Business

The Worst and Best Businesses I’ve Worked for, By Revenue

It’s yin and yang in more ways than one

Photo by Adeolu Eletu on Unsplash

I’ve worked a lot of jobs in my life. Most of the companies I worked for earned “best in…” awards for their industries.

Not accounting for big-box companies like Starbucks, here are the best and worst industries I’ve worked in, by revenue.

Criteria: each company has less than 100 employees.

The Worst

Let’s just rip this bandaid off. This one hurts because it was the one I wanted to succeed the most.

I studied for decades to be a martial arts instructor. Have you ever seen Netflix’s Iron Fist? The most realistic thing about that show was how the martial arts teacher, Colleen Wing, was broke as a joke and hit the pavement every day trying to conjure new students out of a hat.

While teaching martial arts was easily the most fulfilling job I’ve ever had, the only successful martial arts schools I’ve seen, when talking in terms of revenue, sacrificed everything that made the industry fulfilling to make money. The industry term for such places is “McDojo” — high sales, low artistic or martial value.