Complaint Review: Abundant - San Francisco California

I felt it pertinent to share my personal experience with Abundant/Epic Impact. I joined Abundant on 5/18/18 and cancelled my membership on 12/14/18. Here is why, and here’s what happened when I explained to the Abundant leaders my feelings about their program. The following was an email I sent to the Abundant/Epic Impact organization on 12/14/18 requesting a cancellation of my membership and a refund: ----------------------------------------------- Subject: 8 Month Assessment I want to begin this by saying I appreciate many of the individuals in your organization and I wish everyone the best in their personal endeavors, but there’s something I need to be honest about as it pertains to my experience as a member over the last several months.

When I was initially approached about joining your organization while attending an "immersion” in May 2018 from the recommendation of a friend, I was pitched on Day 2 to join this "crew” membership, which cost $3500 to sign up + $1500/month after that for this program that included 4 immersions (one of which was a Costa Rica trip that cost an additional $2500), a weekly "crew call,” and a bi-weekly 30 minute coaching call.

Of course I had previous commitments in my personal life including family events and a 2 month trip to Asia in the fall where I was becoming yoga certified. I was unable to attend the June immersion which took place 2 weeks after I signed up due to a family commitment that had been made before ever learning about Epic. The following immersion took place while I was in Asia becoming a certified yoga instructor, another commitment I had made months before ever enrolling in Epic.

At the time of signing up, I was led to believe I was enrolling in a sort of sales/entrepreneurship mentoring mastermind of sorts. I had explained what I was going to be doing professionally to assist my friend in growing an internet marketing/online sales consulting business. I felt that the leaders of the organization failed to provide me a clear understanding of what exactly Epic Impact was, but I decided to take a chance and enroll, even though at the time, I had just quit my former job, and would be spending the next year or so living off a small nest egg I had saved while I apprenticed under my friend’s business on an assistant’s salary.

The investment was significant for me at the time, but I was assured this program would be providing me incredible value and the growth I would experience would pay me back tenfold, which I hoped would be easily applicable to my new position professionally, or at the very least provide an excellent opportunity for networking. It is now December and I just returned from a Costa Rica trip that was sprung on us just weeks prior, and as I sit here and try to quantify the value I have received from my Epic Impact involvement, I am coming up empty-handed.

I’ve realized that when someone asks me what Epic is, I don’t even have an answer. After 8 months, after calls and gatherings that just felt full of smoke and mirrors and cloudy, seemingly direction-less content, I am unable to put together a single sentence that explains what Epic does, and I have even more trouble putting together any results or true value I have taken from the experience.

My intention is not to be abrasive, but I have to be completely honest about my experience. After every call, coaching session, or event, I kept thinking, "Maybe the goods are on the next one,” or, "What are we even doing here?” Every session was an abstract, cloudy, disorganized discussion where many buzzwords were dropped (like "energy, abundance, breakthroughs, visualizing, manifesting, North Star,” etc.), but no real tangible, quantifiable, legitimate, or tactical value was ever offered.

The entire experience felt to me like the Emperor’s New Clothes, a story about two weavers who promise an emperor a new suit of clothes that they say is invisible to those who are unfit for their positions, stupid, or incompetent – while in reality, they make no clothes at all, making everyone believe the clothes are invisible to them. When the emperor parades before his subjects in his new "clothes", no one dares to say that they do not see any suit of clothes on him for fear that they will be seen as stupid.

Finally, a child cries out, "But he isn't wearing anything at all!" I consider myself at this juncture the child at the end of the story. I feel that not only was I misled into investing in something under the guise that it was about sales and entrepreneurship, but that I simply did not get enough value, if any, out of the significant investment I made to be a part of it. I invest time reading and studying a lot of experts and leaders in business, marketing, personal development, spirituality, etc., I have invested in programs such as Brendan Burchard’s Expert’s Academy, Tai Lopez’ social media marketing, Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula, Ryan Deiss’ Digital Marketer - each of these programs cost between $500-2500, but with each, I received massive libraries of tangible, actionable content and value, videos, PDFs, step-by-step guides, case studies, examples, a large network of support for Q&A, how to go from zero to hero at XYZ, PLUS a live 3 day seminar to be taught by world-famous experts such as Mark Cuban, Frank Kern, Ryan Deiss, etc.

I walk away from those investments with so much value I can barely handle it all. I can easily look at my investment and say, "I got my $2500 back within the first 10 minutes.” And I have to be honest, I have derived more applicable value in a free 60 minute podcast by someone like Gary Vaynerchuk or Timothy Ferriss than I have in over 8 months and an investment of nearly $20,000 with Epic over the course of the year. I’m a reasonable and optimistic person.

I am a person who fully believes in investing in myself, my business, my human, and my future, but I’m also a person who believes in value. I have to be completely and utterly honest here when I say that I feel that I have not received the value that was promised to me, and quite frankly, I feel bamboozled. This had nothing to do with entrepreneurship, marketing, or sales. The "coaching” sessions came off like biased therapy sessions. Calls were spent story-telling, listening to other people talk about their life problems, and then participating in vague, directionless exercises littered with non-specific, intangible, unquantifiable buzzwords like "energy, abundant, authentic,” etc.

The last saving grace could have been the networking, but that too yielded no value. I reached out and made relationships with some individuals as well as attempted to utilize the private group for help with a career-specific question and I received only one dead end reply. What was this experience? What does Epic do? What is the value? I have no answer. I have no results. I have no value from it.

Here is what I have paid Epic: $2500 for Intro Immersion in May $3500 initial sign-up $1500/month June, July, August, September, October, November $2500 for Costa Rica ($1300 paid) = $16,300 total This is the first time in my life I have not felt justified in my investment in anything personal development or education related, and I am simply not okay with it. Here is what I feel is reasonable and fair: I will pay for my initial immersion as well as cover the cost of the Costa Rica trip, totaling $5000, but I would like a full refund on the remaining $11,300.

I don’t want to rock the boat, make waves, or stand up in the middle of the Cutco training on Day 1 and shout, "This is a pyramid scheme and a scam!” and poison the Kool-Aid for anyone who may truly be getting value in other ways out of the experience, but I am going to quietly and firmly request a refund on my investment, because the truth is I not only feel misled, bait and switched, and bamboozled, but I simply feel there was nowhere close to a return on my investment throughout this experience.

I trust that any organization who fully believes in the value they provide would have no problem making things right for someone who took a chance on their program and simply did not benefit from it, and I am hoping we can make this simple and quiet. I wish everyone the best, but this simply did not provide the value, results, or tools that I hoped to receive from my involvement.

Thank you -------------------------------------------- Following this request for a refund sent on Friday, December 14, 2018 due to feeling that I had been led to believe I was investing in something that I actually was not, Abundant proceeded to charge my card for an additional $700. So at that point, I had invested $17,000 with Abundant with what I felt was virtually nothing to show for it. It was not until the following Monday that Ben Schemper reached out to me and scheduled a call for Tuesday evening.

On the call, we discussed my request to cancel. He addressed the lack of value that I received from the program by replying that the majority of the value to be gained was not from the 5 hours of calls each month (4 one hour crew calls and two 30 minute "coaching” calls), but rather the 4 live events a year that the organization hosted that were supposedly included in my membership. I found this to be a manipulative way to handle the lack of value I received, because when I did try to attend a live event in August prior to me traveling to previously planned trips to Asia in September and October (as I was already aware that I would miss an event while away in Asia), I was informed by Michael Ambrosino that it would cost me an extra $250 to attend for an event that was supposed to be part of my $1500/month membership already.

Ben then proceeded to tell me how much value he felt everyone else was gaining from the membership, saying that he was curious why I was the "one off” case. For the record, the vast majority of people who have initially signed up for the Crew Membership quit, as they too also must have determined that the value they were receiving was not worth $1500/month. Therefore, I was far from a "one off” case. Ben then proceeded to upsell the value offered by Abundant claiming that they were working on enterprise opportunities with organizations like Sales Force and Square because they too were looking to extract value from working with Abundant.

However, I found this to be incongruent with his next move for me. He proposed that we schedule another two phone calls. The first phone call would be a call with Jake Merriman, Michael Brabant, and Ben. The reason I thought this was incongruent with "enterprise opportunities” with major corporations, is because why would three leaders from Abundant want to waste their precious time with me, one individual when they have "enterprise opportunities” that they are working on with major corporations?

That’s either awful time management from three leaders of an organization that claims they can teach entrepreneurship and sales leadership or it’s what I’ve found to be the typical Abundant smoke and mirrors strategy. I’m betting on the latter. As of a couple months later, one of those leaders is no longer even with Abundant, which goes to show the lack of stability of an organization that claims 5 hours a month of their time is worth $1500/month of your hard earned money. It gets worse.

The second call Ben proposed was a "Vision Call” for my exit from Abundant. As any reasonable person would do, I decided I just wanted to cut ties and move on so I simply requested that I get the refund I asked for, as I just wanted to be done with this matter. Ben said that there would be "zero chance of a refund without a conversation with our leadership team.” I obliged under the condition that I would receive my refund and it was the last call that I had to have with them as again, I simply wanted to be done. Ben manipulated the situation saying "I don’t feel with a request from you and our conversation, that there is enough data or perspective to make the aligned decision.”

My thought was that any decent organization that had received a reasonable request from someone coming to them and explaining their lack of value would empathize with that individual’s very practical request and do the right thing. Especially a coaching company that is supposed to have the client's "best interest in mind." I responded to Ben’s request by saying "Hey Ben, I am willing to do just one more call if the intent is genuinely to better understand why I’m asking for what I’m asking in order to make things right.

My hesitation has come from feeling like I’m walking into a situation where I hop on the phone with three leaders from the team trying to sell me on their combined perspective on the matter and I simply don’t want to find myself in any sort of situation close to that.”

He said "Sounds good Zane,” so I decided to get on a call with he and the other two leaders of the Abundant organization just to put this matter to rest and get my refund. When I had my call with the three leaders, Ben Schemper, Michael Brabant, and Jake Merriman, not only did they do exactly what I had requested they not do which was to "sell me on their combined perspective on the matter,” but even worse, they had prepared unusual questions to ask me. Here are some of the questions they asked me during this "exit” interview: "What is the state of the business you are currently working in?” (asking how my personal business is going) "What is your position financially?” And shockingly, "How much money do you have in your bank account?” (WHAT???)

Every question seemed to be predicated on my current financial situation, as if they wanted to try to somehow make it appear that the only reason I wanted a refund was actually because I needed the money, which was not the case. At one point, Michael Brabant asked me if I was aware of the 30 day cancellation policy that was on the contract that I signed when I initially signed up for my Crew Membership with Brian Hines. I told him I was not. He proceeded to tell me that even without me knowing about the policy in the first place, based on the presence of that policy, I should have still given 30 days notice… of something I didn’t even know about.

Jake in a very condescending manner said, "Just for the record, we don’t owe you any sort of refund so anything you get will be based on good faith.” In the end, that refund of "good faith” turned out to be $800 of the $17,000 I had invested in the organization for no value. They gave me $1500 back, but that was after charging my card an additional $700 following my request for a refund. One of my biggest motives for leaving and something I haven’t even brought up, is the issues I had with the "coaching” that Abundant assigned me.

I was assigned to a woman named Elizabeth Webb, who spent virtually every call discussing my dating life with me. It was clear that this person had her own agenda and instabilities in her biased "advice” and judgments about what I felt was a healthy part of my life. She would ask poignant questions like, "So how’s respecting women going?” and it was obvious that she was projecting her own issues with relationships onto me. To my knowledge, she is not a psychologist, licensed therapist, qualified guidance counselor, or relationship expert of any kind, so to even put this person in that role is highly irresponsible (and probably not legal) for a company to do in the first place.

The entire time I was a part of Crew, it seemed like Abundant always wanted to make you feel like there’s something wrong with you or your life; that you need something, like a breakthrough, because you’re "energy poor,” and they make people feel like Abundant and its pompous leaders are the answer. Once you start feeling good or you express that things are going well in your life, they make it apparent that they don’t want you doing "too” well, because what would you need them for then?!

It was a constant push/pull scenario that made it apparent that in no way was your well-being the center of their focus. Here’s an example: There was one individual in Crew who was a young entrepreneur from San Francisco, who shared in Costa Rica that things were not going well for him financially, and that he had just $2,000 left in his dwindling bank account, and didn’t know how he would be able to pay his rent the following month. This individual was paying $1500 each month to be a part of Abundant Crew.

He didn’t need woo-woo talk about energy and the complete scam of "network chiropractic” (look it up) -- he needed real help! He needed a business coach; a successful mentor who could help him with his real problem! Not a single leader in that organization came forward to give him real advice about what he should do. They would have rather taken his last dollars and watched him sink as he clung to hope that the hocus pocus the Abundant leaders preach would somehow be the miracle to his sinking ship. Zach Wagner, Co-Founder of Abundant, slyly pushes people into spending more and more money by inviting them to special events and then dropping the bomb after they’ve made travel plans to go by saying, "By the way, that’s going to be $5,000.”

Nothing is forthright. Every person is just a walking dollar sign, and they constantly and unabashedly try to squeeze you for your network to gain more enrollments from your friends and family. See the photo I have included which is a text conversation between him and my boss, Becca, who runs a legitimate sales training company that provides actual value to the marketplace without having to use false advertising like Abundant. Notice Zach's approach in the conversation. Zach is a Co-Founder of Abundant, an organization that claims to teach sales and entrepreneurship.

Yet Zach makes no effort to build any rapport and rudely goes straight for the ask. In his last message, Zach proposes a follow up call after January 1st of 2019 to clear the air. Zach never contacted her. He failed to build rapport, ask for the order appropriately, and he epically failed to follow up when he said he would. That's three strikes in just one interaction for this "sales leader." All in all, I feel that Abundant is an organization of unqualified, bogus self-proclaimed spiritual gurus who are only good at one thing: convincing people to pay shockingly large amounts of money for virtually nothing in return for a surprisingly long amount of time.

The worst part is that I think they truly believe in what they are doing. From what I saw, they prey on people desperate for help in their failing businesses (but offer no real business help), are emotionally vulnerable due to a life crisis (but are not qualified or licensed therapists, psychologists, or counselors), or simply bait and switch otherwise sound individuals who believe they are investing in an entrepreneurship mastermind, but instead get smoke blown up their asses with buzz words like "abundance” and "north star” and "alignment” and "energy” until you finally can’t take any more of the nonsense.

That’s my truth. Draw your own conclusion about this organization, but I felt I’d be doing an injustice to the marketplace and the Abundant organization if I did not get my experience out there. Thank you for reading.