- Report: #808075
Complaint Review: Pro Elite - Red Bank New Jersey
Reported By:
bobc -
Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, United States of America
Submitted:
Updated:
-
Author Not Confirmed
Why?
Pro Elite
12 Broad Street Red Bank, 07701 New Jersey, United States of America
Phone:
Web:
http://myproelite.com
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Pro Elite Carbon Copy Pro, CCPRO, Pro U Pro Elite, great education but pass on the upsells, they are expensive and don't make you money Red Bank, New Jersey
You want to make money on the internet and lots of it and you've landed on the Pro Elite (formerly Carbon Copy Pro or CC Pro) website. Well, actually you're probably landed on a website that is one of the Pro marketing partners; Lena Bjorna, iGlobal Pros, Michael Force, Andrew Cass,Ann Sieg, Aaron Raskin or Greg Davison.Pro Elite The marketing partners are actually the Pro Elite's seven figure earners who are your mentors. Not a bad deal.
Perhaps you have read about how easy it is to "copy" the Pros with a turnkey system that will have you up and running in minutes. And a six-figure earner will mentor you. All true. You could. But, can you?
A Little History of Pro Elite
Pro Elite used to be known as Carbon Copy Pro or CCPro. Developed by Jay Kubassek in collaboration with Aaron Parkinson, Carbon Copy Pro was the result of their partnership. The men spent several months in 2007 kicking around ideas, eventually coming up with the final product. Parkinson seems to have left Pro Elite around the end of 2010, when it was announced by the company that it would drop their long standing relationship with Wealth Master's International and sell a line of products by New York TImes best-selling author and financial guru, David Bach. As in any divorce, a lot of long-time Pro members also opted out and Parkinson seems to have divorced himself at that point as well.
Like many online websites, you join Pro Elite and get your own, pre-designed web pages, which are actually your Marketing Partner's pages, the premise being that it's easier to sell them with their track record to someone than you, a newbie.
The idea behind Pro Elite and Carbon Copy Pro was to "carbon copy" the pros or the people that had been successful six and seven figure earners. Sounds easy enough but the reality is far different.
The Pro Elite Product Lineup
You are essentially selling the Pro Elite base product, called the Black Box, or formerly, business in a box. For the princely sum of $395 you have your marketing partners replicated websites and hundreds of hours of courses on everything from search engine optimization to blogging and Twitter. I will vouch for this: it is a great education! It makes anything taught by any university pale in comparison. You receive a commission of about $150 from each black box you sell, less if you do what most do and discount the thing.
After this, to make real money you're urged to purchase a package. They are Silver, which you can purchase for $1,995. With it comes about five products from David Bach, which in reality you could easily purchase for about $120. Then you receive three PRO U (they love the names here) courses; Pro Why, Pro Sales Course; a Pro Service Course. Other than the Why course, no one actually uses these as far as I could tell.
The next step up is the Gold package, yours for the incredible price if just $9,995. That includes the Bach stuff and a couple tickets to a live, two-day event with Bach. Then if you REALLY want to make money, you have to shell it out to. You can purchase a Platinum package for $19,995 or even a Black package for the $39,995.
The entire premise behind these very expensive packages is that you make a large commission selling them to others. That's also the problem. How many people, even on the web, are going to shell out anywhere from $10K to $40K? Answer, not that many.
I actually knew a couple people who purchased the Pro Elite Black package. Neither of them stayed in longer than 8 months and neither made a dime of profit. The thing is, you have to be at a level to sell up to that level, i.e. if you are a Gold, you can sell silver and gold packages and earn a commission. For packages above that, you must pass up some sales and take a 10% commission. So, the onus here is obviously to get smucks to buy up in hopes of making the "big" money. In fact, the marketing partners, which I listed in the first paragraph, will pressure you and tell you to make good money you must buy a gold or higher package. That that's the key to your success these days at Pro Elite.
The Reality of Pro Elite
The reality is this; most people can't afford anything other than the silver package - fortunately. The other reality...you have to spend a lot of money to advertise your Pro Elite opportunity. A lot. The whole point here is to drive traffic to your (which is really your Marketing Partner's) website.pro elite It takes a LOT of traffic. Even Pro Elite admits only 3.8 out of every 100 leads or so are going to actually express enough of an interest to fill out what they call an "application."
And that's the inherent problem in the Pro Elite system. Google used to allow the advertising of home business opportunities. In those days, before 2010, it wasn't difficult for people to post an ad and have 30-50 leads a day come in fairly cheaply. People made $5K their first or second month in the business. When Google cracked down it got a lot more difficult and to be honest, I didn't see anybody getting those types of results in Pro Elite unless they spent a few grand in advertising.
In our group of people who were under marketing partner Lena Bjorna, there were about 24-30 of us. No one, not a single one I could tell, ever came close to making five figures a month; despite the best efforts of Lena to help and guide us; despite my spending thousands on ads; and despite an contest she held to give away a free cruise for the first person in the group to hit 5 figures a month. In fact, the contest backfired because many of the action takers, myself included, quit when it became apparent the entire process was not working.
Signs of Trouble at Pro Elite
Apparently, I'm not the only person who thinks Pro Elite isn't working anymore. One of their former vice president's, Jeff Lerner, departed in November 2011. Blogging about his reasons for leaving, Lerner said, "Enriching ourselves at the expense of our teams would be to continue to insist that our team should just "hang in there" with the abysmal conversions we'd been getting with the system funnel for the last year, and the continued insistence on teaching people to market replicated funnels (which Google, Facebook, and every other major traffic portal have banned)." Days later Lerner announced he was joining forces with Wealth Master's International (WMI), which had been paired with PRO Elite (at the time Carbon Copy Pro, CCPRO) before PRO jilted them for David Bach.
In a press release barely a week later, PRO Elite announced that John Jackson, who had been a Vice President, was leaving using the old, "leaving to pursue other opportunities." Take it from this former corporate hack - that usually means fired or going to the competition. Two days later my suspicions were confirmed when Wealth Master's announced Jackson was joining them. Another one had jumped ship.
Pro Elite's Numbers Suddenly Disappear
Another bad sign is when a company suddenly stops being transparent. One day in November 2011, I noticed that Pro Elite had removed the actual numbers from the back office leader's page. They used to list the leaders in several categories along with actual numbers. For instance, the leader last month sold x number of Black Boxes, and was followed by four others along with the numbers of Black Boxes they had sold. Leaders in a number of categories were listed each month along with their numbers. Mysteriously, in November those numbers disappeared and now, just the leading members in each category at PRO Elite are listed but no actual numbers. When I asked Pro about it on their Facebook page, they replied the numbers were being checked and would be back up shortly. Weeks later, they were still invisible so take that with the same kind of assurance that Bernie Madoff used to give his clients.
Before they removed them I had jotted down some numbers. From Jan-August 2011, the leading member sold an average of 32.1 Black Boxes in Pro Elite per month; a median of 28 compared with an average of 46.5 for all of 2010 and a median of 40 for all of 2010. That's a drastic drop. In fact, there were two months, January and February 2011 when the leading member in PRO Elite sold 15 black boxes, barely enough, according to my marketing partner, to make five figures a month and something that had never occurred previously.
An earlier sign of trouble was their twice annual marketing meeting. In May about 600 people attended Pro Elite's Master Marketing Event in Phoenix along with yours truly. In October, they barely mustered 200-250 at the event held in Las Vegas. I was told that was down from about 1,000 the fall before. Do you see any trends here?
A Name Change from Carbon Copy Pro to Pro Elite
Another thing that gave me pause was when Pro changed its name from Carbon Copy Pro, or CCPro, to Pro Elite. Why would a company that had been around since 2004 change their name? I don't know but changing your name also means that people searching for negative reviews find far fewer negative reviews under your new name, Pro Elite than the old name.
I enjoyed my time in Pro Elite. I learned a lot and made some good friends. The Black Box offers a great education in online marketing, but at $150 a month, you can get the same education for half that price from other places like My Lead System Pro and a better back office. If you want to actually make money there are other opportunities out there that are easier, much cheaper, and take up far less of your time and energy than Pro Elite. You can make a living on the internet, it's just not likely it's going to be as a Pro Elite member. You have to consider the ROI, the amount of work it's going to take and for goodness sakes, something that is affordable.
The Pros of Pro Elite:
You have the help of a seven figure marketing partner to help you close sales
You can use their web pages and their success to attract potential members to you
No building out of web sites
Can be up and running in a few minutes
Great education in online marketing, social media, etc.
The Cons of Pro Elite
Free advertising doesn't work well, you must spend a lot of money to attract enough people to purchase something
Those duplicatable websites of your marketing partner are not going to be allowed on Google, Bing, Yahoo and a lot of other places to advertise
It's very expensive
There are much easier ways to make five figures a month without the investment
Indications are from people who have left and other statistics is that Pro Elite sales are way down.
The Familiar Mindset of the MLM at Pro Elite
Then there were those who never questioned the status quo in Pro Elite. In our group there were members who had been in two years without achieving a profit. They just kept plugging away. When I asked them about return on investment with Pro Elite and why they would keep spending money in a system that wasn't returning a profit, they'd almost always resort to the popular MLM rant about, "you're not getting results because of your mindset."
Folks, you find this in almost every business. People that buy into the dream or drink the Kool-Aid and absolutely never question anything, especially results. Unfortunately, business IS all about results. No profit, you go out of business unless you happen to be laundering money! Pretty simple formula actually. It was maddening to a results oriented individual like me whose idea is "if you don't get results and are doing things correctly, then move on, because doing more of the same isn't going to get you anything but more broke." I swear there were people in our group that had been in Pro Elite for two years without getting close to making money and I could never figure out why they stayed? Again, my philosophy is if you aren't getting results, move onto something else. I was not in Pro Elite to lose money!
Perhaps you have read about how easy it is to "copy" the Pros with a turnkey system that will have you up and running in minutes. And a six-figure earner will mentor you. All true. You could. But, can you?
A Little History of Pro Elite
Pro Elite used to be known as Carbon Copy Pro or CCPro. Developed by Jay Kubassek in collaboration with Aaron Parkinson, Carbon Copy Pro was the result of their partnership. The men spent several months in 2007 kicking around ideas, eventually coming up with the final product. Parkinson seems to have left Pro Elite around the end of 2010, when it was announced by the company that it would drop their long standing relationship with Wealth Master's International and sell a line of products by New York TImes best-selling author and financial guru, David Bach. As in any divorce, a lot of long-time Pro members also opted out and Parkinson seems to have divorced himself at that point as well.
Like many online websites, you join Pro Elite and get your own, pre-designed web pages, which are actually your Marketing Partner's pages, the premise being that it's easier to sell them with their track record to someone than you, a newbie.
The idea behind Pro Elite and Carbon Copy Pro was to "carbon copy" the pros or the people that had been successful six and seven figure earners. Sounds easy enough but the reality is far different.
The Pro Elite Product Lineup
You are essentially selling the Pro Elite base product, called the Black Box, or formerly, business in a box. For the princely sum of $395 you have your marketing partners replicated websites and hundreds of hours of courses on everything from search engine optimization to blogging and Twitter. I will vouch for this: it is a great education! It makes anything taught by any university pale in comparison. You receive a commission of about $150 from each black box you sell, less if you do what most do and discount the thing.
After this, to make real money you're urged to purchase a package. They are Silver, which you can purchase for $1,995. With it comes about five products from David Bach, which in reality you could easily purchase for about $120. Then you receive three PRO U (they love the names here) courses; Pro Why, Pro Sales Course; a Pro Service Course. Other than the Why course, no one actually uses these as far as I could tell.
The next step up is the Gold package, yours for the incredible price if just $9,995. That includes the Bach stuff and a couple tickets to a live, two-day event with Bach. Then if you REALLY want to make money, you have to shell it out to. You can purchase a Platinum package for $19,995 or even a Black package for the $39,995.
The entire premise behind these very expensive packages is that you make a large commission selling them to others. That's also the problem. How many people, even on the web, are going to shell out anywhere from $10K to $40K? Answer, not that many.
I actually knew a couple people who purchased the Pro Elite Black package. Neither of them stayed in longer than 8 months and neither made a dime of profit. The thing is, you have to be at a level to sell up to that level, i.e. if you are a Gold, you can sell silver and gold packages and earn a commission. For packages above that, you must pass up some sales and take a 10% commission. So, the onus here is obviously to get smucks to buy up in hopes of making the "big" money. In fact, the marketing partners, which I listed in the first paragraph, will pressure you and tell you to make good money you must buy a gold or higher package. That that's the key to your success these days at Pro Elite.
The Reality of Pro Elite
The reality is this; most people can't afford anything other than the silver package - fortunately. The other reality...you have to spend a lot of money to advertise your Pro Elite opportunity. A lot. The whole point here is to drive traffic to your (which is really your Marketing Partner's) website.pro elite It takes a LOT of traffic. Even Pro Elite admits only 3.8 out of every 100 leads or so are going to actually express enough of an interest to fill out what they call an "application."
And that's the inherent problem in the Pro Elite system. Google used to allow the advertising of home business opportunities. In those days, before 2010, it wasn't difficult for people to post an ad and have 30-50 leads a day come in fairly cheaply. People made $5K their first or second month in the business. When Google cracked down it got a lot more difficult and to be honest, I didn't see anybody getting those types of results in Pro Elite unless they spent a few grand in advertising.
In our group of people who were under marketing partner Lena Bjorna, there were about 24-30 of us. No one, not a single one I could tell, ever came close to making five figures a month; despite the best efforts of Lena to help and guide us; despite my spending thousands on ads; and despite an contest she held to give away a free cruise for the first person in the group to hit 5 figures a month. In fact, the contest backfired because many of the action takers, myself included, quit when it became apparent the entire process was not working.
Signs of Trouble at Pro Elite
Apparently, I'm not the only person who thinks Pro Elite isn't working anymore. One of their former vice president's, Jeff Lerner, departed in November 2011. Blogging about his reasons for leaving, Lerner said, "Enriching ourselves at the expense of our teams would be to continue to insist that our team should just "hang in there" with the abysmal conversions we'd been getting with the system funnel for the last year, and the continued insistence on teaching people to market replicated funnels (which Google, Facebook, and every other major traffic portal have banned)." Days later Lerner announced he was joining forces with Wealth Master's International (WMI), which had been paired with PRO Elite (at the time Carbon Copy Pro, CCPRO) before PRO jilted them for David Bach.
In a press release barely a week later, PRO Elite announced that John Jackson, who had been a Vice President, was leaving using the old, "leaving to pursue other opportunities." Take it from this former corporate hack - that usually means fired or going to the competition. Two days later my suspicions were confirmed when Wealth Master's announced Jackson was joining them. Another one had jumped ship.
Pro Elite's Numbers Suddenly Disappear
Another bad sign is when a company suddenly stops being transparent. One day in November 2011, I noticed that Pro Elite had removed the actual numbers from the back office leader's page. They used to list the leaders in several categories along with actual numbers. For instance, the leader last month sold x number of Black Boxes, and was followed by four others along with the numbers of Black Boxes they had sold. Leaders in a number of categories were listed each month along with their numbers. Mysteriously, in November those numbers disappeared and now, just the leading members in each category at PRO Elite are listed but no actual numbers. When I asked Pro about it on their Facebook page, they replied the numbers were being checked and would be back up shortly. Weeks later, they were still invisible so take that with the same kind of assurance that Bernie Madoff used to give his clients.
Before they removed them I had jotted down some numbers. From Jan-August 2011, the leading member sold an average of 32.1 Black Boxes in Pro Elite per month; a median of 28 compared with an average of 46.5 for all of 2010 and a median of 40 for all of 2010. That's a drastic drop. In fact, there were two months, January and February 2011 when the leading member in PRO Elite sold 15 black boxes, barely enough, according to my marketing partner, to make five figures a month and something that had never occurred previously.
An earlier sign of trouble was their twice annual marketing meeting. In May about 600 people attended Pro Elite's Master Marketing Event in Phoenix along with yours truly. In October, they barely mustered 200-250 at the event held in Las Vegas. I was told that was down from about 1,000 the fall before. Do you see any trends here?
A Name Change from Carbon Copy Pro to Pro Elite
Another thing that gave me pause was when Pro changed its name from Carbon Copy Pro, or CCPro, to Pro Elite. Why would a company that had been around since 2004 change their name? I don't know but changing your name also means that people searching for negative reviews find far fewer negative reviews under your new name, Pro Elite than the old name.
I enjoyed my time in Pro Elite. I learned a lot and made some good friends. The Black Box offers a great education in online marketing, but at $150 a month, you can get the same education for half that price from other places like My Lead System Pro and a better back office. If you want to actually make money there are other opportunities out there that are easier, much cheaper, and take up far less of your time and energy than Pro Elite. You can make a living on the internet, it's just not likely it's going to be as a Pro Elite member. You have to consider the ROI, the amount of work it's going to take and for goodness sakes, something that is affordable.
The Pros of Pro Elite:
You have the help of a seven figure marketing partner to help you close sales
You can use their web pages and their success to attract potential members to you
No building out of web sites
Can be up and running in a few minutes
Great education in online marketing, social media, etc.
The Cons of Pro Elite
Free advertising doesn't work well, you must spend a lot of money to attract enough people to purchase something
Those duplicatable websites of your marketing partner are not going to be allowed on Google, Bing, Yahoo and a lot of other places to advertise
It's very expensive
There are much easier ways to make five figures a month without the investment
Indications are from people who have left and other statistics is that Pro Elite sales are way down.
The Familiar Mindset of the MLM at Pro Elite
Then there were those who never questioned the status quo in Pro Elite. In our group there were members who had been in two years without achieving a profit. They just kept plugging away. When I asked them about return on investment with Pro Elite and why they would keep spending money in a system that wasn't returning a profit, they'd almost always resort to the popular MLM rant about, "you're not getting results because of your mindset."
Folks, you find this in almost every business. People that buy into the dream or drink the Kool-Aid and absolutely never question anything, especially results. Unfortunately, business IS all about results. No profit, you go out of business unless you happen to be laundering money! Pretty simple formula actually. It was maddening to a results oriented individual like me whose idea is "if you don't get results and are doing things correctly, then move on, because doing more of the same isn't going to get you anything but more broke." I swear there were people in our group that had been in Pro Elite for two years without getting close to making money and I could never figure out why they stayed? Again, my philosophy is if you aren't getting results, move onto something else. I was not in Pro Elite to lose money!
