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WSA Corp false advertising, horrible customer service, possible scam, too expensive ripoff Shawnee Kansas
First of all, let me explain that I am normally the last to disparage a small business. Economic times are difficult enough without bad word-of-mouth. However, since this particular company can charge upwards of $30,000 for services with zero guarantee, I thought it worth my time to elaborate on my particular dealings with them.
I am the interim president of a public company, after I hire my successor I will leave to pursue other interests. I contacted WSA in order to FIND those other interests.
To their credit, they provide information ad nauseum regarding their company services. They also provide both written and audio testamonials. WSA requests of ANY potential client the courtesy of listening to a 40 minute audio session with their Founder Wayne Starr.
I did this and took copious notes.
The next afternoon I was scheduled to speak with a "Senior Advisor" who mentioned that I had a market rate of between $200-250K per year salary and a comp plan of around $450K.
She was very kind, and listened well to my desires and concerns.
She then asked that I do a mailing of 6,000 letters even though I ask to stay in my (rather small) metro area. I asked if her stated "minimum" would cover my state and she said "easily" however, she warned that we would not have as many competing offers in Anchorage, AL et al. to leverage against local offers.
Well, since I have no intention of EVER going to Alaska- I'd rather not send my resume there. Why? I understand the principle of competing offers, I suspect that the majority of their clients (who can spend five figures on outplacement) also understand it.
What she didn't understand is that as a President myself, I know that preparing an offer takes time. A lot of time if you get the right candidate, and that you can end up upsetting a great number of people if you are wasting their time with ZERO intention of working for their company.
So, we settled upon her stated minimum of 1,000 letters, even though there were a number of "testimonials" on the site that did far less than 1,000. Some sending as few as 500. Here are a few examples from the WSACorp website:
$95K Manager mailed 500 letters. Had 6 calls, 3 interviews and started $135K+ package!
$80K Manager accepted $132K+ package! Within 30 days of mailing 730 letters!
$75K Engineer mailed 680 letters. Had 5 calls, 3 interviews and 1 offer within 2 weeks.
Etcetera.
So clearly, this is the beginning of the false advertising or "bait and switch" campaign that I feel WSACorp is running.
Now, on to my main complaint:
I was told by this Senior Advisor that my business "wasn't welcomed" because I wanted to write my own resume. When I asked if that was policy, she said "I am just doing what I was told to do."
It states QUITE clearly in the transcript of the interview with the founder "Winning Ways with Wayne Starr":
(Interviewer) Wayne, what about those that don't follow WSA's advice?
(Wayne) Sadly, those who do less get less. About half our customers can't afford or for other reasons do less than we recommend. If you lump them together for the last 15 years, they averaged about 45% of what we recommended. Now 52% of those failures only did our minimum letters. Nevertheless, 51% to 55% of them still took a job from the mailing. Now that's incredible considering that 20% of that group didn't even have us write the resume. And we are 5 to 11 times more offer-effective per thousand-letters-mailed when we write it than when we don't.
But don't worry if you don't want to have us write the resume. We call you, internally, guinea pigs. We need the 10% overall, that 20% of the half that don't follow our advice, because we want stats on that too. I can tell you some things about those resumes. They are usually two pages, they usually have large paragraphs, you can't quickly scan them. These secretaries are very protective of their boss's time, and the net result is when you have that kind of a resume, it gets through a lot less often.
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Now it's very clear to me that they do have success with people writing their own resumes. There are only a few ways that one can write "President of XYZ Public company trading on ABC exchange".
Still, they would not budge and insisted that they charge $1000 to write my resume for me. (Not that I don't have 10 people who work for me already to "update" my resume)
I asked to speak with her supervisor and I made sure to tell the supervisor that I in NO way had issues with the young lady with whom I was dealing and that my issue lay with the existing policies and obvious discrepancy in the primary marketing material: the website and audio content.
I was told once again that my business wasn't welcome if I chose to write my own resume. I once again asked if this was company policy, and she replied that she had been trying to MAKE it policy for the last 2-3 weeks.
That doesn't make it policy does it? I replied.
She went on to state that we COULD do a mailing if there were no "sour-grapes" on my end if I didn't get any responses and that I would have no recourse.
I attempted to ask what recourse the balance of customers had who DO allow WSACorp to write their resume for them, given that there is no guarantee, but she interrupted me and asked me to "get to the point" because she had another phone call.
I guess you can say that her comment was the final straw, because when someone is asking me to drop the equivalent money to an used BMW I like to know what I am getting into. Especially when there is no guarantee or warrantee.
Call me crazy.
I then asked to speak with the founder, and she replied and said that he sold the company and no longer works there. I reminded her that her employee said he DOES in fact still work there in the sales department.
She offered the new owner of the company instead but assured me that he was "out of the office today". Sure.
Again, as the president of more than one company in my career- I know if there is a potential customer on the line that is beyond upset with our policies or our INTEGRITY, I would have that call patched through to my mobile phone. Without question.
It's no doubt that the new President of WSACorp will hear about this post though. I found this website by looking for other WSA corp complaints, and magically- there appears to be more than one on this board.
The moral of this story is:
1. If you have a website or any kind of marketing, make sure that you can do what you claim you can do, for the price you say you can do it for.
2. Do not yell or be impatient with a customer who was asked less than 24 hours ago to spend $18,450 dollars with your company plus an additional $2,200 in expenses when they have a few questions.
Don't heed the morals and you MIGHT just get a write up like this one.
Good luck!
Exasperated by WSACorp
Denver, Colorado
U.S.A.