In the beginning we hired this company to do a painting analysis and service for the inside of our home. The work was adequate so we asked if they did interior and landscape design; they said they did. We decided to hire them to choose and purchase ceiling lighting for each room in the house; to choose and implement window coverings for each room; and, to design and follow through with a landscape for a small backyard. This is where the problems started. First, Citron’s “statement of understanding” of how they do business was 100% in their favor. The initial retainer was $8,000. As soon as they received this money their “terms and conditions” for working started. But as stated, it was all in their favor. For example, if you needed to communicate with them and called or emailed, they charged you for the time spent answering your email or phone call; therefore, effectively cutting off communication unless you wanted to pay them to talk to you. They also promised an update email each week on their progress; however, we never got these. When we would finally call to find out what Citron was doing with our $8,000, we were billed for it. To make matters worse, we paid to find out the reason our job had not progressed was they had been busy with other projects. In today’s business world, it has always been our experience that communication with a client is a given courtesy, not something for which we are charged. There were other problems but the list is too long as the above is just an example.
If you want to pay $8,000 to a company and get absolutely nothing for it, this is the company to go to. It took two and a half months to get any kind of “plan” from this company. When the “plan” was presented, they had forgotten (or ignored) a number of crucial points we included in our requests to them. What they did present was so far off of what was suitable for our home, we wondered between ourselves if they had given us someone else’s presentation. When it was clear to us that there had been no progress toward a useable design, either inside or outside, we stopped the project and demanded an accounting of what was spent. Amazingly, the bill came to almost the full $8,000. We actually had to call back and request some materials be sent to us that we had paid for and were greeted with a surly, angry staffer who was rude, insulting, less than cooperative and who told us “you have no reason to be angry.” Overall, we wasted $8,000 of our retirement funds, received absolutely nothing of value for those funds, and had the additional aggravation of being insulted by a project manager who clearly had not shown any real interest in our project from the beginning. So the “How did it go overall” answer is that it didn’t. By the way, the original paint job was also never completed. In our opinion this company earns a huge “Buyer Beware”!!
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