We had a hearing some weeks ago.
A trusted employee had been handling logistics for a regional tech event we were participating in. The original plan was simple. A small booth. A fixed budget. I approved it. Clean.
What I didn’t approve was a booth upgrade that cost ten times more than what was agreed.
I found out when the invoice arrived.
The e-signature on the contract was mine. I didn’t put it there. This employee did — using a saved copy of my signature — and submitted it to the organizer. No call beforehand. No direct message. No separate email. Just a CC on a thread I had never read.
When we sat down for the hearing, I asked a simple question: “Before returning that signed contract, did you inform me that you were about to do so?”
The answer kept going in circles. But eventually, the answer was a clear cut “no”.
“But I CC’d you, sir.”
I have over 1,600 unread primary emails right now. This employee knows this. Being CC’d on an email is not the same as being told something. Not when it involves committing the company to a financial obligation that is ten times the original scope.
That’s not a miscommunication. A miscommunication is a 10,000-peso mistake. Maybe 50,000. Not 1.3 million. That is the largest single financial damage in the history of SEO Hacker, and it came from an assumption.
The assumption that silence is approval.
There is no version of this where what happened was acceptable. A nine-year-old understands that you don’t sign someone else’s name on a legal document without permission. This was not a matter of unclear instructions. This employee had my signature saved digitally, used it, and submitted a legally binding contract on my behalf — without my knowledge, without my explicit approval, without even a direct message asking if it was okay.
And when confronted, the response was deflection. Going in circles. Zero evidence that I had ever authorized any of it.
Because I hadn’t.
This is what bad character looks like in the workplace. It doesn’t announce itself. It accumulates in small decisions — CC instead of direct message, “I assumed” instead of “I confirmed,” a saved signature used without permission. And then one day you’re sitting in a formal hearing asking the same question five different ways, watching someone try to reframe a clear ethical violation as a misunderstanding.
It isn’t.
When you delegate, you are handing off a task — not your name, not your signature, not your authority to commit the company to financial obligations you never reviewed. Those are not things that transfer with a CC on an email thread.
Approving a small booth is not approving something ten times the cost. Full stop.
After the hearing, I decided to do away with the EA position entirely. I made a virtual EA from OpenClaw – let’s see how this pans out.
The lesson here is not about delegation process. It’s about character. You can build the best systems in the world — and I’ve written about why systems matter more than heroics — but if the people you trust have decided to act in their own interest and cover their tracks when it goes wrong, systems alone won’t save you.
I’ve talked about what my worst hires taught me about leading a team, and this situation is a reminder that hiring character is not optional. Skills can be trained. Integrity can’t.
And if you think you can spot a person of bad character in an interview — you can’t always. But you can verify, watch patterns, and act decisively when the evidence becomes undeniable.
Hire carefully. Trust slowly. Verify always.
