I am assuming everyone has received the letter from Bill Freeman the founder and CEO of Freeman. What are your thought about his response to the pay issue.
Here is a copy in case you have not received it yet.
Dear Floyd,
My name is Bill Freeman - owner and founder of FreemanGroup. I want to communicate directly with you as to where we are with our present payment issues and what we intend to do to correct the situation. Firstly, I need to give you an unreserved apology for the issues and hardship for which I am responsible. As a company we are embarrassed and dismayed that we have failed to live up to basic expectations. That is not who I am and not the vision I had for this organization when I founded it.
How we arrived at this point is completely explainable, but not relevant to your concern of getting paid. So with the intent of communicating with you today regarding reimbursement and payment, I do not want to dwell on the chain of events that led us here, as it would be construed as an excuse. I do want to stress though that we are completely committed to resolving the issue and I personally am very aware of my responsibility in this matter.
I want to outline our plans for getting payment issues resolved. We have set ourselves the objective of achieving an eight week pay cycle by November 1st. In no way are we implying that an eight week cycle is satisfactory or our end goal, but we need to get to that threshold by November 1st in order to achieve a more desirable and competitive cycle by February 1, 2013 (which we will provide additional details on as that date approaches).
Plans for achieving those goals include the selling of property, short-term borrowing, and other investment options. In addition, we continue to source opportunities for new business within our training division. For this to work, it is critical that we retain our mystery shopping clients. To be completely honest, without our existing accounts, this plan does not work and while the monies will be repaid, it will be over a much longer period of time.
I understand the level of frustration that exists with you personally as well as the general mystery shopping community. For 24 years FreemanGroup enjoyed a very good reputation and during the last three years that reputation we previously enjoyed has been obliterated. This damage to my reputation affects me personally as well as the members of our FreemanGroup team.
In closing, we are taking additional measures to streamline many of our processes from scheduling, to assignment execution, to payments and reimbursements. With that said, we want to communicate with you in the most transparent a manner that we can. For questions regarding the status of your payment and reimbursement, you may email our team at
payments@freemangroup.org. Again, we ask for your patience in receiving a response as we communicate with many of you daily and this letter will no doubt increase the number of inquiries we receive. If you are confident that all of your information and supporting documentation has been received by our office, no contact is necessary.
Finally, thank you for your previous support of FreemanGroup and my apologies again for letting you down,
Bill Freeman