Waiving red flags.... - Patient Advocate BioXcellerator Employee Review

This place screams red flags everywhere. Felt like I was living in a sad twisted sitcom, where every episode got more bizarre. Inside joke in the office was we thought this all might end up on an episode of American greed. The company breaks down into 3 different structures... US management, Colombian medical, and Colombian scientific. The Colombian scientific team that produce the stem cells appeared to be competent until recently. The company advertised that they are a GMP certified facility, which they are not. Which means their clean room was possibly contaminated for years. I had a large number of patients report side effects. The company had a habit of obfuscating the actual risk of the treatment, it wasn’t until I was hearing from other Reps of the side effects all our patients were suffering from including temporary paralysis, major pain and death. At first I had confidence in the stem cells we used. By the time I left I had no confidence to accept a treatment myself at a severely discount rate, even possibly free. One employee described the stem cell procedure as "more painful than childbirth". I was pretty astonished when the clinic immediately blamed the rep for her pain, saying that she was a bad patient who didn’t do everything they asked. The Colombian medical staff is in total disarray. Revolving door of unqualified junior doctors. There is only one doctor who has had any experience with stem cells outside of this company, and even they are unable to perform very basic medical procedures like ultrasound guidance. The doctors get their training in the rural areas of Colombia, where that equipment is not available. Even scarier is the fact that the lead physician had zero experience with stem cells before this job. A very strange person who believes they can talk to animals, dead or alive, they seem to me to be more interested in treating animals instead of people. Even giving latitude for the cultural differences, I found them widely inappropriate in a number of workplace scenarios. Because there is no HR department at biox, you are not allowed to say anything to them or about what they do. Anyone that did was severely reprimanded or fired. It is a company expectation to not criticize in any way these highly unqualified Drs, regardless of their level of mistakes. I had a list of qualified, ready to pay patients, completely do a 180 after speaking with the doctors. One patient specifically told me, "I’ll move forward as long as that doctor is no where near me"... many others had similar statements. I had one patient, who was a Dr themself, say that their consultation process was the most unprofessional thing they had seen in 40 years of medicine. Obviously, as a sales rep, this makes sales very difficult so you need to be prepared as it happens across the whole staff. The scariest part about this company’s incompetence is when it ends up hurting people. The clinic doesn't have a nursing staff to help with patient care during non-clinical hours. So they sub it out to a contractor in Colombia. One of the "nurses" robbed a spinal cord injury patient in his hotel while he was suffering massive side effects from the treatment. The company tried to hide it from us and when it was brought up they blamed the nursing company they subbed it out to. Employees who were patients were recommended the exact same nurse just before this happened. Its astonishing the lengths they went to in order to avoid treating members of the company. One employee had a medical condition arise leading to severe pain. They asked for 3 months what they needed to do in order to receive a treatment, which had potential to help what they were dealing with. They received no response for months, while in agonizing pain, with repeated inquires. When they did finally get a response, they were told they needed to pay for treatment at a discount. Even though the company had given other employees a treatment at no cost. Another rep was a patient before they became an employee, and was promised a return treatment for free when they began working for the company. Stem cells had helped them previously so they wanted to continue the treatment to deal with the chronic physical ailment…and the company totally GHOSTED the employee. After the first treatment fully wore off, the company left the employee to work in agonizing pain for months. It was a truly cruel thing to watch. The rep ended up having to walk away from the position because of their physical pain. The US management team is manipulative, abrasive, and lack basic morals. It's a completely toxic environment. The list below is just snippets of moments that were captured after working for this company multiple years. In order to evade any basic level of accountability, there is zero HR at this company One obvious reason for no HR is they do monitor your computer through Spyware (AnyDesk remote Desktop) and have gone as far as using personal contacts within Facebook to hack and view personal apps of employees (whatsapp). Only reason employees know about it is because the CMO bragged about it in a team meeting. Company uses very deceptive marketing. Example. Multiple online documents the company puts out claiming that stem calls can cure cancer or "replace cancer cells with normal cells." In fact the company doesn't even accept patients who have cancer or patients who have had it in the last 5 years, because its a risk to make the cancer worse. The company has already had a cease and desist letter from the FDA about their marketing campaign around covid. Hard to know how they put out claims like this when the company kept zero efficacy data. The numbers they do use are from a different company and they agreed to purchase their patient data and now they use that. From a sales job perspective one of the biggest concerns is there is no transparency in the lead distribution. Multiple employees questioned this practice early in my employment, but at the time it was pure conjecture. But they refused to be transparent. After another rep quit because of the work conditions, the CMO admitted to me they made him quit by turning off their lead flow, leaving them only with garbage leads to work. The CMO then proceeded to threaten that they would do the same to me. Obviously if you can turn off the leads you can turn them on. Be aware there is massive amount of favoritism within the sales staff and management. If you are considering this position and know any of the management team, you should accept the position because you can be given a top of the funnel lead flow. This is evident with several reps. One of the reps was hand picked because they worked with the CMO on multiple occasions in the past. This rep had no clue what they were doing and still within a few months they were a top producer at the company. It made zero sense as patients were calling in asking specifically to be transferred from this person, to someone who actually knows what they are talking about. This rep admitted in a team meeting to not knowing how to do the job and within 10 days they were at the top of the sales board. We found out a couple months later the CMO who had previously worked with the rep, was spending their time closing deals for them. Something they did for no one else. Additionally, I discovered that another employee was closing deals for them as well. The other employee had in their contract that they should be paid for assistance in closing any opportunities, which the company backed out on. They instead handed the full commission the preferred rep who was friends with the CMO. For almost a year the company ran a "monthly sales contest." I put them in quotes because the company never once actually gave anyone anything. Most of the time they wouldn't even tell you what you would get.. just some nebulous offer.. One month they said it would be a weekend get away.. the rep who won had the audacity to ask for the prize. The company told them to book a weekend in Sedona and they would reimburse their expenses for the trip.. 6 months later and multiple requests for the money, they still have not been reimbursed for the vacation they only took because it was supposed to have been won. Of the people that have left the company, every single one had money they were owed from the company. One rep even had their Christmas bonus check voided because they quit a few days after the company Christmas party. The reason for quitting was because they gave out $500 bonuses at the party Saturday night, and when we open our email Monday morning every rep had over $1,000 in random fines that had never been leveed before and were no where in the contract. Things like "didn't notate CRM system properly - $250 fine". Unfortunately, these consistent mental abuses led that rep to quit, and burned out many others. They voided the Christmas bonus after giving it to them 3-4 days earlier, then also didn’t pay the rep the 11k they owned in commissions for that month as well. Don’t forget this was 2020, a year in which the sales staff outright saved the company by selling through a global pandemic while Colombia was not even able to accept patients. If you’re the type of person that has no problem telling half truths, or outright lies, to extremely sick people begging for a miracle, for big money, then this is the place for you. We were advised to “be creative, use other peoples stories as your own”. One rep was caught using blatant lies about their experience at the clinic (they had never been) in a call review. There wasn’t even the smallest denouncing of the behavior and overall they were praised as an excellent storyteller. When I brought up the fact I though it was bad business to sell outright lies in a private call after the meeting, I was moved out of my position within a week into a lower paying grunt work position because "my integrity was keeping me from overcoming objections". A few more small but rather poignant examples of their lack of morality would be asking the patient reps to filter out any lead who was a native born Colombian. We were essentially told to discriminate and not accept any Colombian nationals through the sales process. The only exception was if they were living in Colombia, but from a different country, where they would presumably be able to afford the treatment and not be a headache trying to get reimbursements through the national healthcare plan. The other amazing example is when the country of Colombia shut down the border for anyone who is unvaccinated. The company immediately let everyone know that fake passports will probably let people get through, airports don’t really check that well. But when we were instructed to bring it up to patients, we were told that we should do so in a careful way and we should do it from our personal email accounts, not the company’s email. I found it pretty audacious to ask a sales rep to tell a prospect to forge a government document, and do it from your personal email account so it doesn’t come back to the company. The work conditions are abysmal. If you live in phoenix, you will be forced to be at the office everyday, even though there are multiple reps that work remote across the country. Office is full of disgusting stains, dark offices, and cockroach infested bathrooms. Company said for years we would be moving into a new state of the art building yet still haven’t moved, and they just expanded where they are. Your boss, the CMO, is the only person you would need at the office to help you, but is never there, because he works from home even though he lives locally. You also don’t have to work in the office if your related to management as the operations director’s son is the only other Arizona based employee that I never saw come into the office. The operations director is the only support at the office, and they are very difficult to work with. Constantly nagging you over details of your email grammar while they completely ignore some other legit requests or emails that you have pending for weeks. The operations director personally delayed and gave excuse after excuse as to why my personal employment contract couldn’t be signed for months. They always had some terrible excuse for why you didn’t get what you needed, but was furious when they didn’t have what they wanted right away. I even remember them saying “never call me on a weekend, but if I call you, you need to make sure you answer or call me back immediately.” This personified the closed door atmosphere of the company. There are basically no SOP documents, and no training of any kind in this position. I mean literally zero training, you are on your own. They tell everyone to go watch some of their manicured testimonial videos. If your lucky you’ll get a half day with the CMO and then hit the phones. The process for moving a contact through the selling process is unbelievably nuanced and complex, and again none of it is written down. Yet, you will be fined if you do it wrong. The last warning I would give anyone thinking of working here perfectly personifies how they treat people. A patient with a heart condition, has a consultation with Junior doctors about their heart condition. Our doctors told him they could help and wrote a treatment plan around $20,000. Before he could be “fully” accepted, they needed to get additional test on their heart. Once the test came back, the doctors changed their opinion, and it was determined that the procedure was unsafe for the patient. Instead of refunding the patient the money for a procedure they could not preform, they decided to only give him roughly $5,000 back and they kept the rest of the money for the company in the form of “fees”. Items like this are not isolated. They also have refused to refund a patient, while admitting that the refund request was valid, but they did force the rep who sold the deal to give their commission money back to the company immediately. My overall thoughts on this company is they are in business for the wrong reasons. Their goal is to produce a high generating income facility and to sell it for top dollar, not to build cutting edge medical technology and help heal people. They obviously do not care about people at all (employees or patients), even though they are dealing with some of the sickest people you can imagine at the worst points in their lives. This behavior is persistent throughout the management team and ownership, and they could care less about you as an employee or person. know that you will be defined by the amount of $ you bring in for the company and nothing else.