Way too much faith is put into non-competes. They will keep the ex-employee (Ex) out of your firm’s clients if the Ex sees them as reasonable.
Forget the law, the Ex has to see the non-compete as reasonable. If the agreement feels too heavy, after 3 months or a year, the Ex will go after your accounts no matter what the non-compete says. The more heavy handed the non-compete, the more likely the Ex will break it. The worst ones are spit upon by the Ex and immediately disregarded.
Remember, just knowing the names of the companies you do business with is no help. Those names are available from the telephone book. The Ex can buy lists from a hundred sources. It is personal relationships that you want to keep the Ex from using. And after a year of no contact, those relationships are pretty stale.
As a sales recruiter I have practically never heard a salesperson even consider breaking a non-compete for a year or less that applies only to the companies and people he did business with for his previous company. They feel inside themselves that it is a moral agreement and they want to be moral.
Whenever the non-compete is more than a year, or if it includes ALL companies and people his old firm did business with, the Ex starts figuring out how to break it and not get caught. That’s because the agreement feels immoral and unreasonable.
Let’s take it one step further. I have seen non-competes that forbid the Ex from contacting any company, subsidiaries, or parent companies, or person the firm has contacted in the last 3 years. Even for a local company, that would keep salespeople from being in sales anywhere in the USA or world because so many companies have multiple sites. I’ve even seen non-competes that forbid you from calling on companies in the same industry as any industry the firm has been in contact with.
Even if you scare the Ex by your legal prowess, the Ex can always kill you behind your back by giving introductions to all the people he knows to your competitor. If it happens you will probably be unable to find out.
So stop running scared. If knowing a name is the only thing that keeps your competitors out of your clients, you have a bigger problem than worrying about your Ex stealing accounts.
