Complaint Review: Prospect MX

Plain and simple, Mark was telling the truth. These guys are absolutely the biggest scam artists in the internet marketing industry. I was a part of one of their companies for over a year, Getmyhomesvalue.com, and saw first hand what they are capable of. If you want an idea as to who Co-Founder Dave Conklin really is as a business person, do your research on that company.

Here is a little history lesson for all the people being snowed by the employee rebuttals from Prospect MX (they fear for their jobs). Getmyhomesvalue.com was a scam, they made guarantees about internet real estate leads and rarely delivered. Sure, they SEO'd all of the compliants off the first page of google by now, but it was horrible when I was there. But this is more about the moral fiber of the Founders than the companies practices because to me the 2 are linked. Rory Wilfong and Steve Young are 2 semi- reasonable businessmen, and I feel for them for getting tied to an individual like Dave Conklin. Dave Conklin is a snake in every sense of the word. He creates a hostile work environment for everyone around him. Only people in fear of losing their jobs stand up for him. He was so quick to put Mark Fischer's business all over the web, not a smart by Mr. Conklin considering he was rumored to be a frequent user of illegal drugs in his day as well. Defemation of character anyone? Mr. Conklin has attempted to ruin peoples careers in the past, and if you trust this man with your companies marketing budget you will end up regretting it.

In closing, Rory Wilfong and Steve Young are not the ones to blame. They have unfortunately been lumped in on many occassions with the diminutive Mr. Conklin and it is a shame. The best way for them to save their reputations is to split from the immoral and unethical Conklin and move forward without him in the picture. Doing business with him is no better than lighting your money on fire. Don't let the testimonials of uneducated customers at the beginning of their relationship with a Conklin company fool you, they don't know any better yet.

Sometimes our emotions get the best of us.  When this happens, rationale, good sense and wisdom are ignored.  This happened recently in a post I submitted about ProspectMX.  If I was able to take it all back, I would.  My disagreement with the owners of ProspectMX was never intended for the good folks I worked with while employed there. 

As it stands- I am only allowed to edit my post.  This is my edit.   Please consider it a total retraction and an apology to all involved.

Regarding the point about stolen software; I make every attempt to help the company utilize open source alternatives to commercial software. While we did have an issue with duplicate installs and expired evaluation software, all duplicate installation issues have been rectified (there is now zero duplicate software) and commercially licensed software has been purchased. All software in our business location has also recently been reviewed and approved by the Business Software Alliance.

As someone that is also employed by this company (and believed that Mark was a personal friend), it is extremely difficult to read his offensive and downright mean comments about the company that we've all worked so hard for. 

Every member of our team is a professional, knowledgeable, and hard working employee that would bend over backwards to help a customer or one another.  To say that we are incompetent and unprofessional is completely untrue.  I am very sad that Mark chose to take this route.

I am one of the salespeople that worked directly with Mark Fischer as a part of the sales team and was brought on board in late April. Since the day I came to work for the company Mark was uncooperative, lacked communication skills, and was anything BUT a team player. I'm shocked and appalled on behalf of our company and the great team we have supporting us.

Mark was given so many opportunities to succeed even when he didn't deserve them. I have sat in team meetings and sales meetings where Mark had little respect for everyone's time, for the management of the company, and for the subjects being covered. He was frequently unprofessional in his speech and actions. Mark Fischer was known for throwing temper tantrums and basically telling his superiors that he was not willing to do the things they asked of him even when they were ALL very reasonable requests.

From the day I first started working with Mr. Fischer, he was cold and wouldn't even treat me as a colleague even though we held the same title and same responsibilities. Mark wanted to be the sales manager for our company but can't even lead himself let alone a team of people. He horded information and wouldn't share things with his peers out of his own insecurities and bitterness at the owners for not giving in to his demands to be in management. Management is EARNED not demanded.

Every time you offered Mark help, he declined and claimed to be able to handle it himself. When you asked for his help he would always claim to be too busy yet barely sold anything in the time we worked together. It's interesting to me that Mark would talk about the ethics of our company when the owners paid him a handsome draw while he was NOT working for us and looking at other jobs and interviewing on company time. What kind of ethics does Mark have? NONE! Which then doesn't surprise me that someone of his lack of class would even write this.

It's almost comical to me that this kind of person is even given a voice here on the internet because his accusations are so ludicrous. He makes references to things he knows very little about and cannot backup with statistics or facts. When is this website going to wake up and see that people like Mark Fischer are just disgruntled ex employees that are ticked off that they can't get away with the money they STOLE!

He didn't communicate with his coworkers, his superiors, or his clients. He demanded much (was given most of it generously by the management team) and did NOTHING to deserve it. He failed to set clients expectations properly and HIS actions were the ONLY thing that ever caused a poor result with a client. These are FACTS not opinions!

Seriously I could go on and on and on about Mark Fischer and NONE of it would be good! Suffice to say, the moral of the story is this... You can put a bum in a tux and he's still a bum. Not only is everything he said false, but it makes me ashamed to even admit I ever worked with him. Strike that.... I didn't work with him at all! I worked while he skated by collecting money he didn't deserve. Classy Mark.... REAL classy! 

I have been a member of this company's internet marketing team for almost 18 months. I am also an employee who has knowledge about the roster of clients this former employee brought to the company, and would like to provide evidence disputing this former employee's claims that the company is "too incompetent to deliver."

I would like to provide the following links to images of client website analytics charts. These charts show the amount of website traffic the former employee's clients were receiving from organic search engine results before working with this company on internet marketing, and the amount of website traffic via non-paid search the clients received in the following three months after becoming a client of the agency.

- <a href="http://www.prospectmx.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/long-tail-keyword-traffic-1.bmp">Case A</a>
- <a href="http://www.prospectmx.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/long-tail-keyword-traffic-2.bmp">Case B</a>
- <a href="http://www.prospectmx.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/long-tail-keyword-traffic-3.bmp">Case C</a>

These graphs were obtained from an entry on the company blog and are available to view on their site. After reviewing the dramatic increase in organic website traffic each client received after receiving services and consulting from this firm, I believe this employee's claim that this company is "too incompetent to deliver" can clearly be disregarded.

As a current employee of the company and more specifically, the proposal writer for Mark's clients I would like to address a few untruths related to my position and the atmosphere of our company that I have found in Mark's complaint.

1. Our "unprofessional" atmosphere - Yes, we have a casual atmosphere.  We work hard to do quality work for our clients, but we try to have fun while we do it.  We're a small team and therefore very close.

Mark had no problem joining in the friendly atmosphere, sometimes a bit too enthusiastically.  By this I mean he occasionally told off color, borderline offensive jokes, going past the boundaries we as a team set for ourselves.

2. Our being "too incompetent to deliver" - In the interest of transparency, our client acquisition is SUPPOSED to go something like this:

Salesperson has initial meeting w/ potential client, they bring information back to me and I analyze the client's site and goals and develop a VERY DETAILED plan for moving forward.  The salesperson takes this proposal, reviews it in detail with the client, the client signs the proposal and officially becomes a client.

Unfortunately, it has come to light that Mark was NOT going over the proposal in detail with several of his clients, and so they did not have a firm understanding of what we were going to do for them.  Therefore we were finding that we would have to re-review the project with his clients as we got started.

Luckily, our production team follows proposals to the T, and have delivered proven results for every one of Marks clients - most of which are satisfied and still working with us!  So I'm really not sure what "clients" Mark is referring to.

Bottom line: The complaint from Mark Fischer is from a disgruntled employee and filled with many untruths.  We have various documents disproving much of what he said.  We will be posting our side of this situation on our website shortly, facts only, with documentation to prove the truth of the situations.

Please visit http://www.prospectmx.com/mark-fischer for more information about this filed report.

We were excited when Mark Fischer of Lancaster, PA came on board with us because he came off as a professional, well qualified employee who had some truly amazing relationships.  The agreement that we had with him was a draw agreement, where we would pay him advanced commissions that would be paid back as commissions were earned.  He had no issues with this compensation until he stopped producing sales for our company.  We then increased his draw (which he negotiated), paid him additional monies, paid (IN FULL) his entire families health coverage and more.  This was taking place while he had no sales for a period of longer than 60 days.

We even elected to keep Mark Fischer on board with us after he brought a bag of marijuana (and smoked it) to a hotel in Hoboken, New Jersey where we were meeting with a potential client.  We have a strict no drugs policy at our company, but we expressed our concern for the situation very clearly to Mark Fischer and he stated that it wouldn't happen again.  We kept him on board.

We never asked Mark to leave our firm.  His last sale was more than 2 months prior to him resigning with our firm, and he had already moved on to a position with Stoner Bunting, an ad agency in Lancaster, PA.

If you are concerned about the quality of our work, please contact us and we will gladly give you as many references and people to talk to that work for us and are clients of ours.  We won't only supply you references... we will allow you to speak with these people on the phone.

This rebuttal was put together becuase Mark Fischer is angry that he has to pay back the money that is owed to our company for advanced commissions that we paid him.

Because this report has been filed, we will be publishing at the address below the agreement that Mark signed with our firm, the log of his sales and more.  It is unacceptable to us that you hear Mark's false claims without seeing the actual agreements and hear from the clients themselves.

We wish Mark Fischer the best in his endevors with Stoner Bunting.  We just hope, for their sake, that he doesn't get angry with them as well.

Please visit http://www.prospectmx.com/mark-fischer for more information about this filed report.