Ultimate Water and Coffee, Company Never Paid Me Last Check Owed Boca Raton, Florida

I worked for this company as well, for three weeks.  Having been involved in professional sales for much of my career, I found myself looking for work after being laid off due to the economic downturn.

I was promised HOT leads, a turnkey program that couldn't lose, and $750 per week in training pay, plus car and cell phone allowances. What I got was leads that were often years old (many of them had rejected service previously), a corporate culture and sales system based on deception and deliberately inflated statistics, and a pay structure that reverted to minimum wage if you didn't convince 3 businesses to take on the free* trial in your VERY FIRST week. No product training to speak of, no support (front or back end); here are your brochures, go sell. By the way, we're out of professional, color brochures. Take these black and white photocopies with you true story). Then we get into the obscene numbers you'd have to post to get the car and cell money. In my tenure, not one front line rep qualified. There were only two people left on the sales force who were there when I started.

Now let's talk about pay issues. They pay a week behind, so after busting my a*s for two weeks, I looked forward to getting paid for it. A "communication error" lead to my paperwork not being filed with the corporate office in time. I was informed that I would be paid the following Friday. That was unacceptable to me, and I made it very clear that I had the resources at my disposal to initiate legal action. I had to drive up to Broward to get that check. Finally, they attempted to withhold my last paycheck. After I was terminated for not producing (which very few people do), I was still owed a week of pay. After trying to be nice and getting nothing but the runaround in return, I had to make the DM aware that I knew of their reputation and that, once again, I was fully willing and able to take legal action. I firmly believe that that was the only reason I got that check mailed to me.

The only way I think they make money is by the sales managers poaching the warmest leads from people who give them an honest effort and succumb to the inevitable. On most of these forums, you have the occasional response and threat from a current employee. There's a VERY good reason that their posts are outnumbered as badly as they are. This is not a "promising opportunity"; it is a fraud. 

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     I was also hired by this "company" (I use the term loosely) in March of 2010.  The Orlando branch looks and feels like only a storefront with barren appointments and only 3 or 4 laptop computers, a networked printer/fax machine, and a warehouse in the back that contains the units that they are leasing to businesses.  Just like the original poster, I was contacted by Chris Silverman who, again, gave me the verbal interview where he indicated that my sales skills would be greatly rewarded with this company.  After a 30 minute interview with the branch manager I was hired, and directed to show up at 8AM on the following Monday morning for the "sales meeting", which was essentially a "rah-rah" (manager's own words) meeting before the salesmen were unleashed on the Orlando Metro area.  They go over the previous days' numbers per salesman followed by clapping and general "way to go's", provided that you were, indeed, putting up some numbers.  This company's bait and switch mentality has its salespeople giving away a 2 week trial run for its Reverse Osmosis water treatment water coolers, the end result being that you get the business so enamored with the new setup that you swoop down and close the 60 month lease a few days after the trial install goes down.  Which sounds do-able, right?  Until you get out there and start canvassing businesses, that is.  This company is the very definition of disorganized.  They have no way of tracking where salespeople have been the previous day, week, or month, so when you go out to whatever side of town you decide on that day, there is a 95% chance that you are hitting the same area that Joe Salesman has just hit the day before.  And you can guess the result:  you start pissing business owners off, because they just said no the day before with someone else in your company.  When you try to raise questions about it, they just tell you that it's ok to hit the same area again that week, because whomever just said no the day before "could have had a bad day" (I'm not making this up) and they may sign that day.  This is a bold-faced lie.  Ultimate must just be too cheap to invest in a tracking program of any kind.  The CRM database is useless and looks like it was written by a 10 year old, not to mention that upon further investigation, it was last updated in 2006.  What year is it anyways?  And my main beef is this:  They claim that they will pay you $600 (just upped it to $750 according to Careerbuilder today) a week during training that will last 4 weeks.  When you get in the door, they make you sign an employment contract that spells out that, if you don't get 5 "trials" a week during training, your training wages retroactively revert back to MINIMUM WAGE for the pay period.  When I asked about it that day, the manager told me not to worry about it, that NOBODY gets anything for at least a few weeks, but that I shouldn't worry about it, I would be trained, and I would be taken care of.  Training consisted of (get this) watching a 20 minute Penn & Teller "B.S." video off of Youtube which made fun of everyday people who couldn't tell quality water from water straight from a garden hose.  Then we were given an employee handbook but subsequently told that that is just corporate "BS" and just listen and learn from the other salespeople to learn your job.  In my two week tenure with this company, I went out with the manager twice, the team leader once, and a couple of other guys who were only with the company a couple of months.  Not ONCE did any of these guys ever get any business owner to bite on a "trial" while I was with them.  As a matter of fact, in my first week there, the ENTIRE sales staff failed to drum up 5 trials during the week, and there were 10 salespeople at the time.  Of course, by the middle of week #2 of my "training", the other two people in my "class" had thrown in the towel and 2 other "established veteran" salesepeople had also quit.  This was no accident.  How the heck are you supposed to do business this way?  You might as well just throw darts at a wall-sized map of the Metro area and assign territories that way.  At least there would be some degree of random canvassing.  I wasted 2 weeks of my life, drove all over God's half-acre (over 1000 miles on my new car for nothing) and made minimum wage.  BYPASS!