Chapter Three - Work Hard and Follow the Program

CHAPTER THREE

Work Hard and Follow the Program

GETTING HIRED WASN’T the end. It was just the beginning.

There was some basic onboarding of course. A contract to sign, a portal full of videos, and a few training modules. The kind of corporate homework you could knock out in a few evenings if you weren’t distracted. But what really mattered were the meetings.

These weren’t just meetings. These felt more like indoctrinations.

I remember my first one clearly. It was with Tyler, one of the three Langois brothers, the owners of Alta Pest Control. They ran the whole thing like a family business crossed with a locker room sermon. And Tyler? Tyler came in hot.

He was giving us the business.

Not in a rude way. In that motivational, sales-bro, “alpha energy” kind of way. The clichés came out fast.

“Who here likes money?”

“Hourly pay? That’s not real money.”

“Commission is freedom.”

I’m paraphrasing, of course, but you get the idea. It was the usual self-help-guru-in-a-polo-shirt script. Work hard, think big, no limits, yadda yadda yadda.

I wasn’t even fully paying attention at first. Why? Because I was on a literal snow plow. I was in the middle of clearing snow and ice, standing on a machine in subzero weather, headphones in, phone in my pocket at 9 o’clock at night, while getting lectured about how hourly work was for suckers.

Then I hear it:

“Hey, James. You with us?”

No mic. No camera. Just me, freezing, salty, and getting called out on Zoom by a man in a t-shirt telling me I was wasting my life.

Tyler’s big line, the one I do remember, was this:

“Work hard and follow the program.”

That was it. That was the mantra. The blueprint. The holy commandment.

And here’s my take on what that actually meant:

Obey. That’s it. Just obey.

Because following “the program” meant memorizing the script.

The Script. Capital S. Their sacred text. Their gospel. Their virus.

It still haunts me.

It started like this:

“Hi, my name is James. I’m with Alta. I’m out here taking care of the Johnsons, the Murphys, and the Howards...”

It kept going, too. More names. More buzzwords.

It was the most robotic, soulless string of words I’d ever had to memorize. And they loved it. They didn’t just hand it out. They worshiped it. You couldn’t do anything in Alta without first learning the script.

I tried saying it to friends and family just to see if I was crazy.

Every single person had the same reaction:

“That’s it?”

That’s it.

That was their entire sales philosophy. A pre-packaged stream of buzzwords and name-drops they expected you to repeat word-for-word. No deviation. No improvisation. Just knock, say the lines, and repeat until something sticks.

And the pitch was always the same: If you just follow the program and work hard, you can make six figures.

That’s what they sold.

I was making about $40,000 a year doing landscaping. Freezing my ass off, working 17-hour blizzard shifts, getting treated like garbage, and here’s this dude telling me I can triple that by knocking on doors and reading a script?

I mean, come on.

What would you do?

You’re young. You’re hungry. You’ve lost nearly 100 pounds. You’ve got a bet with your boy to have abs by Valentine’s Day. You’ve got nothing but ambition, caffeine, and a vague sense of purpose.

And someone waves six figures in your face.

Of course I said yes.

Of course I believed it.

Of course I bought in.