Complaint Review: D.S. MAX - Nationwide

I started the business in 1997, responding to an ad in Raleigh,NC. With a degree in advertising, I was looking for a job in Advertising/marketing. Even as an honor student with a degree, and military experience plus sending out about 10 to 15 resumes daily, finding this type of job was tough. In despiration, I answered an ad for a warehouse position which was advertised at $600/wk. I figured this would pay rent until I found a professional job.

When I called in I was happy to discover that they were also an advertising company. Jackpot. I Interviewed the next day and the process began with the day of observation and all that follows. With a degree in advertising it was easy for me to understand how service & dining establishments would benefit from this type of marketing. The people in the office were sharp & I had been out of work for two months so I gave it a shot.

I was a natural, got into leadership in two weeks and started making money right away. Good money. Within two months I was breaking sales records. To give you an example, once I sold 50 advertising certificates in one day, over 150 that week. At $7 commission per cert, I made a cool thousand that week. The whole time I was in the field I consistently made $600 to $800 weekly.

The field was so easy for me that training was never a problem. As a leader training people every day I always made good money even after giving some sales away. The funny thing was that I had absolutely no sales experience prior to this job, just natural people skills.

It took me exactly one year to get promoted to assistant manager. I soon discovered that the promised $500 weekly salary plus commission was a lie. During the first interview I was told that when you make it to assistant manager you would be guaranteed $500/week plus residuals off your team plus commissions from your own sales. This was not true. I moved up to $13 per card on my own sales plus $1 per card that my team sold. I rationalized that this was still more money than I would be making at a regular job. I never did see any of the residuals from my team sales.

I was promoted to Indianapolis to run an office along with another owner who was already there running his own office. I was promoted out while still an assistant manager. I took five of my good leaders with me and they were eager to go. After being in Indy for about 3 months, our account manager signed a bad golf deal which was extremely difficult for the average distributor to sell. I lost most of my team because of this and had to basically start over. It took me about 3 months to build the team again. During this time the owner I was working with quit and was replaced by another new owner and I was forced to partner with him.

He didn't know what he was doing and I again lost most of my team. At this time I had been in the business about 2 yrs. After this I was sent to Cincinatti to try it again. At first I was paired up with another owner who was great. Learning from him my office started to grow quickly, finally. However, soon after my arrival the other owner left to go run an office in Chicago. He promoted his assistant manager(lets call her Mary) to owner and left her there with an office of 15 people as he took about 5 people to Chicago.

Mary immediately began investing a lot of energy into running me out of business. I put up with it for a while and finally quit after being in for 3 yrs. I made a lot of money in the field but couldn't make money as an owner because they forced me to partner with morons who knew about as much about advertising as I know about rocket science. They would'd actually let me open my own independent office. I probably could have been successful if that were the case. As a matter of fact, many seemingly very successful owners I knew are no longer in the business. Finding this website has been very healing for me.

Now, I own my own advertising and fundraising company and make a nice chunk of change. Actually we have taken about 5 clients with about 50 locations away from DS Max, so in a way I finally got my residuals.

There is an opportunity, but the failure rate is probably about 99%. There are about 15,000 offices but that doesn't mean there are 15,000 constant owners, the owners of the 15,000 offices change all the time. The opportunity requires intense work ethic and giving up any life that you may have. If you get your own office, you will be partnered with someone you don't know, and they will be competing against you which makes it extremely hard to be successful. I failed partially because they didn't give me enough control.

I got shafted in a lot of ways but I also learned a lot about running a business, which is helping me be successful today.

Troy-USA

Troy

bristol, Tennessee
U.S.A.

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