Good afternoon everyone. This is my first post to the forums but I have had an experience that I felt should be shared and that I hope will prevent others from making the same costly mistake. I have been in the inspection business for the past 15 years though I have recently been expanding and restructuring. I have 8 inspectors who work for me and I run what I consider a medium sized operation in the eastern Nebraska area. Over the course of the years I have taken on additional certifications and inspection offerings for my clients as things start to get requested. I do not know the cause or what has changed but over the past 6 months I have had more and more requests for Lead Based Paint Inspections. So I decided to get licensed, as required in my state, to be able to do complete lead inspections, to see if it would be profitable or not. Now the problem and costly mistake I have encountered is not with offering Lead Inspections, but with the vendor I have chosen for my training. I was notified by a company of which I had inquired, that they would have a last minute initial lead inspector training in my city. I was notified less than three weeks prior to when the class would be held, but seeing how the training is very difficult to attain, at least in my state, I enrolled for a fee of $600.00, for three days of training. Of course as a business owner and active inspector, things changed. The week before my scheduled lead course a good client and continued customer came to me with an issue that my company can help him out with, more specifically, me, as my other inspectors lack the necessary licensure. I contacted the lead training company, META Environmental, based out of Lawrence, Kansas, to try and cancel my enrollment. I was informed that they can cancel my enrollment but will not be refunding me any of the $600.00 I have already paid to them. They cited their policy that for a refund they need 21 days notice for cancellation, even though 21 days ago this training class did not exist. The owner of the company compared them to the airlines with how their cancellations work, which is nothing to boast about, and was incredibly rude and unwilling to refund me the amount I have paid for the training course. Thankfully I was the only one enrolled for the training and I had not paid for any of my other employees to take it at this time. META Environmental operates in many states and shows up as a top result in most search engine results for anyone seeking “initial lead inspector training”. I am writing this as a warning to anyone looking to add lead inspections. Losing $600.00 for my company is an undesireable and unwanted event, but for smaller inspection companies or individuals, losing $600.00 could be a massive loss. META Environmental offers trainings for Mold, Lead, Asbestos, and others. But please heed my advice if you are seeking additional environmental inspection training. Working with META Environmental was a horrible choice and had someone warned me out them as I am doing for all of you, I would have avoided this.
I have a same story for any of you contractors out there.
NEVER DO BUSINESS WITH EXAM PREP1 in South Florida.
The phone girl is great the hired teacher is great the owner is a rotten piece of sh-t that will rip you off in a second and actually tell you how about you go fu-k yourself when you tell him what it would take to make you happy after spending 7 hours in his sh-thole of an office / school while he sells you and makes you do the work for a course he is not qualified to teach. He said if I wanted to wait for his approval it should be in abut 6 months. He told me he was going to beat my a-s if I showed up to discuss it with him. Thank Goodness I was on the other side of the State or i would have gotten locked up. Just remember Rob the owner is total SCUM and will rip you off at his first chance. Here is the link so you do not make the same mistake as I did:
Several questions OR thoughts … You signed up for a course, then one of your customers asked you to do an inspection (or something similar) AND instead of saying to the customer … “So sorry already booked and NOT available those 3 days BUT we can do it here OR there”. … You voluntarily decided to blow off the class. What exactly with 8 inspectors does Nebraska have licensing in THAT nobody else but YOU could do. AND if it was that important, I’m betting the customer could have rolled it back a day or 2.
I don’t know about the whole $600, but if you were a student of mine, I’d keep at least $200 for the inconvenience you had voluntarily caused us.