Do not be duped into working for this company. We too were taken in with the promise of a "career position" at Evans Glass that has turned out to be nothing more than a scam that cost us dearly. Read the details of our nightmare that I will outline very carefully as to what happened when my husband joined this vile company, and then tell everyone you can to stay away from anything to do with Evans Glass.
My husband answered an employment ad in The Oregonian for a siding sales manager position at the end of last June. When he got to the address it turned out to be a glass company, Evans Glass. He went in and the person he met did a complete interview for a sales representative for their windows-not siding. My husband asked about the siding manager position, and he was told that the company had prematurely placed the ad for that position and they were not hiring for that just yet. He was also told that if he would take the position as a window sales-rep and join their company, he would be placed at the top of the list to help develop the siding division.
When he first arrived at training class, he was handed a contract and told that he could not participate in the training or join the company unless he signed the contract. He asked if he could take it home over night and read it through carefully so that he could understand exactly what he was signing, and he was told absolutely not.
He was further told that if he did not sign the contract, he could not participate in the training class and if he did not start the training class that morning, they would not have a position for him at Evans Glass. With the pressure of needing income and the promise of a lucrative career if he could just get through the paid training program, he signed the contract.
My husband began selling for Evans Glass during his third week of training. He had been told during the interview process that the training was paid at the rate of $250 per week for the first four weeks and that during training he would receive a commission rate of 30% of the 'overage' amount.
The managers at Evans Glass never revealed during the interview process that the $250 per week would be paid ONLY if you made at least one sale every week starting in the third week. Paid income would not start until the end of the third week; therefore if you do not make a sale THAT week, you do not get your training pay for the first week.
Also not initially revealed was that the first few sales leads you went on with other trainers you would only receive 2% of the overage.By the time my husband discovered and fully understood this rediculously contrived program, he had invested so much of his time and our money (to cover non-reimbursed expenses) in the company that he did not feel he could just walk away with no pay.
After completing the two weeks of in-house training and a couple of weeks of field training, he was finally being sent out on his own, but what he then discovered was that he would not just be selling in the Portland/Metro area, but throughout Oregon, yet another small detail they did not reveal during the interview or initial training period. He was suddenly being ordered to drive to Lebanon, Stayton, Albany, Longview, Hood River and beyond, putting several hundred miles a day on his truck.
Often he would arrive at the supposedly confirmed lead and there would be no one there or they would turn out to be renters who had no authority to talk about replacing windows. Several times he was sent on bogus, unqualified sales calls. He ended up putting several thousand miles on his truck at our expense. He knew going in that they did not reimburse for mileage, but never was it revealed nor did he imagine he would have to drive so far.
The upshot of the whole deal was that during the seven weeks he worked for Evans Glass he sold $70,000 worth of product for this company. He has taken home from that a total of $866. If you take away the $700 in gas and expenses, that leaves us with $166 for seven hard weeks of work.
Incredibly, my husband still thought maybe he should just ride it out, but when they gave him leads to go to Hood River and he told the general manager, Roger Ricks, he did not have enough money to pay for the gas to get there, Ricks took him off all leads, promising he would get to the bottom of the payroll situation immediately.
That was on Friday August 22nd. He has not returned any of my husband's phone calls since, and every time my husband has tried to talk to him in person he has avoided him or conveniently not been at the office. My husband has also tried several times to contact Matt Flath, the supervising general manager in Seattle, and has not received the courtesy of a return call.
From what I can see, THIS IS A NEW TWIST ON THE PYRAMID MARKETING SCHEMES OF OLD. The salesmen are told they have one shot at every lead they are given. That means the new salesman goes out on the supposedly qualified and confirmed lead and does the company's energy inspection for the homeowner and spends the next two to three hours educating the customer on the Evans Glass products.
The salesmen are told if they do not sell the product and get the contract signed that day, they give up their right to any commission on the sale. The head office then calls the customer back and sends another salesman back out-usually a manager who specializes in re-hashes-to offer them a better deal and get the contract signed. The first salesman is prohibited from contacting the customer to follow up himself. Most of the customers my husband talked with told him, even if they loved the product, they wanted to think about it, which is exactly what Evans Glass obviously counts on.
In effect, the low men on the pyramid are doing all the groundwork at their own expense, being told that if they stick with it long enough their pipeline to money will soon pay off. Since most of them get frustrated and quit before the company ever has to pay them their commissions, the company keeps all the profits for themselves. The middle of the pyramid is made up of the managers and lead salesmen who are given the opportunity to do the re-hashes and the re-writes. At the top of the pyramid are general managers who are raking in the profits from organizing this despicable scheme.
Evans Glass appears to be running new training classes every few weeks. Of the seven people that started at the same time as my husband, to the best of our knowledge, only one is left. At least one other training group completed the initial two week class and was out selling (my husband was paired with one of the new guys and told to train him - and share his commission) and another class was being formed when he finally left.
Apparently they have developed this system specifically for bringing new trainees in on a regular basis and conning them into doing the initial sales work without reimbursing them for their time or mileage. Evans Glass has a cleverly written contract that allows them to not pay their new employees, regardless of how many hours or days or miles the employee invests in the company.
We will undoubtedly never see the $7,000 in commissions my husband had on the books at Evans Glass. Nor will we ever recover the money spent on gas (who knows how we will pay to replace the brakes and tires that are now destroyed on my husband's truck after 3,000 miles of travel in five weeks), or the countless hours, day and night, my husband spent working for this company.
I will now have to give up the volunteer work I do teaching social education in elementary and middle schools and with the DARE/GREAT program and start looking for a second job in addition to the classes I already teach. My husband has, of course, been interviewing for other jobs, but nothing is going to happen overnight to replace the three months of lost income.
My heart aches for our children who are now having to contribute from their own bank accounts to keep the electricity and water turned on, and who are going to give up having at least one of their parents home every evening to help with homework and the basic guidance that tweenagers need. Thanks to Evans Glass, they are both going to have to grow up a lot faster than they should.
I am in the process of contacting anyone and everyone that will listen to stop this company from continuing to take advantage of hard working people who simply want to earn a living. Every legislator, attorney general, news station, news paper, and every client I have ever had in both Oegon and Washington is going to hear this story.
If you too want to see Evan Glass get what they deserve, contact me through this web site and I will add you to the increasingly long list of people Evans Glass has taken advantage of to rake in profits for themselves.
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