Worst money I've spent on my business
Worst money I've spent on my business, full stop. I hired FractionalClients to build a client pipeline. The promise was a qualified client within 90 days, or they keep working until they land one. Eight months later I had zero qualified leads. Not one person worth taking a call with.
The bigger problem was how they operated. They'd tell me they were going to get back to me and then just wouldn't. They promised to adjust the strategy multiple times and nothing actually changed. Always new excuses: bugs in their systems, people leaving etc... The targeting was consistently off, they kept reaching people who were never a fit, and when I finally pushed on how the new approach would fix that, the answer was a different data tool, not a different plan. I raised these issues with their team 2 months in and repeatedly after, and was later told it was the first they'd heard of it.
They eventually refunded part of the fee once I escalated, which I'll acknowledge. But eight months, constant dropped communication, and zero qualified leads is about as poorly as this could have gone. If you're a fractional exec considering them, be very careful, and at minimum get in writing how they'll define and reach your actual target client and what happens when they don't deliver.
Réponse de FractionalClients
Hi Ben, thanks for the review.
I agree with parts of it and disagree with others. On the results side, I think that in retrospect LinkedIn outreach wasn’t the best channel for what you’re doing. It’s becoming increasingly less effective across the board, so in the time since working with you, we’ve actually shifted how we work with fractional execs away from done-for-you LinkedIn outreach.
On the operations side, there were definitely some miscommunications and delays - and I totally own and accept that, although I’d say that we generally worked with what we could have, given constant changes to LinkedIn, databases for targeting, the market in general, etc.
We did provide a partial refund as you mentioned, so thanks for including that. I think your recommendation at the bottom of getting clearly in writing how things will work and what happens if things don’t go well etc is fair and good advice for potential clients of ours. We have this included in our terms of business anyway, and I would always recommend that clients read them in detail.
The vast majority of people we’ve worked with have had strong results with us as can be seen on the recommendations section of my LinkedIn, but we’re disappointed at how things went in our work with you and I’m conscious of our shortfalls, so we’re grateful for the feedback.
We wish you the best of luck with business going forward.
Best regards,
Stewart Mathieson, Founder and Managing Director