STEPS Tutoring TCYOnline Franchise Complaint
According to its website, Steps by TCYOnline offers a unique online tutoring opportunity featuring an exclusive territory and a licensing fee of just $2499.
According to the website, “Students and tutors are logged in at their respective computers and tutoring is done through highly advanced Whiteboard technology. Both can text- chat and talk and listen to each other naturally through VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol).”
Sounds like a great idea. However, commenter Alex ( District of Columbia), posting on RipoffReport, states investing in TCY is just a great way to lose money:
TCYonline aka TCY aka STEPS math tutoring. Offering 24/7 online math tutoring in the U.S. You buy a territory of 100,000 households and you do all the marketing. Expect negative cash flow.
Last Fall (2009) they asked franchisees to pay $5000 each into a "national marketing pool". Luckily no one did. Turns out TCY had no plan on how to spend the money and had not done any test marketing or pilot studies to show RIO. After their failure to convinece franchisees to send them $5000, TCY canceled the campaign. They were not going to spend one cent of their money. They like playing with yours. TCY promised to do a pilot study of online marketing (basically google ad words) and show franchisees the results so they could decide whether to participate in the marketing pool. TCY did not do that.
TCY promised to share leads from the campaign (which never happened) from unassigned territories with their affiliates to help them out since they expected affiliates to pay for 100% of the cost. But then TCY changed their minds about sharing leads and then canceled the campaign when affiliates got disgusted with their attempted $5000 money grab.
Investing in TCY is a great way to lose money.
Basically, TCY gives ZERO support to franchisees. Not a good investment. If you are interested in tutoring, at the minimum go with a company that has a marketing plan that they can articulate to you, some level of marketing support, and has at least one employee based in the US. TCY has ZERO employees based in the US. They don’t really know what they’re doing in the U.S. market.
Good luck and buyer beware!
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