"Terrible experience": Agency Media had problems long before president's firing, clients say

Mary Kehler was excited about starting her new business.

She’d just invented a new product for infant safety and decided to start selling baby products to raise enough money to proceed through the patent process.

She contracted Fraser Valley-based Agency Media in 2021 to build a website for her business and said it quoted her $12,000 with a six-week completion timeframe.

But a year-and-a-half later, she still didn’t have a workable website.

In the meantime, the cost of storing her merchandise in a Richmond warehouse had grown to thousands of dollars — and she had no hope of recouping her losses with the revenue from selling it. The delay had effectively killed her business and cost her and her partner somewhere between $25,000 and $30,000.

“It decimated it,” Kehler said. “We never got a website. They couldn’t build it. They didn’t have the skillset or the talent at the company.”

In that year and a half of waiting for a website, Kehler said her calls would be bounced around to different employees amid high turnover, and that at one point her credit card was double charged.

In the end, she asked for her money back, which Agency didn’t agree to — it only gave her a free photoshoot and business coaching, which she said hasn’t been useful.

“When you’re paying for a product, you know, you have to provide a product,” Kehler said. “If you go to buy a wedding dress for a wedding in April, and you go in end of March and there’s not a wedding dress for you — they need to give you your money back so you can get one elsewhere.”

She’s one of several former clients and workers with Agency Media who are speaking out following the firing of its president, Joel MacDonald. He was terminated after former client Annette Andersson publicly shared an email where he called her sexist slurs after she demanded a refund in a similar situation.

Four former employees and two clients Daily Hive has spoken with say that wasn’t an isolated incident. They say there was a mismatch between sales deals and the development team’s ability to make the websites promised which frequently led to disappointed clients. They say the company kept signing new clients despite challenges delivering products and services.

Kemp Edwards was another client of Agency’s who says he didn’t get what he paid for. He owns several companies and hired Agency to rebuild his website. It was a beefy project, involving client login access, a unit management system, and a refresh of the brand.

But a year later, Edwards said none of his deliverables had materialized.

“Finally I was like, ‘You guys have withdrawn all the money but I’ve got nothing,'” he said. “It was a terrible experience.”

Edwards had spent about $12,000 with Agency on the website, and after going back and forth was able to get $5,500 back. Now, he’s speaking out to protect other business owners from going through the same struggle.

“I happen to be in a position where… I’m a big enough business. I can handle that,” he said. “But imagine if $5,000 is all you’ve ever had to launch your business. And they just took that $5,000 and blew it away?”

Employees Daily Hive has spoken with on both the sales side and the development side say sales reps were pressured to sell products and services, despite pushback from clients who weren’t happy.

One employee from the development side told Daily Hive the scope of projects promised was often way off what the team could deliver — he alleged he saw website and application builds that he estimated should cost six figures promised for just over $10,000.

Andrew Westlund, CEO of Agency Media, told Daily Hive that both Kehler and Edwards’ contracts came at a time when the company was working with pandemic staffing levels and facing operational challenges.

He added Agency took steps to try to rectify both situations, pointing to the photo and video material provided to Kehler and the “considerable time” spent on Edwards’ project before the 50% refund was issued.

Westlund said he’s grateful the concerns are being brought forward and is taking the former clients’ concerns seriously.

“In hindsight, we should have done a better job of communicating our resource limitations in a timely fashion,” Westlund said. “We fully acknowledge how frustrated and disappointed they felt, and for that, we apologize and recommit to dedicating ourselves to meeting our client obligations in a timely fashion”

He added he’s grateful the concerns are being brought forward and is taking the former clients’ concerns seriously.

Agency Media was thrust into the spotlight last month when Andersson shared an email on LinkedIn from former president Joel MacDonald. The Agency executive called Andersson a “c*nt” and a “fat b*tch.”

“I was shocked,” she said. “I kind of froze up.”

LinkedIn

Andersson ended up getting her money back after filing a complaint with BC’s Better Business Bureau, and had an outpouring of support from other media agencies after her post on LinkedIn was widely shared. She’s confident now she’ll get the website she wanted.

“I just hope Agency Media comes out better from this,” Andersson said. “There’s always a possibility to improve.”

Agency Media is part of the Westlund Group of Companies, a group of nine businesses owned by Andrew Westlund. The complaints discussed in this article centre on only Agency Media. The group’s other endeavours include mobile phone retailer Apex Wireless, a helicopter company, Vynil Labs, Fluid medi-spa and wellness academy, Otter Lake resort, Coastal Drone Co., and Canadian Internet Marketing Conference.