Hired a junior for social content and lost a client, $8,400 and five months

Small team, we do turnover and light rehab coordination for a handful of owners. Started posting before and after work about two years ago and it brought in real business, so last spring I hired part time help to keep it going instead of doing it at 10pm myself.

$1,400 a month, roughly 20 hours. Six months planned, killed it at five. So $7,000 in wages plus $1,400 in tools and a stock footage subscription I'm still unwinding.

Where it went wrong is specific. He was fast and the posts looked fine. What he did was write captions from the job photos without ever calling the crew, so the details were invented. A caption said we replaced a subfloor on a job where we'd patched two boards. Another described a unit as being in a neighborhood it isn't in.

One of our owners saw the subfloor post about her building, called me, and asked what the invoice had actually covered. It covered exactly what she paid for. It took two calls and an emailed photo set to fix, and she was polite the whole time, and she didn't renew in September. Somewhere around $22,000 a year of work.

I don't blame the kid. I gave him a folder of photos and a posting schedule and no way to check anything. He filled the gaps the way anybody would.

What I'd do differently. No caption goes out that contains a scope claim unless the person who did the work approved that sentence. I'd rather post three times a month with true captions than twelve with invented ones. And I'd have owners approve any post that features their property in writing, which I now do and should have done from day one.