Complaint Review: Kim Paul Imminent Inc. - Lombard Illinois

This company is an exact carbon copy of a now closed company called Principal Marketing Inc.  Up until 2017, Kim Paul was the "owner" of Principal Marketing, Inc. in Glen Ellyn, Illinois - right next door to Lombard.  Except for reviews on Glassdoor, every trace of Principal Marketing has been erased from the Internet by parent company Smart Circle.  Smart Circle companies like this change their names and re-incorporate constantly to distance themselves from negative reviews and Ripoff Reports and to continue to dupe people into working in their direct sales cult for little to no money.

Smart Circle is known for recruiting under deceptive pretenses, promising an accelerated "management training program" that will have you owning your own business and making six figures in less than a year.  The program, advertised as "direct marketing," is actually just straight-up sales.  It requires you to stand inside a Sam's Club, Costco, Walmart, Meijer, Kroger, and other big-box retailers throughout the United States for upwards of 10-hours a day selling mediocre products.  Some of these products include Body Comfort, Soma Care (exact same products, just different boxes), Laveau, Quick Whisk, Sonic Comfort, Biomega, Whip It, Gourmet Traditions, IBIZ, and Stylehouse.

Smart Circle also works for telecommunications companies; so if you visit a big box store and somebody asks you about your cell phone, television, or energy provider, they are trapped in a Smart Circle business, and they will try to rope you into an unfair service contract.  Smart Circle sells DirecTV, AT&T, Verizon, and Just Energy, just to name a few.

The management training program works like this:

At Entry-Level, you learn the campaigns and sell.  If you sell "the national average" (between $800 and $1000) a day, you will be promoted to "Leader."

At Leader, you will start to build a team.  After you consistently hit the national average, you will get "interviews," and try to con people into signing up for the "opportunity."  Once you train about 3 or 4 other team leaders on your team (which will likely take you a year since the turnover rate is unfathomable), and if your owner likes you, you will be promoted to Assistant Manager.

At Assistant Manager, you will learn behind-the-scenes scripts about how to run a Smart Circle business.

At Owner, you are in charge of hiring and firing.  What they don't tell you is that you will also be forced by the "Regional Consultants" and "National Consultants" to keep selling crappy products in the stores, and pay yourself only the hourly or commission rate of an entry-level employee.

Even if do persevere long enough to make it to "Owner," the promises (lies) never match the reality.  That promise of $75k-$100k a year as an owner is more like $35-$40k a year.  You can make more money and receive benefits at practically any full-time job in the country and you won't be worked like a slave and treated with no respect.

When you dig deeper into the manipulation tactics and lies prevalent from the top executives and national consultants all the way down to the individual "owners" in this business, it resembles more closely a mind-control cult than a legitimate business.

Kim Paul is a master manipulator.  She dismisses all legitimate complaints against her business as "negative people who didn't have what it takes."  She has worked for Smart Circle for at least 8 years, and is so far down the rabbit hole she can only communicate in the scripts of this business.  Everything Kim Paul says is a Smart Circle script - I truly believe she is incapable of thinking for herself.  If you work for her, everything she tells you has been pre-programmed into her either by Smart Circle owner Larry Tenebaum, hellish national consultant Larissa Hawley, or former national consultant Mike Putnam.

If you want more information about Kim and other Smart Circle companies, search YouTube for the films The Sweatshop of Wall Street and The Slave Circle, and the follow-up Slave Circle series showing interviews with former owners who were able to escape from this sales cult. They give you graphic insiders' experiences of the deceit these companies use from recruitment tactics, to interviews, to barely paying their employees, to the pyramid-shaped business model that only benefits the people that have already been involved for years, to the absolute hell that owners are put through for pennies on the dollar.

If you currently work for Kim Paul - get out!  She will not help your career in any way.  She will string you along as long as you are selling products and making money for "her business."  If you stop getting along with her, she will fire you without a thought.  If you work hard and long enough to be promoted to your own office as Kim's "outside deal," she can shut you down at any moment.

Even as an "owner," you never "own your own business."  You will always be controlled by people above you.  "Your" business can be shut down without warning and you will be sent on a "retrain" (i.e. forced to move and sent back to entry-level under a different owner).  I honestly don't know how Kim has duped herself for as long as she has into thinking she owns her own business.  Kim Paul is a sad example of a completely brainwashed person who has been manipulated her entire professional career and is unable to tell the difference between Smart Circle scripts filled with lies and actual reality.