The Miami Switcheroo: You Thought X, But It Was Y

Dan Gudema
4 min readDec 16, 2022
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I should have studied the movie The Sting a little more carefully. It has some tell-tale stories of people who are not who they appear to be, and you need to always be on guard that the person you are meeting is not who they say they are; specifically in Miami.

This strange phenomenon seems to be so commonly happening to me where I go into a meeting expecting one thing and within a few minutes it appears that this person is not what I expected.

Recently I set my wife up with a meeting with someone in Miami who said they were interested in being a sponsor, which means paying her for traffic and visibility, but within a few minutes of the meeting, they were trying to sell her TikTok videos. They were pretty nice videos, but she was not expecting to be pitched. She quite honestly was turned off by this. It’s not what most of us expect.

Do you have the expectation that everybody is not what they say they are, when you go into every meeting, especially with investors?

You go in thinking they will be investing in you and it turns out they want to either 1) sell you some service, 2) they want to raise money from you, or 3) have some altogether different objective that was never what you expected.

It’s just common in Miami to be duped, cajoled, or talked into something you were not expecting. Is this common in other places in the US or it a Miami thing?

Am I just naive this is the business world that I just never understood, and I am trusting of people no matter what?

Am I just the fool’s fool?

And some of this can be the telephone game. That’s when a person tells a person, who tells a person, who tells you something, and by the time it gets to you, the original message stated that they were investors, but by the time you meet, they were undertakers. How did this happen?

It could be my ADHD.

I am not a great listener.

I sometimes miss the fine details.

Dan Gudema

Founder SEO Turbo Booster, http://seoturbobooster.com, Writer, Speaker, Consultant. Email me at dan@seoturbobooster.com to contact me.