Hey everyone

So I had a question about what to do. I worked for a catering company 2 years. I first met this guy at a coffee shop and started working for him as a driver around pandemic and he was ready to sell his business and move to east coast. I helped him in Cali while he was on the east coast – it was just me working and over time the biz grew and he drove back.

Then fastforward I’ve been working there for 2 years. What I realized he kept doing was changing my pay structure (when it was busy i became salary so I would take a bunch of runs and do operations sales etc and get paid fix rate,,, but when it was slow he’d say you get paid per run you do and then bonus me like 100 bucks for the operations and sales) this was annoying but he has a reallyinipulative way of kind of promising to convert to employee or get a % in the company.

After all this last year around end of the year he did the same thing with the pay structure and at this point I told him I wanna step down and just be a driver and take the orders when I want.

I’ve been a 1099 contractor this whole time never signed an agreement or contract. I would’ve if I could but was never given an option.

I helped him run about 5-15 customers / drops on a weekly basis

I told one of the clients about what he did and they offered to use my service personally and I worked with them, worked with ex employer less.

Now I’ve got a cease and desist form the ex employer saying I used trade secrets and slandered his name. Does he have any ground?

I have never purposely solicited his customer the one customer that asked I helped them , and as far as slander goes I’ve never bad mouthed him to any off the customers only thing I can think of is customers wondering why I wasn’t emailing them and / or delivering as much and I told them Honestly it was the payment part and they all told me it’s messed up and I should’ve been promoted this whole time.

Let me know anything helps pm me I can send the cease and desist to show or share more info