I felt a little inspired by Lanny sharing her story and I've been personally encouraged by someone who was closely involved, so I wanted to share my experience I had working with Adam. At first I was a little hesitant to put this all out there, but now I think it's necessary to put it out there as a warning.
My experience was a little similar to other stories I’ve read on here. Everything I’m relaying here can be verified through email messages, skype messages, or people who were on phone calls with me when talking to Adam. I’m not making anything up, and my only reason for telling anyone this is to let everyone know that Adam is NOT who he says he is. I hope he gets his stuff together someday and becomes the guy so many people already think he is, but for now, he seems to be pathological liar with no regard for other people’s wellbeing or livelihood.
SIDE NOTE: If I use quotes in this post, it’s because I’m ACTUALLY directly quoting Adam. I’m not making things up.
Essentially what it comes down to is that Adam proposed that we work together on a project that I was already working on. I was doing SEO for a few dentists, and Adam said he had a background in lead generation for local businesses and he could help expand my business. It seemed like a great way to make more money, since SEO and pay-per-lead programs are separately billed services. I hadn’t done local pay-per-lead work before on my own, but Adam assured me he knew plenty. He assured me that if I found the clients, he could “make their phone ring.” In fact, here’s what I wrote down about him in my notebook from our first meeting when I knew very little about him:
***Adam Dicker: owns thousands of domain names – worked at GoDaddy – local lead gen expert – marketed for 3,500 businesses, including 500 dentists – can make their phone ring off the hook – as many leads as they can handle***
I don’t know if any of that stuff he told me is true, but he definitely said it to me. I can’t think of any reason why he would say it to me unless to get me to want to work with him. I mean, for someone like me who’s just a small time marketer, why wouldn’t you work with someone with those credentials? I had just bought a house, my wife and I had our first baby on the way, and I was VERY excited that things seemed to be working out so well for me.
Anyway, 7 months after working with Adam who promised to “make their phones ring,” he had not delivered so much as ONE lead to any of the 27 dentists I recruited for lead gen services. I spent 100% of the money I had saved up to start this business which was about $20k, all spend on salary and commission to salespeople, marketing efforts, ppc, office lease, and eventually chargeback fees while getting these dentists signed up. I couldn’t generate leads on my own at the scale necessary and with the budget I had set aside, no matter how hard I tried to set up a profitable adwords campaign using the lead pricing that Adam had instructed me to use with the dentists I had signed up. I was stuck on my own, waiting for Adam to come through on his promises. Adam assured me every couple of weeks along the way that things were “moving along” or that he’d “have it taken care of by this weekend” or that he just “needed to hear back from someone” before we could get the ball rolling. I’d have gladly jumped ship at any time if he’d given me a legitimate, honest response telling me that he wouldn’t be able to deliver what he promised. But instead, I just kept going while receiving reassurance such as these DIRECT quotes from him:
“we’re going to make a s**t load of money”
After asking him every couple of weeks if he was still on board, he’d say “oh yeah, definitely. Let’s get this going.”
“we’ve got leads coming in, I just need to log in and check it this weekend.” (referring to his adwords and call tracking account)
About 3 months in to working with him (around November 2014,) he introduced me to one of his VPs (let’s call this person Erik to avoid real names,) one of his project directors in a new company he started called WebCorp. At this point, Adam handed all communication off to Erik, so he was the one to relay to me things like “he says he’ll take care of it by Monday” or “he says he’ll take care of it when he’s back from his trip.” His VP, Erik, was simply caught in the middle, and he did a great job of working on things from his end, but Adam just never came through on anything.
One thing as a side point: At one point along the way (around December 2014,) Adam asked me to be a project manager for him on a separate project. We were building an affiliate site together, and I was supposed to make 20% of revenue off the site. After working on if for over 40 hours, Adam scrapped the project. 20% of $0 is still $0, so I wasn’t paid for any of the work.
By February 2015, after we’d been working together about 6 months, Adam agreed to let me set up an adwords campaign in a shared account with him, and if he could pay for the ads upfront, we could split profits 50/50. A full month later (March 2015) after he had apparently checked the campaign I had put together and said everything looked good and started running the ads, we had spent $700 and got one lead. Most of this money was spent on clicks from people WAY outside of the geographic area around the area we were targeting. He had forgotten to set the correct geographic radius like I asked him to, and I didn’t have correct Admin access to do so. At this point, Adam was apparently very disappointed with the project, and scrapped everything.
So, at this point it had been 7 months that I’d been working with Adam. I’d been working with Erik for about 4 months, and Erik could back up my entire story from that point, as we were on calls with Adam at the same time. I was $20k in the hole on this project, my entire savings set aside for the project had been exhausted, and I had a list of 27 clients who were all angry with me because they were never going to get any leads.
By April 2015, after paying back the deposits that I charged each dentist when they signed up, I had to start selling off my office furniture to pay my personal bills. I sold my truck to pay my mortgage that month, and I sold my desk and chairs to pay my wife’s car payment. I maxed out my credit card to help pay for groceries and diapers and baby food. I was stuck with 100% of the bill on this project spearheaded by Adam, and I was never going to get a dime out of him.
I emailed Adam to see if there might be some other way that I could be involved in his company. I figured there was no way that he would have put me in this position on purpose, and that he would probably be able to see my side of things if I just explained it to him. After all, he’s the one who continually reassured me that things were moving along, and he never once admitted that the project had the potential to fall apart like it had.
I figured since Adam apparently had several companies clearing over $100k per month, there must be a way that someone like me could get involved and make enough money to get by. After emailing Adam, here’s the exact email response I got from him:
****
Ben,
i do care, let's chat about this tomorrow.
Adam
****
The next day we spoke on Skype, and Adam said he’d get me involved in his company and he’d find a way to “make [me] tons of money.” I was glad he said that, but I was still skeptical that it would ever pan out.
Within the next 2 months (by June 2015) Adam had offered me a commission-only sales job selling bobble head dolls, and that’s it. At that point I knew that none of the salespeople working for him had been paid either, so I had no intention of getting involved in that. He did say he’d help me sell a website I own to help me raise some capital and that he’d put me in touch with his broker, but after an initial conversation, his broker fell off the face of the earth too. So, it was clear Adam wasn’t going to help, and that he likely didn’t take any personal responsibility for how things had gone. I emailed him a couple more times, but I didn’t get a response.
Now, it’s been about 14 months since I first started working with Adam, and things are a little bit better, due in no small part to the fact that I work 60 hour weeks to try to salvage a small part of the business I once had before Adam got involved. My goals are no longer to strike it rich, but rather just to pay the bills and somehow climb out of the hole that Adam helped me dig.
I know it’s not 100% Adam’s fault that this is how things turned out. I have to take plenty of responsibility for being so trusting of someone I didn’t know very well. I honestly don’t even know how to put a dollar amount on the damage that working with Adam has caused. If I’d continued to build my existing business on my own without involving Adam, I suspect I could have built it into something great on my own, but instead I trusted someone that didn’t have any intention of fulfilling his promises. I don’t know if he does this on purpose, or if he just doesn’t know how to tell the truth any more, but I do know though that if he truly did want to help make things right, he’d do more than send a one-sentence email to me to let me know that he cares.
I am certain I’m far from the worst victim of Adam’s deception, but I still feel like he needs to own up to what he’s doing with his life. For the 9 months that we were in regular communication, I couldn’t believe that Adam would be leading me along with no intention of helping. I figured he’d be honest and let me know if there were a chance that he couldn’t fulfill every promise he made to me, but he was VERY clear that I had nothing to worry about.
So, Adam Dicker, now is your chance to respond. You know I’m not lying about any of this. Although you have a different perspective on this, I'm not lying about anything. Plenty of people know that everything I’ve said here is the truth. You’re messing with people’s lives here, and not everyone can blow a ton of money on a failed project and still come out ok. I’m set back more than 16 months financially with this little venture, and I doubt you lost any sleep over it. If you are sincerely worried about this, then please let me know. You have my email.
