I appreciate the mods allowing this controversial post to be here.

Some other commenters are upset by this post but I think anyone that reads it will know there's always two sides to a story, but the details are pretty fascinating... And it's fascinating to hear some of these details.

There are both 'facts' (if true) and 'opinions' in this post. The opinions are fuelled by OP feeling s/he was wronged, so those are taken with a grain of salt (though still interesting to hear.) But details like the private investigator are very interesting.

Also interesting -- that he was looking to converting it to an employee owned co-op. That sounds pretty cool, actually... Was that not a good thing?

As far as the other issues... some of them sound pretty typical of working for a small businessman. There's a lot of responsibility in that position because of how close the person is to the money (as opposed to managers in a large corporation) and that tends to bring out some weird behavior sometimes.

Running a business is hard. It doesn't excuse mistreating employees by any means.

I appreciate this person's voice being allowed to be heard here. I would love to hear a response from John Mottishaw, not that he owes that to us or anything.

OP - can you tell more about the employee co-op idea? Usually the motivation to do something like that comes from a different kind of person than how you make him sound.

And some of the details are weird, like his quote about "reminded him of his daughter" being gross. I can see why you would feel that way, but as a dad of several boys and a girl I can also understand how he would say that and not mean anything gross by it.

I would be curious to hear more "facts" about what it was like to work with John. Not opinions based on rage, just real stories of what it's like to work there.