Vector Marketing: Scam or legit?
Company featured at MRU career fair subject of many complaints
Kaity Brown
Staff Writer
Vector Marketing is a company that prides itself upon helping students learn entrepreneurial experience and other skill sets. However, if you look up Vector Marketing on Wikipedia, you will find that the company has been accused of unsavory business practices by some.
During the Mount Royal University career fair held on Main Street in March, Vector Marketing was one of the companies on site looking to hire students.
Photo courtesy: Shabniz Hirji
The job, at a basic level, is an entrepreneurial job. Students start out by paying $99 plus GST as a security deposit for their first set of Cutco knives. They start a training session for sales. From there, students are encouraged to sell the knives on an appointment-with-clients basis rather than door-to-door selling or group selling.
The more they sell, the more rewards they “unlock,” and the more bonuses they get — a percentage increase of what they sell.
Shabniz Hirji, a Calgary student who worked for Vector Marketing for a little over a month describes the experience as a “terrible time.”
“I first started with Vector Marketing because I really needed a job and I didn’t care which job,” Hirji said. “They didn’t tell me what the name of the company was, so I went to the first meeting. They sat me down and that’s when I found out I was selling knives.
“They gave you barely any training; they gave you a little booklet and that was basically your training – telling you about each knife and how good it was.”
Numerous online complaints against Vector indicate that the company is controversial for reasons similar to what Hirji experienced. YouTube video blogger Gregor Wilke created a blog called Vector Marketing Is A Scam.
“The one thing that I hate most was that they break out saying that they have this flexible schedule,” Wilke said.
“But they want you in the office every other day for a team meeting, a phone jam, where all your friends come in and you call people that you would give demos to use on your cell phone. That’s the other thing — they don’t even let you use an office phone, they don’t even have office phones.”
Hirji agreed, noting that she found the atmosphere at Vector to be unpleasant. “They don’t support you — it’s not even a proper office,” she said. “It was an uncomfortable environment. I had people breathing down my neck all the time. It was like a cult, like I couldn’t get out.”
Patsy Valenzuela, a representative of MRU’s Career Services, explained in an email that the most important thing to remember is that regardless of the company, students need to do their own research and reach their own conclusions to stay out of trouble.
“This can include internet research, unresolved complaints, and, if possible, connecting with current student staff at the organization to discuss their experiences,” Valenzuela said.
Valenzuela also said the reason Vector was at the career fair is that the school is trying to showcase a variety of different job opportunities.
“This year I met with the lead Vector staff, as well as four MRU students that are currently employed by Vector,” she said. “Although very different, they each reported positive results from their employment. In addition, a scholarship donation was presented to Mount Royal as a result of MRU students exceeding some of their sales targets.”
She also explained that jobs are a very personal decision and what one student may enjoy and learn from, another may strongly dislike.
“Entrepreneurial sales-driven employment may not be a positive fit for all students. However, some do very well and find great career success with those types of jobs,” Valenzuela said.
Although Hirji said she understands that there may be some who love the job, her reasons for disliking it didn’t stem from a distaste for selling in general.
“It was probably the worst job that I’ve ever been to, and I’ve done a lot of marketing,” Hirji said. “At least with those, they provide you with support so you can learn to sell that product. ”
Angie Macdougall, a Calgary representative for Vector Marketing, said she understands that entrepreneurial work may not be for everyone, and it may seem intimidating, but she encourages students to give Vector a try.
She said she encourages students that this is a good opportunity for them to try, for them to learn really great skills. She noted that she wouldn’t recommend it or have spent 19 years working for Vector Marketing if she didn’t believe in the company and the opportunities it has for students.
“There’s just no way that I could continue to work with colleges and universities if I felt that in any way, shape or form we weren’t doing something that was good business practice,” said Macdougall.
In regards to the comments accusing Vector of “unsavoury” business practices Macdougall said, “It’s usually because of misinformation or an uneducated viewpoint because they have never actually done the job. They might do an interview but they don’t do the training or get any further to see what the opportunity really is.”
However, the main comments being made are with regards to the company not giving information in advance about what the job actually entails.
Typically, that kind of information would be found after doing the actual interview for the job. However in the case of Vector Marketing, Hirji and other students commenting online said that despite doing their research and talking to Vector representatives, when it came to actually doing the job, they faced a lot of surprises.
Any company will try to make their job look appealing, but, as Valenzuela pointed out, it is really up to the student to do their homework about it and determine whether they want to give the company a try.
“Students should always consider their comfort level with an organization’s pay structure, work hours, work environment, industry, client type, etcetera,” Valenzuela said. “This is very personal and subjective and it’s really about the individuals fit with the job.”
Bottom line: Vector Marketing is not a scam; it is a real company. But, when it comes to how much students have to pay out of pocket, and how much time they actually have to put in, it may be more than they bargained for.
A company making a job look appealing and telling flat out lies or withholding vital information is totally different.
Here are the flat out lies of Vector Marketing
1. Earn $20/hour guaranteed:
You get paid about $20 per one hour appointment regardless of whether or not the potential customer buys something. Sounds good right? This does not include the hours it may have taken to get this appointment or the time spent driving to the appointment which could be hours if you live in Airdrie and the client lives in Okotoks and you start driving at 4pm on Deerfoot. Also if you go three appointments without making a sale a higher ranking sales rep will accompany you on sales calls until you make a sale.
2. Flexible schedule: As stated above you really only have the flexibility to schedule appointments, but they have tons of pump up meetings and phone jams throughout the night where they expect you to come in and call people and schedule appointments. This consumed many of my evenings and just wasn’t worth it.
3. No cold calling: this is a stretch it depends on how you define cold calling. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines cold calling as “a telephone call soliciting business made directly to a potential customer without prior contact or without a lead”. During your first training meetings they have you draw up a list of everyone you know, narrow it down to the target market and start COLD CALLING YOUR FRIENDS. No matter how well I know someone, if they didn’t ask about Cutco and I call out of the blue to tell them about it, it’s a cold call. Your first attempts are done in the office during training and if you don’t stick to the script they shove it in your face and make you read it. At least that’s what happened to me and it was extremely uncomfortable.
4. You will work as an independent contractor: The government has strict rules in defining an employee-employer relationship, because contractors don’t always need to pay CPP or EI and can claim a host of deductions against their income. Here are the criteria and how Vector violates each.
Control: independent contractors have control over how they do their work. Evidence of an employee/employer relationship:
a. payer (Vector)can scrutinize or control the work (ie. if your sales are low you must come in for more training, you must stick to the script).
b. The worker receives direction or training on how to do the work. No brainer here folks Vector offers the training.
Tools and equipment: the contractor pays for his own tools. This is the one aspect they follow
Financial risk: You bear the risk of loss, this is a grey area but there are definite evidences of an employee-employer relationship;
a. Payer (vector) is not responsible for operating costs. Part of the guaranteed $20/hour is a reimbursement for fuel or travel costs
b. You are compensated regardless of whether or not you make a sale.
c. Payer determines pay: They have fixed percentage commissions depending on your sales level.
Investment: to be a contractor their must be a capital investment
yes there is a small investment in the knives…
Opportunity for profit/risk of loss:
Evidence of violation: the $20 guaranteed compensation almost reduces your opportunity to have a business loss. Interestingly, their guarantee is also their undoing.
The employee-employer relationship is frequently taken to court in class action lawsuits in the US. Vector ends up paying for the training. These rules for determining if you are an independent contractor are similar for the Canada Revenue Agency in Canada and the Internal Revenue Service in the US. If you’re really disgruntled you can take Vector to court and probably win!
4. You will be an entrepreneur: Entrepreneurs are self motivated and hard working, which many sales people are as well. Being self motivated doesn’t make you an entrepreneur. You can be self motivated and be a cashier, it doesn’t make you an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship is about innovation, finding a market need and filling it. Selling knives with Vector is about selling knives in a controlled way that you have no say over. You need to stick to the script and if you don’t sell they come to your appointments to make sure you’re following the script. If you found a better way to sell knives they wouldn’t let you do it. They also don’t help you learn the ropes of managing other aspects of a business such as financial and accounting, which every entrepreneur needs to know. They use the word entrepreneur because it sounds better than sales rep.
Lots of jobs have unsavory parts to them, but many companies are transparent about it. Auditing firms have a reputation of low pay and long hours, yet accounting majors will kill each other to get a position with one. You just need to ask yourself if you are willing to work for a company that lies to and misinforms their staff and the government. Lots of these lies seems to be a failure to understand basic definitions. It could be argued that Vector doesn’t intentionally lie, but rather there comprehension of the English language is on par with most trained monkeys. Either they’re stupid or they’re liars but one thing is for sure they are not honest.
I left a resume with Vector at the career fair last year. The next day they called me back and left a voicemail asking to set up an interview. Before calling them back I did a quick google search of the company and found many postings that made me very uncomfortable, so I decided just to not call them back at all. They called me around 6-8 times over the next two weeks, and I returned none of their calls. What they told me at the career fair and what they really do were two totally different things!
They report that you are doing much better in sales then you are . Exploitation
In regards to Emma, you filled out an application. Which generally exhibits an interest in the job. If you receive a call, you call them back and inform them that you are no longer interested point blank. They will keep calling simply because they believe you’re interested and they are just calling at bad times. That was your own fault, they were just trying to give you a fair chance.
And everything in this is incorrect. Kaity Brown did a completely inaccurate, biased report. Bad journalism