Deceiving Med Recruiters on MedReps: Bob Hutch & Peter Dowd from Healthco Search

I just saw two Acell positions posted for Georgia from Healthco Search a.k.a. Peter Dowd & Bob Hutchinson.

Anyone looking into these positions or any others posted around the country PLEASE BEWARE!!!!!! The comp plan posted is a complete lie. Below is the description of the position that was posted from www.medreps.com along with some facts to follow regarding Acell

description posted: Jan 10th, 2013

Surgical OR Sales
Savannah, Georgia | Sales | Medical Devices | $180K - $240K

Compensation:
$180,000 - $240,000
Comp Type: Salary + Commission
Salary: $60,000 - $70,000
Bonus ---
Commission
$120,000 - $170,000
Auto package: None
Travel: 10 - 20%
Benefits: Full Medical Dental Etc $1200/ mo expiences

Description:
Looking for 5+ Years Surgical OR device sales exp.
Main focus General Surgeons, GYN, Urol, Plastics, Wound.
Selling cutting edge Biologic
Base salary to start then move to 100% comm
Target territory to sell 2 mill generating 280K W2's
Full benefits etc.

The facts about Acell!!!

80%++ of the salesforce is making less than 90K/year AND have to pay for their own car, cell phone, etc. You would think that if the comp plan is 180K-240, a rough year puts you at $140-$150... not $75k wit zero car allowance.

MORE FACTS ABOUT ACELL!!!

#1 Product is good, not great. Works well in many case types, but unproven in many situations. More studies are needed.

#2 Acell managers direct you to present information regarding non FDA approved procedures. One thing in common with the top 20% of sales force is that they promote off label procedures.

#3 The guy running the salesforce is in over his head. He has experience as a distributor in Texas. Distributorship models are not used in "real" medical device companies and Texas is verrrrrry different than the rest of the country when it comes Med Device Sales.

#4 Reimbursment is a joke. No outpatient or office based procedures are reimbursed. The DRGs for inpatient surgery dont qualify the majority of the time. They will tell you that they now have Q codes for office based procedures, but they don't get reimbursed.

#5 Absolutely the worst sales tools: Many of the powerpoint picture presentations do not show patients completely heeled.

#6 We have no clinical data, sorry one wound care study of 31 patients. Surgeons are reluctant to experiment on humans, so no data to support claims means Surgeons are stearing clear.

#7 Six reps in the country made $150+ in 2012. Over 80 reps reps made less than $85K. NO car allowance, NO cell phone reimbursement, NO stock options. Overall salesforce compensation is embarrasing.

If you are looking into this position. I beg you to reach out to some current & former Acell reps via Linkedin to get a true feel about the company and dig deep during your interview.

Good luck, I hope you don't make the same mistake that I did by joining Acell. Hopefully I will be gone in the next three months.

(For Bob and Peter.....please stop posting this bullsh_t to try and make a few grand. Over the past year and a half you should have learned by now that this information regarding this position isn't true. Take a look at yourself and think of the families you are hurting by your deceiving postings)

Yours Truly,
Deceived Acell Rep

 

Got a call from Bob last year when I knew nothing about Acell. I had worked with Bob in the past and was excited about the opportunity. It took all of two phone calls and a look on this message board to figure out it was not what they were making it out to be. I emailed him back and said that I was willing to take a meeting with them to learn more, however word on the street is that they are a hot mess. Never heard back. It made me angry that I had worked with him in the past and he would try to sell me on this POS job. Does he even have a clue or simply not care? And recruiters wonder why we feel that 90% of them are sleazy used car salespeople.

 

Pete is the worst. Total liar and would sell his mother's soul for a dollar. Hey Acell when are you going to learn that working with that unethical fraud is not working for your or helping staff your company properly?

 

you sound miserable. why are you still there? my advice is to quit and focus your time, resources, and efforts on finding a new job.

 

Agree with everything in original post! Acell is NOT a good place to work! It's not a place to make money! It's an absolute disaster and everyone needs to know! Spread the word.

 

Sure, someone should just quit their job in this economy and current state of medical device because a new good one is so easy to find. Are you fucking retarded? What dumbass quits a job before they find a new one? I don't even work for Acell. I come on this thread occasionally because I find it amusing and it makes me feel a little bit better about my own current medical sales situation. It is not that easy right now to not only find a new job in medical device but more importantly the RIGHT job. They are few and far between right now and there are an inordinate amount of talented and qualified people competing for them. You should commend this person for trying to pay it forward and save someone else from their current misery. This could have been me they were trying to help when I got a recruiter call about Acell last year. Jackass.

 

I agree. It's easy for someone to say "Just leave". Even if they are saying it in a nice way, it is not that easy, especially when the tenure here is so short.

As for the opportunity, half of the sales force is making under $60K a year. If you think that is not the truth, then do the math. 110 reps and $4 million in sales per month = $36K in sales per rep per month. 14% of $36K is a commission of $5,000 per month. This is the AVERAGE, which means half the reps are well under that. Why do you think people are jumping so fast?

No sales reports come out and no stack rankings either.

 

Pete Dowd has a terrible reputation. The biggest BS artist in the business. Bad person

 

so, on one hand acell is the devil incarnate, evil, blah blah blah; and on the other hand, this is a bad economy and someone should stay there and be greatful for the job they have? which is it? seems to me that staying somewhere one is miserable isn't a very good strategy. and if they stay b/c they 'have to' to pay the bills or whatever, then they should be greatful for what they have (particularly in this economy as you aptly pointed out), and try and make the best of it.

as for ' don't work at acell', its very clear to me that you did or still do. noone in the world just casually 'drops by' this ridiculous blog, and checks in on a company as small as acell for shits and giggles. that would be a really sad state refection non their life if they did. its pretty clear to me from the ad nauseum reptition on this blog 'no reimbursement!' 'i was lied to!' 'X% of the reps make Y!' 'off label!' that its just the same disgruntled rep (or ex rep) posting over and over and over again. sounds to me they don't have a lot to do, and have an axe to grind. most people don't harbor that much resentment towards anything, let alone a medical device company, lol

 

You are lying to yourself if you think that this entire board is made up by one rep. The reason people are upset is that this whole company is a classic "bait and switch", we were trained and told one thing only to find out the job is totally different than we were told.
We have no codes so why have a reimbursement department? That's got to be the easiest job in the world!

 

again, if you could actually prove that someone told you upon hire that the reimbursement situation for woundcare was great, that would be something. you can't. i went through same hire and training process, i know. surgery has reimbursement. that's why we spend our time trying to book hernia cases in the OR. sometimes, depending on the affiliation of the woundcare clinic and/or the location of the clinic (depending on the medicare contractor) woundcare clinics have reimbursement too. sometimes docs use it anyhow regardless, b/c its the only thing that works. you just have to be a hunter and figure out what works for you in your territory. as for salary, it's a pure commission gig. its not rocket science. if you make sales you will do well. if you don't, you won't. in this economy, i'm not complaining. i'll bust ass and try and make good money. some months i do, some i don't. but the 'bait and switch' argument is tired. it sounds like someone who is frustrated trying to blame their failures on others. i don't blame them. that's what happens when you're disgruntled. but what's the alternative? sit unemployed on the street? go to some mega company that will lay you off after you make too much money or due to a 'merger'. been there, no thanks.

 

Are you high or just stupid?
I went through training and was told which codes to use, was given letters of medical neccesities and told to "fight the fight". Guess what? In the majority of states it does not get reimbursed. Yes we have codes but they are worthless since most LCD's will not pay for a product w/o clinical trials. Even at NSM in Vegas they were telling us to use the exact same codes. Is that not lying?
In the "OR" you get paid? Paid for what? You get paid, the Hospital does not if it is outpatient. Please educate the rest of us as to exactly how you are getting your accounts reimbursed?
DRG bump is all we got and even that doesn't work all the time AND it's for a procedure not ACell. This company would be much further ahead if they had just told us the truth instead of sending us out to piss off accounts when they discovered that they were not going to get reimbursed. Many stories of reps getting thrown out of hospitals after massive invoices start rolling in.
ACell works and it will be a successful company once this management is gone but only if a whistleblower does topple the whole thing before we get to that point.

 

being told to use codes in hopes of getting reimbursed is not a 'lie', nor is it a 'bait and switch'. it's simply instructing you on ways that you MAY get paid. neither i nor anyone i've ever worked with has thought we had a good chance on getting paid in the wound clinics (though as i mentioned above, some actually do, for a variety of reasons including wound clinics owned by hospitals, cases where nothing else works, and/or certain geographic areas where LCDs pay).

the company's revenues are real. if OR cases weren't getting reimbursed the revenues would not exist. the money is coming from somewhere, right? reimbursement in the wound care side is not the end all be all for a platform technology with such broad indications.

again, what i'm amazed at is the logic behind continuously logging to a blog to publicly cry and bitch about one's state of affairs. it seems it would be more productive to either leave and get another job, or stay here and make the best of it. to stay on board because "its a bad economy," and then constantly complain about the hand that feeds you in said bad economy is ridiculous.

 

I ma new to this thread, but I have to call you out on your statement about getting reimbursed. How does "being owned by the hospital" affect reimbursement in a wound center? Answer: it doesn't. Also, your assumption that hospitals will use it "because nothing else works" is bogus. Matristem is good, but no different than any other product efficacy wise. If it was, we would have data that would have proven it by now. In addition, we WERE told that we were being reimbursed. Don't you remember the April 2nd announcement that we are now being reimbursed?

The chances of success are limited here. The stars basically have to align. If you have a hospital system that tracks new products or has any clue about reimbursement or the DRG, they will call you out. No hospital is going to take a loss because a couple surgeons want it and there were a couple incomplete cases on an Ipad.

 

"Broad indications"??? Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahaahahahahahahahahahahah!

 

don't give me the 'i may new to this thread' bs. i know its you, it always is. anyhow, you can't have data if you don't have clinical trials. clinical trials cost money, and acell hasn't completed any yet. therefore, doctors who do use matristem in critical situations use it when nothing else works, because from their perspective in their own clinical experience, it actually does work when other things have failed. why? the technology is superior. it's that simple. doctors don't have to use anything they don't want to use. despite all the reimbursement headaches etc., they still use the product and use it more and more with every passing year. you think they use it b/c of iPads? hell no. they use it from seeing it work themselves, and hearing from their colleagues (and nurses, etc.) that it works.

why do you think acell was involved in patent litigation for so many years? you think other competitor companies spend hundreds of thousands, if not millions, to keep matristem off the market b/c the technology sucked? think again.

and again, reimbursement isn't the only factor a hospital considers. it also considers metrics like length of stay, patient outcomes, keeping their docs happy, PR, etc.

again, i like to take you back to your motivations. what could possibly possess you to sit on this blog over and over again and go back and forth with anonomously with a stranger about some small company in maryland? seems suspect to me. move on with your life. you may enjoy it more.

 

yes. broad indications. have you ever read the indications for use statement? do you know what platform technologies entail? no wonder your sales are in the toilet. you can't sell what you don't even understand yourself. especially to docs who are no dummies. this is not some hip implant or pacemaker or suture that has one specific role and use in one part of the body. read the indications statement some time. you may learn something and generate sales while you're at it.

 

I can assure you that I do NOT work at Acell. Get over yourself. I read this thread occasionally for my own amusement. I also am fairly entertained by the KCI thread and Intuitive surgical, but can honest say that this must be the most dysfunctional fucked up place to work out of the other threads I follow. I found this thread when I was contacted about a job at Acell last year by Bob Hutchison you fucking moron. It took all of 10 seconds of reading to turn around and run. I now come back and read occasionally to follow your ongoing saga while I am taking a shit like I am now. If you hear the same thing 50 times there is usually some truth to it.

 

Hahahahaha! You crack me up with your ignorance. Except that won't help when people figure out that surgical sheets don't have the indications. Oops, the cat is out of the bag.

 

Hahahahaha! You crack me up with your ignorance. Except that won't help when people figure out that surgical sheets don't have the indications. Oops, the cat is out of the bag.