Hi guys and gals. It's Kimberly from Measure (the founder)-
I wanted to reach out to you fill you in on everything. Honesty is best, right? So, here’s my 6 month tale. Back in late October, my former CFO and I amicably parted ways. I hired a new guy. He seemed bright and sharp, and like he knew what he was doing. Woot! Anyone who knows me I can’t add my way out of a paper bag, so his solutions seemed like great ones. Switching accounting platforms, streamlining processes in billing/payment. Simplifying AR/AP. There was new technology that was so awesome, he said! We knew there would be hiccups along the way, but he assured me that he had everything under control.
One thing we implemented, which I am sure many of you are very familiar with, is using an answering service to answer the phones 24/7. This was to accommodate overseas clients who may have questions or need to get to us, and to accommodate shoppers. We know that many of you may not read instructions, or may have questions at night after the shop day ends. We wanted to make it easier (not harder) to get messages to us so we could help you. It seemed to be working well.
Then-we got hit with the cashiers check scam-you know the ones that newbies and non-shoppers fall for, where a very large check gets sent to an unsuspecting person in exchange for doing a western union transfer; this one was that one, and a large iTunes gift card. With, of course, Measure’s name on it. In February and March, we received no less than 1000 calls from people asking if it was us. So, we turned off the direct connect from the call center to emailed messages bc we couldn’t keep up with the phone calls and do business.
During this time, I was assured that shoppers were being paid, or if there were delays, that payments were about to go out. Fine, Ok. I get it. Let’s just let the shoppers know. Robin, Armando, Becca, me-were all assured that payments were going to go out, or that we were waiting on things to be clarified by the client.
About 4 weeks ago, I began to get suspicious/ aggravated/ annoyed. What was the influx of calls coming from? Why was the call center calling me directly asking me if we were scamming people. I started poking around, asking questions from new CFO. I started getting questions from the new accounting platform that we were using, because they hadn’t received any information that they were asking for so they could reconcile the books each month. I talk to new CFO, he assures me it’s being taken care of. But, I’m not trusting it. Start asking for copies of invoices, looking to see where shoppers were and weren’t paid. Looking lot a not being done.
With that, I put on my investigation hat, and dug into conversations with vendors, our accounting platform provider, my team, and other experts. Whew! Discovered a lot. Lit a fire under new CFO, while inspecting what I expected. I knew the guy had to go, but me not being a math whiz (I got a 100% on the English portion of my grad school admissions test, and a 0% on the math, to give you an idea!), needed a backup plan and proof. I got it this morning. Thanks to a few persistent shoppers, a conversation with Maggie (thanks for listening Maggie, and for your heartfelt message Misti), I was able to let him go. I had my contingency plan in place, and all the I needed to drop the proverbial ax on new CFO.
With regards to the tax shops, some of you have been paid, others have not. The issue that arose was a handful of bad seeds that caused issues for the whole-we had some fraudulent shoppers submitting false reimbursement amounts (a few innocent mistakes as well), and the client has to verify each individual shop with the IRS system. This couldn’t be done until after 4.15, and it takes a while it seems. Now, for each of you, that seems like, well just pay me my amount. The issue is when so many shops are done, with such high reimbursements and payments, it’s not a good idea to pay out that large sum without 100% verification-as we might be left on the hook with tens of thousands of dollars in fraudulent reimbursements that we can’t bill for.
So, with that said-it doesn’t look like he’s transferred money into paypal (despite telling us that he transferred it over last week). That takes a few days for the funds to go from our bank to paypal. Currently, we are going through all the paypal transactions just to make sure he wasn’t doing anything sneaky. I don’t believe he was, but we were advised to check that out. And our bank account is on freeze for a few days until we are sure that he doesn’t decide to write himself an insane check out of anger, or whatever.
I’ve been in this business for 18 years, and it kills me to see our reputation tarnished. To see shoppers who’ve trusted us and now are angry, hurt, and frustrated. I feel your frustration. I’ve worked too hard to have this happen, and I am on top of it. Robin has been awesome thru this, as has the KSS team (thanks Lorri and Pete-I owe you!), Steve at Quantum who schedules our video, Becca and Jenna who’ve done great work on the back end, and to the Independent Schedulers who’ve worked with us in the past 8 months who’ve weathered the transitions, too.
I ask that you bear with me a few more days-I need to make sure that his behavior was laziness and not something more malicious.
I hope this helps. From the bottom of my heart, I am sorry. I’m a single mom, and I feel your pain.
Kimberly
CEO
Measure Consumer Perspectives
