Complaint Review: Beyond Breakeven TRUSTED BUSINESS | Ripoff Report Verified™ …businesses you can trust. Since 2003 Ed Keels and his staff at Beyond Breakeven Inc. (BBI) have been helping wannabe business owners with deal structures that provide business loans and business credit when banks won’t. Beyond Breakeven has developed more than one hundred ways to fund a business acquisition and do so with little to none of the buyer’s own money.

ABOUT THE RIPOFF REPORT BELOW:

Ripoff Report would like to let readers know that Ripoff Report emailed this customer so the member business could make things right with them. When a business joins the Corporate Advocacy Program, Ripoff Report emails everyone from the past so the member business can make things right with them. Of course, everything within reason. In order to confirm that the complaints were resolved, Ripoff Report is copied on all responses so we can insure that the member business did right by their customer. The author of the Ripoff Report below never responded to our offer to help them. The Report below should be taken with a grain of salt

STATEMENT FROM BEYOND BREAKEVEN:

This client was from 2011 and filed this report in 2016, three years after we completed his project. He blames us for his decisions during those three years, a time during which we provided no guidance and had no correspondence with him. We are not responsible for his actions during that time. He failed to respond to our attempt to remedy his dissatisfaction. Also, his report is full of lies, untruths and libelous statements regarding alleged kickbacks which do not exist.

NOW TO THE ORIGINAL REPORT THAT WAS FILED

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I engaged with Beyond Breakeven a few years ago to assist me in buying a business.  I had found a business that was for sale that was something I was an expert in and was in the location I wanted to live.  I was unable to get financing myself so paid Beyond Breakeven their $5,000 fee to help me buy the business.  I was apprehensive about paying their fee and should have listened to my gut.  If it sounds too good to be true it probably is and Ed's promise that I could start or buy a business without any money out of my pocket proved to be false.

I went through the standard conference calls, gathering the information for Ed and doing all the leg work.  At first it seemed like things were going well then a couple weeks into it he got into a heated argument on the phone with the broker that had listed the business.  The broker called me up afterward and told me he was unwilling to talk to Ed anymore and he would only work with me. Not a good sign.  It surprised me as we went through the process that Ed seemed unfamiliar with some of the most basic steps in buying something.  When the Broker asked for a Letter of Intent Ed balked at the idea.  When the Broker refused to move forward without one, Ed sent me a generic one that appeared to have been downloaded off the Internet. 

As time went on I began to question his motives - and his integrity.  During one conference call he was telling another client about a lady he knew who was a "LinkedIn Rock Star."  He told this client this lady could get him over 10,000 connections on LinkedIn, Ed knew she could because she had done it for him.  I looked up Ed's LinkedIn profile while he was talking and at that time he had less than 100 connections.  There was more than one time where he would say something and I would look it up online and it seemed he was not being truthful.

After about 3 months we seemed to be at an impasse.  Ed had produced a document that had 3 different offers on it and the Broker flat out refused all three, saying he had never seen a business transaction structured in any of the three ways.  It was difficult being the middle man as Ed would tell me what to tell the Broker then I would try and relay it only to have the Broker tell me "I'm sorry you paid Ed money to help you because it appears like he has no idea what he's doing."  Finally, Ed told me that it just wasn't going to happen, the Broken was to "stubborn and stupid" to make a deal happen.  "Sorry," he told me "but this one just isn't going to work."

So now what? There was no way Beyond Breakeven was going to refund my $5k, so he asked me "What is your passion?  What do you dream of doing?  Let's start you a business doing that."  I tried to explain to him that the business deal he just torpedoed was my passion but he didn't seem to care - whether he actually thought buying that business was a bad idea or he just didn't like the Broker I'm not sure.  He reassured me my money spent with him would not go to waste and once I decided what I wanted to do he would help me get it off the ground.  I said I would have to think about it, he told me to take my time. I found three or four existing businesses that I thought I would like to run and set up an appointment with Ed to discuss and each time he shot me down, telling me all the reasons that particular one wasn't a good idea.  He kept telling me to start one instead of buy one.

I finally found something I thought I would like and Ed didn't seem adverse to it but I needed to adjust some things in my life before I could get started on it.  I called a few times over the next few months and checked in, he was always cordial and told me "we'll be here, just let us know when you're ready."  Then once I had a timeline for when I could start I called to let him know, he was busy so I told Candace.  She told me in no uncertain terms that my contract with them was for 1 year, I had blown it by waiting so long as they had no obligation to work with me after the one year mark - which was only about 60 days away.  She was very rude and confrontational, I was taken back and concerned I was about to lose my $5k investment so accelerated my timeline, doing things in a rushed manner and compromising some of the tasks.  I even took on a couple partners to help move things forward.

Over the next 60 days as I rushed through all the analysis to get Beyond Breakeven the information they needed I was continually surprised at how unprofessional Candace could be.  At some point she misspelled my email address when sending me some documentation and I never got it.  When I called to inquire about why she hadn't sent it, she became upset with me and told me she had sent it days ago.  It took a while but eventually we figured out what happened and she resent it to the correct email.  After that her email auto-filled the misspelled email address every time so I never knew if she was still working on the documentation or if she had sent it to the wrong email.  More than once she chewed me out for not responding and I would have to remind her that she frequently sent stuff to the wrong email and ask her to check again.  She never got a bouceback, so someone out there with an email similar to mine was getting all of my confidential business documents.

Candace sent some Excel templates to use for many of the calculations she needed.  I know Excel pretty well and used formulas to do the calculations.  Apparently Candace doesn't know Excel very well and could not figure out how to transfer worksheets without breaking the links.  There was no way I was going to manually enter in every figure, the whole point of Excel is for it to do the calculations.  She sent me an email once asking if I had used formulas in the spreadsheet, when I confirmed I had she responded with a one line email telling me I had "totally screwed up" the worksheets.  I suppose I could have helped her understand how to use Excel but I was pretty much trying to avoid her by this point.  I started converting cells to Values Only before sending them so I could use formulas to do the work and she wouldn't throw a fit.

The end result of what Beyond Breakeven gives you is a Business Plan and Strategic Funding Plan.

When I finally received the business plan from Candace I was shocked, it was a standard (ugly) Microsoft Word Business Plan template and was riddled with grammatical and formatting errors.  Many of the text was cut and paste from emails I had sent and forms I had filled out.  It did not flow well having paragraphs from multiple places cut and paste into the same document.  Maybe Candace was just sick of me by this time and didn't care about the quality of her work.  I suppose it possible other people have received quality work from her but I ended up rewriting the entire business plan as the one they delivered was unusable.

The Strategic Funding Plan was about as useless.  It started out by saying no bank would lend to me and that I would need to find more "creative" ways to get the money.  It suggested 13 different methods that could generate capital, all of which were nothing new - a simple Google search would have given me the same suggestions.  Ed gets kickbacks from many of the organizations he sends people too so it is hard to tell if he really thinks it is a good idea or if he is just trying to pad his own pockets.  i.e. he suggests you work with Seed Capital out of NV that will take out myriad credit cards in your name and do cash advances on all of them, or Guidant Financial who will take control of your 401k and convert it into stock in your own business to generate capital.  Those two (and many others that Ed suggests) will get you funds - for a fee - and Ed takes his cut for referring you.

When I received the Business Plan and Strategic Funding Plan I was distraught, I couldn't believe I had paid so much and done so much work (and put up with so much of Candace's attitude) and this was all I had to show for it.  I was ready to pull the plug on the whole thing, but my partners were not willing they wanted to continue.  They engaged Seed Capital and took out 20 some odd credit cards in their own names and the business name - Seed Capital charged $5,000 in professional fees on the credit cards and got us around $50,000 in cash advances. By this point my name was on too many documents and I was in too deep to be able to pull out but there was no way the business was going to survive without more cash.  I ended up taking $40k out of my own savings and a personal loan for another $40k. 

After Ed had delivered the goods he was contractually obligated to (the Business and Funding plans) he essentially disappeared.  To be fair, he told me to call if I ever needed anything but why would I?  I certainly didn't want Candace to answer the phone when I called and what was Ed going to do?  If the documents he had given me were samples of what Beyond Breakeven could do I wasn't really that interested in pursuing the relationship.

At the end of the day, I had sunk $80k of my own money and my partners had scrounged up about the same amount (some of it through Ed's associates and some from other places).  The business struggled for just over a year then I finally extracted myself out of it and left it to my partners.  My partners are still trying to make it work but it has destroyed our relationship - they consider their predicament my fault since I introduced them to Ed and most of what we did was on his suggestion and it turned out so bad.  I do not ever expect to see my $80k again. 

Ed told me the story many times about a friend whose business failed and he ended up committing suicide.  He always finished off the story with a passionate declaration of why he did what he does.  No one should go through that; he is here to help the little guy, help the entrepreneur get started on the right foot so they won't experience that.  I am not sure if he is a hypocrite or just delusional, but my experience was almost exactly what he claimed he was trying to avoid.