Complaint Review: George S May International Company

Rip-off Report Investigation:
The George S. May International Company is fulfilling its commitment to provide excellent customer service and gets a positive rating for its customer support from Rip-off Report. The George S. May International Company pledges to resolve complaints and address inquiries from the past, present and in the future.

This company has been in business since 1925, and serves more than 6,000 clients every year and employs more than 800 people throughout North America. However, with these numbers of relationships, mistakes and misunderstandings do occur. We are all human and people are not perfect. The George S. May International Company has a small number of complaints against it when compared to the large number of transactions it makes every year.

There are many other companies that would disregard this comparatively small number of complaints. May International, however, believes in doing what is right for its clients. An important aspect to any kind of business relationship is how problems, when they arise, are resolved. Responsible companies, like the George S. May International Company not only want to know about problems, but also want the opportunity to correct the problem and make it right.

May International is committed to resolving these issues and providing satisfaction to the best of its ability for its clients and employees.

George S. May International Company's commitment to client and employee satisfaction is shown by its participation in the Rip-off Report Corporate Advocacy Business Remediation and Customer Satisfaction Program.

After interviewing the president of the company, it is clear that he and May International are dedicated to helping employees and clients achieve complete satisfaction and will not allow any legitimate complaint to go unresolved.

Consumers doing business with members of the Corporate Advocacy Program can feel confident and safe when using a members product or services.

Read more about George S. May and their commitment to total customer satisfaction.

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NOW TO THE ORIGINAL REPORT THAT WAS FILED
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George S May International Company ripoff Park Ridge Illinois

After working for the George S May International Company (GSM) for 4 months. I had enough and quit. This firm received the Torch Award for Marketplace Ethics from the Better Business Bureau. GSM represented this as being a current award and placed the BBB torch emblem on their business cards which are used by their employees nationwide. After quick research I discovered that this was not a national award, nor even a statewide award, but an award from the local Chicago chapter!

While in a demanding 1 week training program, the trainers (who have since quit), kept repeating that GSM, "unlike other firms in our profession". Offers services to prospective clients "on the basis of no contract whatsoever". Instead they have a 1-day agreement and the client can stop the work at any time. Isn't this a contract? There is a promise to perform, for which, there is an obligation to pay monetary consideration!

The trainers also said that GSM differs from other consulting companies who "conduct a survey, charge a heavy fee, and leave you with your faults to correct by yourself." The larger "other" firms (such as "Deloitte-Touche" or "Ernst & Young") are frequently mentioned. Well, I worked for both of those firms for many years as a management consultant. I found their pricing for the overall services were actually lower than GSM's (now $182/hour), clearly disclosed, and the clients were never left to "fix it themselves", unless it is by their request.

The GSM trainers also said that such "Big 5" accounting/consulting firms were not interested in the same type of clients as GSM's small clients. In actual fact, 80% of the clients for the "Big 5" are small to mid-size firms according to industry sources and my own experiences.

Unlike many other people hired by GSM, I am a heavily experienced consultant who was lured into the firm by the potential to make "big bucks" while seeing the country east of the Mississippi. They said I would probably be home on Wednesdays and all weekend. It quickly shifted to being home only for 29 hours per week from Saturdays at 11 am to Sundays at 4 pm.

Representations to the clients were also challenging. The firm uses a software (developed in-house) which is designed to quickly analyze the client's financial position and show how much money the client "lost" because of their "poor operations".

The faulty logic in this financial review is that it deals only with the best financial ratios from each of 4 prior years of operations. For smaller firms their financial statements are usually on a "cash basis". The software creates a new financial sheet which only uses the best cash basis ratios in each category from each of the 4 years.

What does all this mumbo-jumbo mean? Let's say you're in the distribution industry; you have 20% of your Maintenance & Repair costs in September, but did not pay for these costs until January of the following year, so your expense level looks lite. This "lite" level is then used in the made up year's numbers used for the analysis of lost money. The consultant will then say something like "See how much money you left on the table because this expense was so much higher in other years - and - look at how much that cost you during those other 3 years - accumulated!"

Since leaving the firm, I feel much better. The firm trainers said that we must never disclose that we work on commission. Always say that we are on salary and don't really care, if they buy or not. On salary? Isn't that lying?

I no longer have to call, with the client, to speak to "Counsel". Counsel was represented to the client as being a small group of industry specialists in the home office who want to hear the client information together, and, comment on it. In actual fact, it was usually only one person on the home office end who would pontificate industry statistics to use on the client. I frequently found these statistics to be wholly in error. A number of times, so did the client! Assuming this was intentional. Isn't this lying?

After contacting many of the people in my original training class, I discovered that almost all of them resigned from GSM before I did. Their experiences mirrored mine and they, too, questioned how this firm could possibly have received the Better Business Bureau's Torch Award for Marketplace Ethics?

Patrick
Baltimore, Maryland
U.S.A.

STOP! ..before you think about using the Better Business Bureau (BBB)... CLICK HERE to see how other consumers were victimized by the BBB's false or misleading information. Don't be fooled! It has been reported, when there are thousands of complaints and other investigations underway by authorities, the BBB has no choice but to finally give an UNsatisfactory rating to a BBB member business that is paying the BBB big membership fees every year. When a business is reported that is NOT a BBB member, BBB files WILL more likely show an UNsatisfactory rating, then reportedly shake down that company to become a member of the BBB. One positive thing about the BBB is, either way, if a business has an unsatisfactory rating with the BBB, you can be sure, the business is bad. But what about all those BBB member businesses that had complaints filed against them? Consumers never get to hear about them. What about the BBB advertising to the public? Is this a false and misleading perception they are giving about consumer confidence when dealing with a business? Click here to understand more of what consumers and business alike are saying about the BBB. You decide. ..Remember. The BBB membership is not earned, it's paid for!