Thursday 29 August 2013

Teaching New People How To Fail: A Client's Story

My story is about The Infinite Group (TIG). I ran my own business and through a client I was introduced to a man called Mark Spolander. Mark was a director and franchisee of TIG. He convinced us to franchise our business by showing us how easy it would be and how much money we could make. We fell for it hook line and sinker. Mark charged us an astronomical monthly fee. He was supposed to help us start our franchise, write a franchisee manual, help develop the training programme and any other hands-on help we would need.

What actually happened was he attended one meeting a month, spent a lot of time talking and delivered nothing. We did attract franchisees; however, because we had no help in developing any real structure, things started to unravel and within weeks of signing up all the franchisees left. With no help from The Infinite Group we had to create our own operations manual, put together our own training etc. At times, when Mark Spolander was unavailable, Ian Johnson stepped in to "help". All he did was talk. No real assistance was given. For the franchisee training, Johnson's advice was to invite all the franchisees to a nice hotel for five days and charge them thousands of pounds each for the privilege. He said it was easy to pad out the training to justify that time and easy way to make some money! The angry franchisees refused to do anything, solicitors got involved and we were left fighting on our own to save a sinking ship. Whilst all this was going on, each month Ian Johnson's accounts lady would call us demanding monthly payment. The business that was doing ok suddenly had cash flow problems and Ian Johnson tried to get more money out of us. The Infinite Group started to turn the screws and before I knew it my business was dying.

They weren't the sole culprits, but they helped to sink it faster by taking over £20,000 in total over a few months. In the end I told his accounts lady to get in line and they wouldn't get paid a penny more. I have nothing to show for this money except heartache and debts.

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