A Phil Hall Op-Ed: Earlier today, Better Home & Finance Holding Co. (NASDAQ: BETR) put out a press release saying that Vishal Garg, its founder and CEO, was a recipient of a “Best of Finance” award presented by a media company that covers the real estate industry. According to this press release, Garg was selected as being among “the real estate community’s best and brightest in the mortgage and finance space.”
When I saw the announcement, my initial thought was: “Hey, wasn’t this the guy who fired 900 people on a Zoom call before Thanksgiving?” I covered that story for another news organization back in 2021 and I looked it up online to recall the details – indeed, the terminated Better staffers accounted for about 15% of the company’s workforce.
The firing was astonishing, with an emotionless Garg declaring to those in attendance via the Zoom meeting, “If you are on this call, you are part of the unlucky group being laid off. Your employment here is terminated effectively immediately.” The 900 getting the axe suddenly found their company emails were shut off.
Some of the people on that call had the foresight to capture it on video, which was then leaked to the media. There was a harsh backlash and Garg was in the spotlight as being the boss from hell. He did some minor damage control, first apologizing to the Better staffers who kept their jobs that he was “committed to learning from this situation” and later taking a brief hiatus to emphasis that he was serious about learning from his mistake.
Well, he didn’t learn very much – not long after returning from his hiatus, Garg fired about 3,000 more Better workers in the U.S. and India, and the circumstances of their termination was even more ham-fisted than the Zoom debacle – they received severance checks through the payroll app without any additional communications.
Perhaps those getting laid off were lucky, as they didn’t have to put up with Garg’s nasty big mouth anymore. Roughly a year before the Zoom firing, Garg sent an email to his workforce that said, “You are TOO DAMN SLOW. You are a bunch of DUMB DOLPHINS… SO STOP IT. STOP IT. STOP IT RIGHT NOW. YOU ARE EMBARRASSING ME.” Really, is this the kind of boss who deserves an award for being among the best and brightest?
And last year around this time, the company laid off its entire real estate division in a shameful manner. The news site TechCrunch cited an unnamed source who claimed Better’s agents received “little to no severance…after getting a more than 50% salary cut in November in order to ‘ensure’ our jobs to come.”
The new award that Garg received was not based on his dismal approach to human resources, but on the company’s financial performance. Better’s announcement had the chief executive declaring that the new prize “reflects our commitment to fixing the traditionally broken mortgage experience by reshaping homeownership for families across America.”
Yes, Better is successful and respected as a mortgage company – and if the new award was presented directly to the company, then applause would be deserving.
But there is no shortage of mortgage industry executives who treat their employees with respect and support. In my humble opinion, Garg’s treatment of his workforce should have disqualified for being considered as being among the best in his industry.
In a Forbes interview that ran shortly after the Zoom episode, Garg defended his behavior by declaring, “I think I take heat for that because people want to talk about work-life balance nowadays. So if you’re not prepared for the sacrifice that success requires, Better is not the right place for you.”
Of course, the pursuit of a “work-life balance” was not the reason that Garg’s Better repeatedly fired a multitude of loyal and hard-working individuals. If anyone deserves awards, perhaps it would be the former Better employees who behaved with more dignity and professionalism than their former boss ever displayed.
Phil Hall is editor at Weekly Real Estate News. He can be reached at [email protected].
Photo: mustafahacalaki / iStock
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