Avoid Legal Battles With Your Ex-Boss

So Worple created an exit strategy that many entrepreneurs would do well to follow. That is, adapt to what your ex-employer wants -- if it isn't unreasonable -- and try to leave on the best of terms. If you do, you may end up attracting your former employer as a client.

When Worple left, he was forthcoming about his reasons for leaving and asked a vice president to write letters of introduction for him to various advertising associations and smaller, independent advertising agencies that had no relationships with P&G. In other words, he used his networking skills to help him out the door.

One year later, when he solicited work from P&G, he felt confident enough to go to people within the company he didn't know. "I didn't want to ask people for a favor and put them in an awkward position," says Worple, who was able to leverage his experience to get business with Procter & Gamble, but with people he knew wouldn't feel beholden to him.

Today, Barefoot Advertising in Cincinnati has 52 employees and brings in approximately $10 million in revenue a year. Not only does P&G send business Worple's way, but "a lot of Procter people who have worked with us have gone on to other companies and initiated work with us," he says. "If we had burned that first bridge and not done work with them, they wouldn't be [clients] either."

The Blurry Legal Line

Of course, Worple's situation was a little easier than some. It's one thing for an employee to leave a company as large as a city. But when Browne, Lupo and Arias left, they constituted 30% of the salon's workforce. At first blush, it may seem like banding together and leaving their former employer behind was cruel or ungrateful. But there's one more detail: They left after their boss died.

John Sahag's offspring are the ones suing Trillium. "They were very upset that we didn't stay," says Browne. "From their point of view, they're not stylists themselves, even though they may be very good business people. They can't perform the service, and we're their means of making a very good living. I guess the fact that when John was sick, we were so loyal, they presumed we'd stay, and they were a little bitter when they learned that we had plans to move on." Browne adds that in the three years their employer battled lung cancer, his kids never discussed with her or her partners the idea of sticking around after he was gone.

Nevertheless, they've instituted a court order barring Browne, Lupo and Arias -- who dedicated a combined 34 years to the salon -- from recruiting former customers of the John Sahag Workshop. In addition, they're charging that Lupo and Arias took personal hair-color formulas of 933 customers with them, including those of celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow, Jon Bon Jovi, Demi Moore, Kirsten Dunst, Jennifer Aniston and Debra Messing.

The Sahag Workshop even sent out a letter to each of its clients stating, "John Sahag's former employees now working at Trillium are prohibited by the court from soliciting your services, contacting you or providing styling and/or coloring services to you until any further order of the court." When The New York Post reported on the melee, at least one customer was outraged, saying, "I've known John for 20 years, and he would never have behaved this way."