy, but I think he's been too busy to realize what is going on, unfortunately. "Unaware" may be a better word, even though he should have been aware to begin with.

Thank you very much for your response. I appreciate it.

Thank you for your well wishes.

While not incompetent, I do believe he's neglected his responsibility to properly evaluate the performance of his employees more closely.

Thank you for the questions! These are great. Unfortunately due to the, understandable, character limit of a post I cut out a handful of text which addressed a couple of these.

The founder is fortunately technically versed enough that he should be capable of an audit of the work conducted by his employees. However, I think he's clueless to what's going on at the moment. He's an awesome guy and his heart is in the right place, but he's much more sales-oriented and concerned with bringing in business than he is with auditing the performance of his employees. Unfortunately. I believe he is indeed too busy with with other things to see this and I think he thinks everything is going well in terms of operations (despite my vague alert). That said, business was booming several months ago and he was not concerned at all about money then. These past couple months have been poor though.