BIZZIBIZ Franchisees Reject Latest Jim Piccolo Spin

November 18, 2012 unhappyzee

Jim Piccolo, founder of the Bizzibiz digital marketing franchise, would rather talk about the amazing wealthbuilding opportunities with his new Real Estate Worldwide (REWW) venture than the money lost by those who bought into his Bizzibiz venture hook, line and sinker.

In fact, Jim Piccolo has purged his LinkedIn profile of any mention of Bizzibiz whatsoever.

[Click on image, left, to see Jim Piccolo’s recently edited LinkedIn profile.]

In a recent presentation to potential Real Estate Worldwide (REWW) investors, James Piccolo regaled the crowd for nearly an hour with his life story. He spent most of the time getting their greed glands salivating with pictures of his former riches: his multimillion dollar estate (the shoe room was a big hit), his private jet (which had a $300K lien against it, reportedly), his luxury car collection, family vacations to exotic international destinations, surprising his wife with a $100K red piano signed by Elton John, etc. etc.

There was no mention of the lifestyles now being enjoyed by the Bizzibiz franchisees who have been fighting off the collapse of their businesses due to the failure of Bizzibiz to provide the support that was promised – and paid for.

In fact, Piccolo spends only a few minutes explaining how Bizzibiz was wildly successful when he launched it, but then was destroyed by his lazy programming staff (whom he calls “punks”) while he went into the hospital for colon surgery.

Unfortunately for Jim Piccolo, his franchisees are starting to speak out and are “calling B.S.” on Piccolo’s fairy-tale spin-story.

Tea Party activist and Bizzibiz franchise owner Mark Skoda is calling for a franchisee uprising and group lawsuit (Read BIZZIBIZ Tea Party Mark Skoda Threatens Franchise Uprising)

Ronald D. Reynolds has posted that Jim Piccolo is driving around Scottsdale in a beautiful black Bentley and his wife Mary Piccolo is in a black Range Rover despite not having paid him and other creditors. (Comments posted at BIZZIBIZ: Jim Piccolo Mansion Listed For $3.5M (SOLD!))

On our post JIM PICCOLO Blames Bizzibiz Failure on Lazy Punks, Bizzibiz franchisee Blake Warrington rejects Jim Piccolo’s spin-story and recounts the challenges he’s faced since being reeled in by the slick Bizzibiz sales pitch:

As a BizziBiz franchise owner who has been part of the business since it’s inception I am calling a big B.S. to a lot of what Mr. Piccolo is stating regarding BizziBiz and it’s operations.

A little about me to understand my background, why I purchased a BizziBiz franchise, and to lend some credibility to what I am going to state here.

I have been studying and applying (and I am using BizziBiz terminology here) “digital marketing services” for numerous years. Six years ago I joined a network marketing company after losing my job and built 99% of what is now a very successful business using digital marketing strategies – and still do today.

Because of my success in building my network marketing business, people started contacting me and asking if I could help them with web site design and digital marketing services. I started doing this and quickly got overwhelmed as the “one-man-show. I also realized there may be an opportunity to start another business because there was a huge need for these types of services for small business owners.

I reconnected with a former business associate who understood the digital marketing space and had done very well with lead generation for his real estate business prior to the 2008 crash. He agreed to come on board and work with me to build this new business venture. Again, as our client base grew, the two of us and the small team we had put together started to get real busy with the growth we were experiencing.

Around this time I was contacted by another friend/business associate who was involved in Nouveau Riche. He knew I was in the digital marketing space and called to explain this new BizziBiz venture and invite me to a meeting to learn more.

Long story short, I was invited to Mr. Piccolo’s home in Arizona and was quite impressed with what I saw and the caliber of people I met there. This was a core group of about 25 – 30 Nouveau Riche people, along with myself (not having ever been in Nouveau Riche) who had been invited to see the debut of the new BizziBiz and Extreme Franchise Marketing business opportunity. We were also informed that if we came on board, and we were accepted, we could be part of a special “Centurion Counsel” which would consist of a select group of 25 franchise owners who would get preferential treatment, recognition and other benefits.

Knowing that we were needing to expand our digital marketing business, and based on what was told to us at Mr. Piccolo’s home, I felt BizziBiz would be the perfect fit. So my wife and I plunked down our $25,000 to purchase a BizziBiz franchise and we proceeded to go to work and grow the business and add new clients.

While it is true that Mr. Piccolo did suffer an extremely serious and unfortunate health issue at one point, there were serious problems with BizziBiz from the very beginning (on Mr. Piccolo’s watch so to speak), and these problems continued throughout the entire time we worked with BizziBiz. In fact, they only got worse as time went on.

Some of the issues we dealt with were extremely slow turn around times on getting work completed. Simple web site design could take several weeks and in most cases, months to complete. Never ending broken promises on deliverables happened regularly, on a daily and weekly basis. Simple, but important and timely, tasks could get pushed down and not dealt with for extended periods of time. This quickly began to affect our business, our income and would soon start to impact our credibility in the community.

While BizziBiz billed our clients on a timely manner, commissions paid to franchise owners would be several weeks late and sometimes months. I had one incident where about $1,000 was owed to us for a couple months. This was during the period when Jim was in the hospital. When he finally got out of the hospital and found out was going on, I contacted him about the our commission check. Long story short, we were promised our check on three separate occasions and it took several more weeks before we received it. At one point in a conversation I had with Mr. Piccolo he stated our check was on his desk and he was going to personally drop it in the mail as soon as we hung up. It never came and took several more phone calls and emails before the check arrived. We were somewhat fortunate that we were eventually paid all of our commissions. However, there are numerous franchise owners I have heard about that have never been paid and have just given up.

We also had incidents where BizziBiz over billed or continued to bill our clients after we had told them to stop billing them. This was extremely frustrating and it almost got to the point where we were going to have to repay our clients out of our own account.

Phone calls and emails to certain people in BizziBiz would go unanswered for days and sometimes over a week, often on timely issues, tasks and projects that we needed to report to our clients about. It was extremely embarrassing for us with our clients as it happened over and over.

BizziBiz was constantly saying that they were completing work and that a given job was done. When we went over the job tasks there were constant issues with getting through to them to explain that they had in fact not completed the work. Case in point; we were told that the on page SEO (Search Engine Optimization) work had been completed on one of our clients web sites. When I looked at the source code (the hidden content search engines use to rank a web site) it had only been completed on a couple pages. Most of it had not been done at all.

I remember we had a conference call with a new CEO or manager regarding this issue, along with several other never ending issues we had on our plate to discuss. I brought up the fact that the on page SEO work had not been completed because I understand and know what is required for this to be done. Her response almost floored me and my three partners. She replied by asking me, “If I you know how to do all of this stuff yourself, why did you purchase a franchise?” That was her answer! We were like, are you kidding me? Unfortunately, the conversation went downhill from there. I also suspect that because the majority of franchise owners were former Nouveau Riche distributors, of which most of them knew very little or nothing regarding web site design, SEO and digital marketing serves, that BizziBiz could just tell them work was complete – when it was not, and they would not know any better.

Another case in point is BizziBiz brought in some SEO guru and we had him on a conference call with one of our clients who was about to leave us because of unsatisfactory work by BizziBiz. This new “SEO guru” promised our client that he would get a certain keyword in the first organic position on the first page of Google in something like 60 or 90 days. This was first position on the first page – not just getting our client on the first page. That is a HUGE promise and something I would never guarantee, however, this guy was some $250/hr guru, came off as extremely confident, so we all went with it. Of course this too did not happen, and, in fact, our client was actually going down in rankings for almost all of his keywords that we had started getting him good rankings for when we were doing the work.

Back to the phone call, we questioned this new CEO (manager) regarding what happened to getting our client on the first position of the first page of Google for this one particular keyword, and she stated that BizziBiz would never guarantee such a thing. Myself and my two partners were on the call and could not believe what we just heard. When we explained to her that the three of us were on the conference call with this SEO guru who made the promise, along with another BizziBiz employee and our client, and she simply restated that they could not guarantee such a thing and that the SEO guru was no longer with BizziBiz anyway. It was unbelievable!

At one point another franchise owner asked me to look at a keyword ranking report BizziBiz had sent him on one of his clients. When I looked at it BizziBiz was claiming top rankings for a very large number of keywords – which appeared to be true. The problem was most of the keywords had little or no relevance to the clients business, or there was little or no monthly search volume for the keywords. So, even if they did in fact rank high for a given keyword, it would produce little or no traffic and probably zero conversions or sales. Here again, an unsuspecting franchise owner like this one had no idea this was actually a poor report and was getting the wool pulled over his eyes.

I could go on and on with story after story regarding ongoing and never ending epic failure of BizziBiz, the management team, and the revolving door of employees and managers on almost every level.

Anyway, shortly after this phone call we knew we had to make a drastic change fast, or we were going to go out of business. We were starting to lose our clients because of BizziBiz’s constant failures, and more important, we were starting to lose our reputation and credibility in the community. I occasionally teach digital marketing strategies at local networking groups which gets us business. Bad word in these meetings would travel fast and cause serious damage to our growing business.

We ended up “throwing ourselves on the sword” and we spoke with every one of our clients who had been damaged by BizziBiz’s complete lack of credibility and their ability to perform. We were honest and upfront, and explained how we transitioned from doing the majority of the work ourselves and how I had purchased the franchise and turned their business over to BizziBiz.

We went to each client personally and offered to do work for them for free in order to gain their business and trust back. Fortunately the majority of our clients took us up on our offer and we were able to get every one of these clients back on track and fix all the problems created by BizziBiz. For the most part this took us several months of hard work to do in turning around poorly done SEO work (or none done at all), unfinished websites, and cost our company thousands of dollars and untold lost and uncompensated for hours. We also had to temporarily stop generating new business since there was so much work to do, which potentially cost us thousands of dollars in additional revenue.

It is also important to note that there has been zero correspondence from Mr. Piccolo for several months now and I only learned from using Google Alerts that Mr. Piccolo had recently started another business venture. I could not believe this. In essence, as far as I can tell since I have not heard anything, Mr. Piccolo has simply walked away from the sinking (sunk?) ship of BizziBiz without one word being said to the franchise owners – or at least to this one. This shows a complete lack of ethics, integrity, responsibility, both personally and from a business standpoint, by Mr. Piccolo, and I would not trust a word he says.

In closing, I consider BizziBiz, Mr Piccolo, the majority of the management team, and several of their employees to have completely failed on almost every level and they have bold-faced lied and hurt many people. I would never do business with Mr. Piccolo, along with certain other people like Marc Gleeman who had a big hand in the day to day operations and overall problems of BizziBiz.

If anyone is reading this and considering joining his new Real Estate World Wide (REWW), I would highly suggest to run the other way – fast. If trouble starts to happen, as it always does with most businesses, especially new ones, then Mr. Piccolo may simply take the money and run.

Anyone is welcome to contact me if they have any questions.

You can also Google my name and you will not find any disparaging information about me – unlike you will regarding Mr. Piccolo.

Sincerely,

Blake Warrington

w. X2remeMarketing.com