Complaint Review: Merrill-Adams Associates - West Conshohocken Pennsylvania

"Merrill Adams Threatens to Sue Dissatisfied Customer"

There are at least two schools of thought when it comes to resolving a dispute with a customer.

One school believes every customer may be an ongoing source of revenue and profit from cradle to grave. Like most customer-centric enterprises, members of this school of thought are taught to do whatever it takes to fix things because "the customer is always right."

The other school believes that you should sue them, particularly when a dissatisfied customer has exercised his First Amendment rights and posted his opinion of the experience on the Internet. Had I known in advance that I would be retaining a firm that would threaten even one dissatisfied customer with the prospects of a lawsuit, I would have steered clear of the company.

Imagine my dismay to receive a letter that went something like this:

"Please be advised that we represent Merrill Adams Associates. In that regard, we are aware that you have posted a letter on the Internet in which you make disparaging remarks about Merrill Adams Associates.

Please be advised that our client takes these allegations seriously. Merrill Adams Associates fully and completely honored the terms of its contract with you. The content of your letter is libelous. Since the letter is totally devoid of truth, we hereby demand that you not only cease and assist from making further disparaging remarks about our client and its business reputation, but, in addition, immediately remove from the Internet the letter you have written to avoid any further harm or damage.

Should you fail to honor this request and our client suffer damages as a result of your conduct, you are notified that we will take legal action against you in the full pursuit of our client's interests to defend its business reputation. We look forward to hearing from you immediately with respect to this most serious matter."

I was shocked to receive the letter for a number of reasons:

1. I couldn't believe that a member of the law firm whose name was on the LETTERHEAD didn't take the time to proofread the letter to recognize the difference between "cease and assist" and "cease and desist". These days, it gives ring to the truth that you only get what you pay for.

2. The posting represents my opinion of my very expensive and disappointing service experience with Merrill Adams Associates. In many ways, it is a front line individual Consumer Report that others may consult if they so choose. Perhaps it can be juxtaposed against all those handy "thank you" letters you may be asked to buy into later.

3. No one should be compelled to agree or disagree with my opinion. After all, it's my opinion. Unless you share the identical experience and frustrations that I did with Merrill-Adams Assoc., you'll have your opinion too. And our opinions about different experiences don't have to be the same, unless you're a Communist, a n**i, or more recently, a Muslim extremist.

4. Certainly, consumers, investors, and global intelligence agencies can all benefit from sharing many of the relevant facts. Wouldn't you want to know if there was a possibility that you may not be getting what you're paying for the day you put a Firestone Tire on a Ford SUV?

I surely would. And it looks like we're going to get into a scrum on this because what follows is my story, my opinion, and I'm sticking to it:

I paid Merrill Adams the sum of $10,800 in July, 2000 in exchange for what I was told was the inside track to "unadvertised jobs", their "connections", and their assistance in putting me in front of individuals who had "hiring authority" at the CFO or greater level.

Actually, I'm a few weeks ahead of myself. It all started with my phone call to the local Merrill Adams office. After a few minutes of query by me, they still couldn't tell me if they were a retained search firm or employee paid counseling firm. The woman who answered my call said, "It sounds like you don't know what you really want to do and need assistance in the area." It is my personal opinion (as is everything in this document) that this remark was a sales tactic that set the hook to an enormously costly and disappointing experience with Merrill Adams.

Since their Conshohocken, PA office was approximately 2 miles from my house, I visited with them there. During the course of our initial consultation, I was provided with a binder of recommendation letters of "satisfied customers", handed a news article for a recently hired CEO for a local company (not placed by Merrill Adams) and was told, "You could be their CFO". I found it amusing that my meeting with them that should have taken 30 minutes was dragged over several hours. During that meeting, I was directed to sit in their conference room and read a binder of "thank you" letters from what appeared to be a slew of "satisfied" customers. It took me back to my college fraternity days where frat brothers "hot-boxed" prospects into pledging a particular fraternity. I got up and left the office because I had better things to do.

So why did I do it? Sign with their executive marketing services? I'll tell you why. In no uncertain terms, they orally promised me connections to their CFO hiring authorities. But when I asked for them to provide me with two or three telephone numbers of satisfied clients at my compensatory level, I hit their Great Wall and just couldn't get around it. Although they said they would provide that information at a later date, I never received it.

Imagine my dismay when, upon signing my contract and writing upon it "Time is of the essence," I learned I was assigned to a counselor in their Parsippany, NJ office, approximately 3 - 4 hours away. The explanation that I was provided was that the individual at the local Conshohocken office was just involved in "selling" and other counselors were involved in "counseling". And this fellow in Parsippany was more experienced for individuals at my level.

This past July 2001, my contract with Merrill Adams had its one year anniversary. During that time period, I mailed out over 6,000 resumes, had a dozen or so interviews (none of which were sourced by Merrill Adams), and had a few other meetings with Merrill Adams that involved my initiating contact, updating them on the status of my marketing program, and asking them, "What's going on with my search?"

During these telephone conferences with Merrill-Adams, there was a repetitive patter and a dose of incredulity to the information and advice I received. For the third time, I heard the story from the same counselor about a fellow who went to a convention in the north-east and hired two college students to slide his resume under the door of each hotel room at the convention site. I was also encouraged for the fourth time to join organizations and "network", attend industry conferences (at $1,200 a pop, plus travel and hotel). When I balked at the cost of such a strategy, I was encouraged to "crash" these conferences during their mid-morning and mid-afternoon coffee breaks and sprinkle my resume around to other attendees. While such a strategy may have saved me from paying the conference registration fees, I still had to consider cost of the airfare and hotel room. I thought to myself, "This is nuts!"

Much later in the relationship, I was advised to list my resume wherever I could on the Internet because there appeared to be a move within the HR departments to a general reliance on that method of delivery. Of course, I had already done this Internet thing and determined that such an approach was largely dysfunctional.

My opinion of the bottom line? Merrill Adams provided me with no "unadvertised jobs", provided me with no introductions to any "decision-makers with CFO hiring responsibility", and, in general, did little more than agree to take my money in exchange for writing a resume - that I subsequently revised. $10,800 for a resume writing service? You've got to be kidding me!

What I found interesting is the way they advertised. Their ad at the time I retained them suggested they represented jobs or job candidates or job marketing programs in the $75,000 - $500,000 range. Later (approximately May, 2001), they were advertising hypothetical salary amounts in the $75,000 - $750,000 range.

So I called the Conshohocken, PA office and asked them how many CFO's, COO's, or CEO's they placed since I retained their services. They said they didn't have the information available at the time. I asked them to get back to me with it so I could determine whether there was a problem with me or with their assistance. Obviously, if they placed 30 CFO's during the last 12 months, then I would be first to acknowledge that perhaps my skill set was the problem. Alternatively, if they placed 2 CFO's during the last 12 months, then Merrill Adams' representations and their business model was likely at fault.

In a humorous twist, I sent a "CFO Wanted" bit of gallows humor to their Conshohocken, PA office, and was contacted via email by one of their career counselors who had worked with them during the last six months saying to the effect that this is exactly the kind of disappointment that using Merrill Adams avoids and would I like to come in to their office for a "free consultation?"

This is the email they sent to me on June 5, 2001, approximately 10 months after I had paid them $10,800:

"Mr. Peterson, I enjoyed receiving your resume. You are a splendid advertisement for our firm - we are a personal career marketing company serving senior level executive clients who routinely experienced what you have gone through with the Internet. We've successfully marketed more than 9,000 of them into significantly higher levels of income and responsibility. I circulated your resume to the senior management staff and, after a good laugh, they asked me to contact you to arrange a mutually agreeable time for you to come in for a preliminary discussion. It would be approximately 1 1/2 hours long, dealing with appraising your experience, assessing your goals, and exploring whether Merrill-Adams Associates can successfully assist in your career search. I look forward to hearing from you shortly."

I thought it hilariously funny that individuals at their Conshohocken, PA office didn't know I was already a client.

This is my reply, also on June 5, 2001:

"I'm glad you enjoyed the bit of gallows humor. The irony of this entire process is that I have been a Merrill-Adams client since July 28, 2000 and am nearly 11 months into my CFO search. On July 28, 2001, my Executive Marketing Program with Merrill-Adams will be having its one-year birthday! And THAT should probably be an embarrassment to your firm."

They have asked me on occasion to visit their Parsippany, NJ office to copy names and addresses out of a book they have there which is not available at the local Pennsylvania office. I've declined simply because the information appears to be readily available on-line and the company doesn't appear to have invested in technology or the subscriptions that permit their offices to share these resources. Frankly, I'm not up for a 7 hour round-trip just to talk to a career counselor when the office I signed up with is 5 minutes away.

It's been a severe disappointment dealing with them. Never in my life have I spent so much time with so little in the way of results. I've probably put in 800-900 man hours this past year in my CFO search and, frankly, if they've put in more than 2% of that time on my behalf as they initially re-wrote my resume, I would be surprised. It is my opinion that their office is geared to selling resume writing services under the guise of "unadvertised jobs", "our connections", "career counseling services", "executive marketing programs", and other blather designed to lead you to believe they can get you the executive level job you're looking for.

I often wonder what the graph of their placements would look like if the compensatory values were plotted on a scattergram during the last 12 months. Although they advertise a $75,000-$750,000 salary range, my guess is that the vast majority of placements resulting from their executive marketing programs occur UNDER $100,000, at the lower end of the scale. But if you just looked at the range they advertise, you'd think about the middle of their placements was at $375,000 or thereabouts. Shame on me.

At the end of July 2001, my $10,800 contract had its one year anniversary and I'm not one iota closer to getting the job for which I'm searching. Approximately three weeks ago, I asked them for specific names of individuals who had hiring authority at the CFO level, and I haven't received a thing. However, they did ask for 10 printed copies of my resume so they could "pass them around" their office in Parsippany and get some feedback from their counselors. I also received a print-out of a job ad to which I had already applied several months earlier.

As a consumer, I want to go on record in saying I believe they have failed miserably in their commitment to me. To the best of my recollection, they have never taken the initiative to call me and inquire "How are things coming along?", or, alternatively, "Your name came up in a meeting today. We're not satisfied with the results of your marketing program. We know the head of a company who is looking for a CFO and wants to talk with you". In fact, when I phone them, I appear to have a difficult time getting through the gatekeeper who answers the phone, whatever office I call. Before I can speak to my career counselor I always have to tell them I'm a Merrill Adams client.

It's my opinion that I would have been better off without their limited assistance. In retrospect, I should have purchased the Nick Corcodilos book entitled Ask the Headhunter or perused the wealth of information on his website (available without charge) that can be found at http://www:asktheheadhunter.com.

I have a three inch thick file on Merrill Adams. I also have a five foot high stack of resumes and emails to various jobs using the Merrill Adams approach. The stack would be nearly twice as high if I followed their recently suggested advice of paying to have my resume broadcasted (spammed) to several thousand email addresses. I didn't agree to the strategy because I believe the practice of spamming resumes is one of the things that have clogged up virtual HR departments to the point of becoming just another file in an "in-box".

I believe I made a bad decision in retaining them. I made myself vulnerable by prepaying the entire fee, failing to insist on a specific set of deliverables, and by giving the other party the benefit of the doubt when it came to doing what they said they would do in the three-to-five months they believed it would take. When I retained Merrill-Adams, I stepped into an "executive marketing program" abyss that's now on the cusp of quadrupling their lower estimate.

These days, I could sure use the $10,800, but they don't appear to want to refund any of the amount.

What have I learned from this process?

Well, I'm certainly grateful I didn't opt in for their lifetime executive marketing program at $18,750. I've also learned, quite tragically on September 11, 2001, that this great country has been threatened by better terrorists than the individuals who work in a law office that Merrill-Adams appears to have retained in an effort to suspend my First Amendment rights.

That's my opinion on the matter.

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