Recently got a call, asking for the owner. The caller used the common nickname based on Owner's formal name ("Dan" for "Dannel"), however the owner goes by his middle name - so I knew it was a sales call.
The caller knew some things about the business, but nothing some one couldn't get from the internet, and search on local business. They used vague language promising that they had some one that might want to buy our type of business. Very Vague.
They tried very, very hard to get us enrolled in a day seiner, so I agreed and begun to search the internet. March Group is a scam, while they claim they have never been sued, a quick google search proves otherwise.
The March Group uses about a dozen web sites to flood search engines with fake positive news to push down the results of any negative information.
TheMarchgroup.net
TheMarchgroup.com
The-Marchgroup.org
The-Marchgroup.net
TheMarch-group.org
and on and on it goes.
They also appear to use linking services to boost their results in site like google and yahoo.
No real Merger and acquisitions asks for fees upfront, they make money on the back end. The March Group, is a scam and fraud that targets small to medium size business owners, avoid dealing with them.
It took some time but I found the article below. It has been pulled from the site it was once on, but Google cache still has it.
A gentleman called me last week and said he’s a recently departed executive of The March Group. He said The March Group runs a scam. A boiler room. That he worked there and became intricately familiar with the operations. He said The March Group has collected over 400 up-front fee retainers (from 400 business owners wishing to be sold) over the past two years totaling over $22 million in up front fees — and have sold just 6 or 7 of them.
Here are some of his comments:
- The people that started the front end of The March Group’s boiler room came from Geneva Companies and/or Equico. (By way of background, Geneva was a company that pioneered the seminar-based up-front fee collection scam business model in the 1980s and earned hundreds of millions of dollars before suffered a class action lawsuit. The founder and owner of Geneva, and many of the Geneva employees, then set up Equico (late 1980’s), which implemented the same business model as Geneva.)
- George E. Gifford, Chairman of The March Group, always wanted to be like Geneva (because the model makes a lot of money).
- Few March Group executives have any experience in M&A.
- In the month of April alone, The March Group collected 70 fees from 70 companies.
- The March Group convinces business owners they are going to sell for top dollar, hoodwinks them into believing The March Group is an internationally recognized top M&A firm, and all they want to do is collect the up-front fees.
- The March Group has maybe 70 total employees, 50 of which are telemarketers and the bulk of the balance put on the seminars.
- The March Group claims to have offices all over the world, but they’re basically telemarketers working out of their homes.
- They don’t really care if they sell any businesses.
- They are not a very clean outfit. They’re very dishonest. Not gangsters, just unethical.
- Terry Dilbert, VP of Sales, runs the March Group boiler room. He has no M&A experience. His background is convincing people to go to motivational speaker meetings. His second in command has a background in multi-level marketing, not M&A.
- They get some bad press but attempt to burry it with their releases of information.
He went on to say, “People like this is what’s wrong with this country. They’re greedy. They couldn’t care less about some things. They misrepresent what they are doing.”
The caller would not tell us his name and said he has sued The March Group on another matter.