Ripoffreport’s Directory of Phil Cannella III
Rebuttal to: Current Employee ‘Slams’ First Senior Financial Group and Phil Cannella
As I sit here in the wake of our latest triumph—embarrassing the SEC about its flaws to the extent that the agency felt compelled to scapegoat its own Inspector General for talking to us so freely—I think of what an exciting job this has become during the nine months I’ve worked here. And what makes that thought somewhat ironic is that I came very close to not working here at all. It’s fair to say that First Senior Financial Group and I didn’t get off to a very good start. Though I’d liked Phil Cannella immediately when I met him on the day of my second interview, a few weeks before Christmas 2010, things went rapidly downhill from here. In fact, it pains me to admit that I actually filed a complaint about First Senior on Ripoff Report. (Have you ever written an angry email to someone that you regretted the instant you hit “send”? That’s sort of how it was here. But let’s back up a moment.)
You see, i interviewed for the job at a very turbulent time in First Senior history. Not only was the company experiencing major growing pains, but Phil Cannella had just been through a difficult period in which a number of financial advisors had to be let go en masse for violating company policy by acting in a manner that was contrary to the client’s best interests.
The entire hiring campaign for the editorial position that had caught my eye was being overseen by a single individual—who maintained all of the relevant information in her personal computer. No one else, from Phil Cannella on down, had access to any of the resumes, any of the contact info, etc. So when she too left the company soon after my second interview, neither Phil Cannella nor anyone else had a realistic way of reconstructing the interview process to that point, or getting back in touch with the candidates. I didn’t know this, of course, but I felt I was at a point in my career where I’d earned the right to be contacted yea or nay, so when the Holiday Season passed and that didn’t occur, I filed a Ripoff complain under the title “I question FSFG’s sincerity.”
This set in motion a flurry of events, including multiple phone calls from Phil Cannella himself, all of them warmly apologetic, none of them confrontational or coercive in any way. Nor, for that matter, were there any offers of “hush money” or even the prospect of future employment. All Phil Cannella offered was a sincere, fully explained apology. And so, a mere 24 hours after writing my complaint, I wrote a follow-up for Ripoff Report—a kind of rebuttal to myself. (If I could’ve “recanted” the original complaint, I would’ve gladly done so, but the site does not permit that.)
I wrote:
“I am the same individual who filed the above item titled “I question FSFG’s sincerity” I—and that item shows the danger in jumping to conclusions. Apparently the situation described in that item was the result of a misunderstanding stemming from a hectic growth environment at FSFG as well as an abrupt change in personnel at the time of my interview. I was frankly impressed by the company’s all-points response to my posting. I’ve been assured by Phil Cannella personally (and promptly) that this was a case of things “falling through a crack”–due to a single weak link in the chain–rather than a case of indifference on his or the company’s part. I must applaud FSFG for its hands-on approach to resolving this matter. That was all I sought originally: an email or a phone call. And in just the past 24 hours I’ve received far more than that. In fairness, I also accept my responsibility for not availing myself of the other contact options Phil Cannella suggested in his recent calls. Though at the time I didn’t want to make a nuisance of myself, I understand his position. … And to be clear: I am NOT saying any of this “under threat of” anything. I am merely taking the same initiative here that I took in posting my comments in the first place. What’s right is right. In a more general matter, I would encourage all employers to go out of their way to exercise TLC in the handling of job interviews and the hiring process as a whole. These are tough times. Although thankfully I am not staring into the abyss, many prospective job-seekers are. I urge companies to be sensitive to that, and to recognize that these are not just resumes they’re dealing with, but actual lives.”
After reading my second posting,
Phil Cannella
called back and said he was deeply touched by the last few lines, which, he added, had almost brought him to tears. And I must say, I could hear the emotion in his voice. He said the words reminded him of what retirees face in dealing with unscrupulous brokers who see them merely as dollar signs.
We met down at the King of Prussia headquarters a few weeks later, at which time Phil Cannella issued his by-now-familiar challenge for me to check the company out before deciding whether it’s the kind of place I’d really like to work—and whether his cause was the kind I could support with 100% conviction.
What makes this even more awkward for me is that not long after I came on-board, one of those terminated advisors launched an all-out online vendetta against Phil Cannella in which the former employee found it convenient as well as, I suppose, “great fun” to attack not just Phil Cannella, but each and every person associated with Phil Cannella. Phil Cannella’s anonymous tormenter seemingly delighted in attacking all of us for every single characteristic, professional or personal. In my case, he began with my voice, which he evidently found annoying and unlistenable during my segments on the Crash Proof Retirement show.
People are free to love or hate my Brooklyn-inflected drone, but it behooves me to point out that it’s a voice that has been featured on perhaps 500 national radio shows from coast to coast in connection with my hundreds of major writing projects through the years( more on that in a moment). And let me add, that very same voice, along with my face, neck and shoulders (which I’m pretty sure my cyber-critic wouldn’t care for, either, if he saw them) have appeared on Anderson Cooper 360, several other CNN shows, Fox News, various MSNBC telecasts and too many local network affiliate stations to list.
I’ve even developed hour-long prime-time newsmagazine shows, most recently for ABC in the summer of 2010. That piece was an examination of the self-help industry (which was also the subject of my 2005 book, SHAM), through the lens of the James Ray sweat lodge disaster. Here again I got a considerable amount of on-cam, as we say.
Broadcast media don’t give this level of exposure away to just any journalist. (Sure, if you’re an accused Penn State child molester, the Unabomber or you’ve slept with Kim Kardashian, you’ll be on TV tonight, but we print journalists have to earn our moments in the limelight through more thoughtful, professional endeavors). In my case I’ve spent the past 30 years perpetrating journalism, primarily on business, social policy and the intersection of the two, for the creme-de-la-crème in the print industry. Notably, between 1994 and 2010 I was what you might call the designated pinch-hitter columnist for several sections of The Wall Street Journal, supplying dozens of columns to its Editorial, Leisure & Arts and Weekend Journal sections.
Which brings me to something else that gets me. As soon as he managed to tear himself away from the subject of my grating voice, my unnamed cyber-hater accused me of having “no credibility” as a journalist: He even claimed he’d Googled me and couldn’t find anything important I’d ever written, which either doesn’t speak too highly of his ability to use a computer or suggests that he has a very unusual definition of the word “important.” I invite you to try a simple Google search for yourself using the terms “Steve Salerno” + “writer.’ Your inquiry will return some 75 pages of hits. Included among those hits will be groundbreaking cover stories, A-list interviews and essays for the likes of The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Esquire, The New Republic, Sports Illustrated, The Washington Post, Playboy (no, I’ve never been to the Mansion) and similar publications. I’ve also written two other successful books aside from SHAM, one of which became, in essence, a Lifetime movie—but please don’t hold that against me.
Indiana University, home to one of the nation’s elite journalism schools, deemed me credible enough to make me an honorary professor of magazine journalism in 1997, even though I lacked all of the advanced degrees that would normally serve as prerequisites for such an appointment. A few years alter, Muhlenberg, a respected liberal-arts college in Allentown, PA, named me its writer-in-residence; as such, I became on one of the college’s key ambassadors to the rest of the local academic community.
As for his assertion that “financial shows don’t employ journalists,” well, maybe more of them ought to think about it. Maybe then, they might have better information and advice for their audiences. At Crash Proof Retirement, and now Retirement Media, we are quite simply changing the paradigm of how cutting-edge financial journalism is practiced. That was my mandate from Phil Cannella when I signed on: He wanted me to use my background, expertise and contacts to establish an in-house journalism program that would challenge the status quo and, over time, raise the bar of the genre as a whole. And to bring this peice full cicle, that’s what now makes it such an exciting time to be a part of Phil Cannella’s team.
As the recent piece from Bloomberg’s Robert Schmidt demonstrates, we are doing things—now at the national level—that simply haven’t been done before. On behalf of our constituency of retired Americans, we are holding the bureaucrats accountable. We’re proving that you don’t have to be part of the same old Washington (or media) insider’s club to get the job done; sometime it’s actually better if you’re not part of the club. And if we’re embarrassing some of those bureaucrats, making them squirm and/or making them angry, that just tells us we’re on the right track.
All of this is a very long way of explaining why I’m glad the job worked out.
-Steve Salerno