- Report: #669479
Complaint Review: Competitive Consulting - Austin Texas
Reported By:
Anonymous -
Austin, Texas, United States of America
Submitted:
Updated:
-
Author Not Confirmed
Why?
Competitive Consulting
1524 S IH 35 Austin, 78753 Texas, United States of America
Phone:
(512) 371-7373
Web:
http://www.austin-cc.com/
Categories:
Business Rating:
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Competitive Consulting Competitive Marketing Concepts, Austin Business Consulting Strategically designed employment scam targeted at recent college graduates and those with little work experience or who are very gullible Austin, Texas
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I am a former employee of this company. It took me three weeks to quit, and I am deeply ashamed that I took so long to catch on. That was a few months ago, and I have yet to regret my decision to leave in any way, shape, or form.
These are the following benefits you will gain from spending time with this "firm": (1) You will learn a pretty good sales pitch, and (2) you will witness a mediocre yet surprisingly effective brainwashing operation in action. Apparently, if you stick around long enough, you get some substandard health benefits.
It goes downhill from there. If you apply to (or are found by) Competitive Consulting, you will go through an interview process that will raise your eyebrow even if you have never been to an official interview before. You will wait in a deceptively nice (and by that I mean looking like a real business should look) reception area, filling out a cookie-cutter application that annoyingly requests much of the information you've already provided them with on your resume, before being taken back into a suspiciously small office area that is even more suspiciously devoid of furniture, except for a small "conference room" with old, wobbly desk chairs and another room with a small table and two more chairs. (On a side note, the only two computers in an office of twenty-something employees are located in the reception area. They are basically communal computers, something companies used to do back in the 80s, as I understand.)
You will be led into the office of Joe Nolan (or possibly one of his higher-echelon lackeys) and subjected to a weird first round interview consisting of personality- and goal-related questions. In my case, I thought, fine. This is only my third legitimate, professional interview. Maybe some companies are just quirky. I was wrong.
If you pass the first round (which I think everybody does), you get to go on a second interview, which entails shadowing one of the higher-ranking drones for a day in the life. He or she will ask you strange questions about things on your resume, and your social life. You will be taught some high school level marketing concepts, none of which you will use again. This will all be done on the drive out to a location that is often at least half an hour away (common destinations are San Antonio, New Braunfels, and Round Rock).
Here's Red Flag #1, a huge, huge flag: You are not compensated for mileage, and you drive over 100 miles on company business every day. You are paying for Competitive Consulting to acquire new clients out of your own pocket. This is truly one of the few jobs in which you can actually lose money, and do quite often. Even if you perform above and beyond the company standard, your gasoline bills are still astronomical...not to mention the beating your car will take on this regimen. Oh, they'll feed you some line about logging your mileage and then noting it on your tax returns. So our compensation is a tax credit, at the mercy and discretion of the IRS? Very professional.
Speaking of professional, guess what the dress code for CC employees is? Business professional, suit and tie, every day. That's fine, as long as you're working in an office and meeting with people in a business environment. Since, however, your primary directive is to hike miles and miles in the hot Texas sun, going from door to door of business after business (some welcoming, most hostile, some legitimate, some very, very shady), I think athletic attire would be more appropriate.
If you are hired (and why wouldn't they hire you? You've got a wallet, so you have money to burn on this company), you'll become a cog in this shady little machine. Make no mistake, this is cold call business-to-business sales. You do not need a college education for this; indeed, some of CC's employees do not have a degree.
The morning rally sessions are particularly annoying. Every, and I mean every, day, prior to being released into the field, all the employees of CC gather in a spartan, chair-less meeting room and go through a series of training exercises. Then you get a pep talk from your "team leader." Then you play a group "game" designed to hone sales skills. Then you get a pep talk from whoever is designated as Lackey #1 for the day. Then you get a pep talk from Joe Almighty Himself.
There is excessive back-patting, constant public repetition of short- and long-term goals, gong-hitting, bell-ringing, and just the same things again and again. In the Army, we call this Brainwashing 101. The veterans of this sham, the people who have been around and burned enough of their time and gas money into CC to earn promotions to Account Manager and Assistant Manager (which, incidentally, are no different from being "entry level" except that you now have to train other people to do the same cold-calling nonsense you've been doing day in day out), treat Joe Nolan as some sort of financial Chuck Norris. He takes care of his people, and is to be admired as a model entrepreneur. If ever a bigger line of sh*t was sold to human beings, it must have had to do with religion. Joe is a scam artist, the "millionaire heroes" he brings in for early morning pep talks are more experienced scam artists, and his lackeys are scam artists-in-training. They've all been shafted, but then they were let in on the secret, and now, in an attempt to make up for what must be epic cognitive dissonance as a result of being screwed for so long, they're doing the same thing to other people. That's what it means when they say (quite frequently), "You'll be opening up your own branch soon enough!"
Depending on how long it takes you to wise up to their act, you might have the pleasure of going on a CC "business trip." This means that you will drive to another city and do the same thing you always do, except that instead of going home, you get to hang out with your coworkers 24/7. The gas you expend reaching the destination city (or the plane ticket you need to go on out-of-state trips) will not be reimbursed by CC, nor will your meals. You will share...yes, share...a hotel room with up to three other employees. Often, this means you have to share a bed. Not even in the Army do we have to share beds. I don't mind sharing a bed, with an attractive female or someone I know quite well, usually in Vegas. But not on a business trip to Waco. On a business trip for a real company, you would pay for neither travel nor food, and you certainly would not pay for your hotel room...which you would not have to share.
CC and many like it are all affiliates (read: demon spawn) of the parent company Cydcor. This is not the marketing industry; it is industrialized cold calling, using the naive and gullible as fodder for the machine...a classic pyramid scheme, except everyone loses until they get to the top. Then you're just the king of the losers, as it were.
I'll end on an amused note: Competitive Consulting now likes to brag about its recent "A" award from the Better Business Bureau. This designation, of course, is awarded to companies who have few or no customer complaints. How would a customer complain about CC? They don't even know they're customers; in fact, they really aren't. They are Quill customers, made so through an intermediary. They never hear CC's name and never see its logo, not even in the sales pitch. There's nothing for a "customer" to complain about. Now, employees, on the other hand...don't get me started.
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