Mr. Jim Masterson, after several weeks of negotiations and receiving free consulting services from both myself and his new Chief Financial Officer, finally agreed to a compensation package for us both that included each a $2,000 per week salary, and 7% equity in Consumerated. The company has not yet been incorporated to the best of my knowledge or research, and Jim Masterson agreed to pay us from his personal accounts until such a time as company checks could be allocated. I audio taped the negotiations and the verbal agreement that as of April 17th, my position of C.O.O. Was a binding agreement, and that we would meet every Friday afternoon at his office in Bonita Springs to deliver all work product designated for that week. Before we could meet and collect our first check, and after meeting with him on more than two prior occasions for several hours each time (where I even made trips to the office to interview potential employees on more than one occasion), Jim Masterson put together a conference call and informed us that not only was he changing the manner of compensation to a 100% 'commission' based structure, but that he had no intention whatsoever of compensating us for the previous week of work that the CFO and myself worked together on from Saturday, April 17th, through the weekend, and up until the 1:30 pm conference call that was held on Thursday, April 22.
While he was to concentrate on getting the website up and running, our first priority was to begin researching the vital elements and financial budgeting and cost to form the framework to construct a viable Operational Business Plan, which would give us an idea of all costs and revenues, as well as capture all competitive analysis, national market rollout timelines, comprehensive financial proforma forecasting for the first three years, and numerous other valuable information that would lay the foundation of launching this extremely large, national business endeavor. This business plan was also to serve as an information source to inform outside private equity investors of the due diligence information required to make an ethically sound business determination on the viability of the business model. Many extremely nebulous financial line items needed to be addressed and we planned on at least beginning that long and arduous task during Friday's scheduled meeting. Jim kept asking us to send him what we had completed on the business plan thus far, even after he sent emails requesting the conference call, where he planned and executed his strategy of removing his executive team. We were very obviously being used to gain as much consulting and business plan development as possible before making his announcement of 'change', and our suspicions became increasingly aware of this ploy, beginning with his adamant demand on Monday morning to speak to an investor acquaintance of ours, who had already told us to get the business plan constructed before he would be interested in discussing an investment opportunity.
Jim Masterson bragged repeatedly to us about getting people to work for free for him, and we witnessed him slander a reputable web designer to another individual in an email, when he did not get exactly what he wanted in a timely fashion. These are a few of the numerous red flags that we were able to uncover about Jim Masterson and his less than desirable business ethics. He claims to be a personal friend of the famous motivational speaker, Anthony Robbins, and in fact told us that he was responsible for getting Mr. Robbins started on his road to success.in retrospect, we find this incredibly difficult to believe, given his extremely unethical ways and his incredibly poor business acumen.
Mr. Jim (James) Masterson is a master in deceit. He wears a thin veneer of professionalism and is just articulate enough to deflect his very shallow understanding of how intricate a process it is to even build a comprehensive business plan, much less the necessary skills to successfully launch a successful business model. He communicates to his employees as though they were his personal lap dogs. I have received text messages from him as late as 1:45 am, and email messages as early as 5:00 am. I would caution anyone to keep as far away from Jim Masterson as possible, in hopes that he will never again have the opportunity to take advantage of potential (and employed) individuals. His compensation plan now requires one to sell memberships to a network that does not even yet exist, with the salesman's commission being just over ONE DOLLAR per membership sold. We hope you will heed our advice, and do not waste your valuable time associating with Jim Masterson in any manner. We are taking all legal action available to us against this con artist, including getting the State and Federal Labor Board involved, contacting any and all consumer advocate groups, small claims court, craigslist.com scam alert, and all newspapers, radio stations and television stations (Fox News 4) in particular, and any other legal means at our disposal to remedy this situation and expose Jim Masterson of Consumerated for what and who he really is.
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