To Maren and the rest of the Zirtual Management Team:

While I can recognize and commiserate with the struggle you have faced with the pending implosion of such a huge dream and effort put out for years to build what Zirtual was, and what I as an employee had come to love as a company, I am not at all happy with the way this was handled.

I am even less happy with your comparison to having this experience be one to make you “cry like someone whose child has been ripped from her arms.” As someone who actually had this happen I dare to say you have no clue what it is like to have a child ripped from your arms.

Let me just say it is indescribable. It makes you want to take your own life. It brings the world crashing down on your head with the biggest, blackest, hurricane storm cloud that ever graced this planet or any other. It feels like the sun has been wiped out and there is no chance for redemption. It hurts like there is no tomorrow, there was no yesterday, there is just a empty gaping gnawing maw that you will never climb out from. To have your child ripped from your arms is soul ending. It has been 7 years since I lost my 3 children, and still I crumble at the thought of the empty hole that was left.

Will you still be crying over your employees, your clients, your business in 7 years? I don’t think so. Do you really feel “like someone whose child has been ripped from her arms”, or are you just using lipservice like you did when you told us as employees that we were encouraged to reach out to our clients to offer to continue to support them, just for you to then turn around and sell your client list to a customer for them to come in and attempt to poach them away. Are you really just disappointed you didn’t find a way to milk more out of this?

I have had my own businesses, and even lost them, and I HAVE lost children. A business will never manage to compare to a child. Yes, a business you put your heart and soul into, you nurture, you coddle, you encourage, you put energy and effort into, but there is no comparison to a child. A child is a part of you. It is your flesh and blood no matter how you came to be a parent. There is a labor of love a parent of any type (adoptive/foster/natural/step) experiences that a business doesn’t put you through. You don’t feed, clothe, nurse, educate, hug, entertain, carry, hold, discipline, or birth a business. You also don’t get to put a child on the shelf at 5pm and go home.

I had so much love for this company. I screamed it’s praises from the highest point I could find. I was proud of the title “ZA”. It was an amazing community with as a general rule fantastic clients. It was unique, forward thinking, and I dare say revolutionary. I had a drive to succeed, in no small part to how you, Maren, Collin, and Erik, presented it. Your interactions on the surface were inspiring. They could have been just as inspiring with honesty instead of smoke and mirrors. You have forever tainted everything that you built up in the actions over the last 2 days. I’m not saying you were bad for having financial struggles. I am saying the way you handled the last 2 days has been appauling.

Giving the media more information than your employees, blind siding employees and clients, lying to everyone (possibly even to yourself) about the status, the potentials, and the results. There is a difference between transparency and invisibility. You bold faced lied to your employees. You told us through so many “update” letters how great Zirtual was doing, how we had so many clients you had to go and hire more ZA’s, how we were going to get raises, and you were buying us new equipment. You came into our team meeting(s) and told us how we were going to go international. You told us you were being transparent so we could know exactly what was going on, but in the “11th hour” you unceremoniously sent an email to all of us saying the doors were closing, we had no jobs, there was nothing more that could be done, but you told the press and the clients that it was a temporary pause and collectively in effect walked away.

Now you collectively come out and try to take credit of the way the ZA’s have pulled together, supporting each other, and say it’s the Zirtual culture. No it isn’t. It is the ZA culture. WE nurtured that. WE built that. WE did that.

Shame on you! Shame, shame, shame.

Did you provide any means for us to stay connected? No, you disabled all email accounts, software extensions, and sent a dismissive email saying you did all you could. Did you provide a any means for the clients to reach out to their former ZA’s to find out about options? No, you removed access to all information stored on the system and then told us tongue in cheek that we were free to contact clients and try to make arrangements, all along knowing you were selling the client list to someone else who would have access to that information and swoop in and poach them from us. Did you ever in the 1+ years since we went to employee status give us the credit to say “we want to offer these benefits but we can’t afford them at this time, so we will have to put a hold on them and come back when we are more solvent”? No, you kept throwing things into the mix to hide the real truth — bonuses 3 out of 4 quarters of the year, chromebooks, software/extensions, pending raises, etc. and then blame the fact that there was too much expense to keep going. These are just the tip of the iceberg, and don’t even begin to mention the things like repeatedly switching insurance companies so that we wouldn’t have the ability to use what was purchased then retroactively cancelling coverage that was already “paid” for and so many more others.

You knew long ago it was not going to be able to be sustained and you did nothing morally and ethically responsible toward fixing it.

If you are having a problem financially, you don’t go BUYING more things to make your debt deeper. You don’t go promising more debt to fish out of it. You find the means to start, and THEN you produce. If you want to keep morale up, perhaps say “we want to buy chromebooks for everyone, we are looking for financing, and will have more information when we can manage that step”. Don’t say “EVERYONE GETS A CHROMEBOOK!” and put yourself into a horrible debt spiral while you are in a massive hiring rush — just for example.

Had you been honest with us, even once, this ZA culture you claim to be so proud of would have surprised you like it did on Monday morning. I don’t think you expected this team of awesomeness to find the wherewithal to piece together an ability to contact our clients and begin turning what you threw at us as rotten lemons, tomatoes, and apples into a whole string of gourmet fruit stands. We created means of finding and connecting clients to former ZA’s, we found a way to create a page and connect up and share information, insights, and support, we found a way to work with the tattered shreds left behind, pick up the pieces, dust each other off, and continue putting one foot in front of the other.

I understand that when there is sensitive information at stake you can’t always trust everyone, but there are correct ways and incorrect ways to handle a shut down. Even if you had to furlough, or contact us 60 days ago and say we aren’t able to continue this way, and so we are giving you an opportunity to have a chance to either contact your clients and arrange separate contracts, or find another job and we can redistribute the clients, and we still have 60 days of pay/benefits to do what was necessary. Even if you had said helped us gather our clients together with information and resources like the completed tasks that we had to use your tools to store everything on so that we could share between ourselves — having to get passwords again is nothing compared to the days/weeks/months/even years of lost work from a purge. There are so many ways that this was botched from the get-go. It really looks like you were trying to set us up to fail.

Saddest thing of all? You lost that precious resource. If you had only been fair and honest with us all along, as you said you were being, things could have been so much different.