We had a simple request that any business under-grad would have easily been able to accomplish— write a business plan for $2000. Plan Your Idea informed us that they could have it done within 15 business days and print off professional copies for us. They would even fly out to the east coast to help us pitch it to potential investors and were even willing to line up 'angel investors' on their end. We thought that sounded great because it met the timeline we had established and we would receive professional copies of the plan to distribute to investors we were lining up, but that's not what happened at all. It was a month before we even received a 'first draft' of the plan, which amounted to 50 plus pages of crap. The ideas, research and statistics we instructed Peter Salinas, our rep at Plan Your Idea, to include in the plan because they were essential to our business model, was put into text that did not represent our company's vision and was way too complex for anyone to even understand, or was not even included in the plan at all. Several times we requested that the adjustments be made to include our key statistics and to reword sections that did not express our business venture's vision properly. Simple requests that should have taken a matter of minutes or hours to accomplish would end up taking weeks. Sometimes we would actually get back damn near the same thing we asked to be changed, even if it was something as simple as take your chart out and put the chart we made on that page. Essentially, the plan was his vision of our company, which is not what we paid for, not what we plan to develop, and definitely not what we want to give to investors. We paid to outsource someone to simply take our research and data for a relatively simple concept, then enter it into the proper business plan format so we could use it to begin pitching investors. It took close to three months (well beyond 15 business days) of constant haggling with Peter to provide something even close to what we requested before finally receiving his version of a final product, which was a joke. His "Final" draft included a pathetically bad, generic cover page, numerous typos (including our company name), major mistakes on financials (P & L, balance sheet, etc.), several charts that we instructed him to remove, and pages upon pages of useless, redundant text that we requested several times to be trimmed down. Ultimately, we received a useless business plan— way beyond the preestablished time-line— that could not even be given to an investor to properly relay our concept. We also received "professional" copies of the plan that were printed off a home printer which was running out of ink. We wasted close to three months and $2000 with Plan Your Idea, only to end up having to do the business plan ourselves (minus $2000). We even requested a partial refund and were denied by these scumbags. Steer clear of Plan Your Idea. They are just going to take your money, give you the run around and nothing but worthless crap in return.
0 comments