Muriel T.
High-ticket marketing machine with zero empathy, generic advice, and severe lack of support
I joined Contrarian Community in September 2025 and Growth Boardroom in January 2026. Despite my full commitment and hard work, this high-ticket program has proven to be a costly failure due to systemic operational flaws and a total lack of expert execution support. As a professional digital marketer, I quickly identified that the marketing portion of this curriculum consists of generic, surface-level advice. It offers no advanced strategy or real expertise. The operational reality of the program includes: 1. Repetitive Advisory & Low Cadence: The advisory support is severely lacking. My first advisor merely repeated my own directions back to me. After escalating, my second advisor tended to extract strategies directly from me; when asked what had worked in the past, I mentioned interviews, and his subsequent advice was simply telling me to go do interviews. Furthermore, contact was restricted to just one call per month, which is entirely inadequate for a program of this price point. 2. Lack of Tangible Execution Support: The program's leadership attempts to take credit for outcomes achieved entirely independently. I secured and delivered my own webinars, and wrote and launched my own book. When explicitly asking the team for concrete network introductions for the launch, the only response was an offer to review plans I had already completed. No actual introductions, leverage, or amplification followed. 3. Complete Lack of Executive Accountability: When I reached out directly to the founder, Codie Sanchez, via Slack to honestly explain that I was generating zero revenue, that the program did not fit a pre-revenue founder, and that my financing routes were legally closed due to my Green Card status, she completely ignored my message and never replied. 4. A Pattern of Backward Situations: Throughout my months in the program, everything ran backwards. When I asked for loan options compatible with a Green Card status, I got radio silence. The only thing that finally triggered a response was my refund request, to which they replied by approving me for an SBA loan—the exact financing route I had just explained was legally closed to me. Similarly, other teams promised to follow up with alternative state information and never did. 5. Zero Empathy and Pure Money Hunger: As an expat and foreigner whose English is my second language, I did not fully comprehend the predatory depth of the commitment I was signing into. I am a single mother in NYC, running a pre-revenue business, who invested heavily because I needed this to work. Instead of addressing their own service gaps or showing an ounce of human decency, the Growth Director (Mr. Hooper) ignored every single practical and personal point, simply hiding behind automated contract clauses (Sections 6.1, 7.2, 5.4, 5.7). After 7 months of being left to work substantially alone, the return on investment here is zero. Look past the polished marketing, the high-profile branding, and the fake community care. When you look under the hood, they are just running a corporate, money-hungry machine where human situations do not matter and operational support is non-existent. - UPDATE (Aug 26, 2026): Following my review, a program ambassador retaliated the next day with a malicious 1-star review on my Amazon book, admitting we share this group. He falsely accused me of plagiarism, which is absurd: my book advises business SELLERS, while their program focuses on BUYERS. He exploited a free copy I shared on Slack as a value contribution, where he previously left hostile critiques. This personal retaliation and conflict of interest was reported to Amazon. This money-focused model is a pattern. In May, a primary banking partner emailed me they were pushed out for ethically refusing to force referral commissions and inflate interest rates for clients. They were replaced by a broker willing to increase borrowing costs to pay the organization's margins. While I was systematically ghosted when needing support, they clearly have time for retaliation, deliver harsh critiques, and replace ethical partners to maximize margins. Proceed with caution.
Response from Contrarian ThinkingAug 18, 2026
Muriel, You're entitled to feel the programs didn't produce the outcome you wanted, and I'm sorry it ended that way. But since this is a public review making specific claims, I want to add context. You describe being left to work substantially alone with essentially no support. That doesn't match the record. You joined the Academy in September 2025, attended 49 events, and made 23 posts, 85 replies, 71 reactions. You worked through valuation, EBITDA/SDE, SBA financing, LOIs, diligence, and deal structure, reaching an accepted LOI with a bank underwriting it before walking away after diligence surfaced risks you weren't comfortable with. That's not a failure of the process, it's what good diligence should do. You later decided buying a business wasn't the right direction and asked to move into Growth Boardroom yourself. We made that change and kept working with you. Your own refund correspondence acknowledged you'd used the community, studied the materials, and attended calls and coaching sessions. You say the Boardroom cadence was inadequate and advisors just repeated things back to you. The record shows five working sessions with your reassigned advisor between June 19 and July 29, covering 10+ prospect interviews and 5-6 second-stage calls. Your advisor reviewed the interviews, refined your ICP and positioning, went line-by-line through your webinar, reviewed your sales materials and offer structure, evaluated your pipeline, and advised against a commission arrangement that wasn't economically attractive, plus follow-up on founder dependency, pricing, lead generation, and outreach. That didn't guarantee a customer. As of the last session, you hadn't signed a client. You also say we took credit for your webinar and book. We've never claimed that, those were your accomplishments. But you did use the Academy community while developing and launching The Valuation Gap, promoting it to members from late May through July. The book covers valuation, financing, and structural risk, the same subjects you spent months learning in Academy deal reviews. You're entitled to write a book from what you learned. It's fair for readers to know it was developed and promoted while you were an active member of that community. On the idea we only responded because you asked for a refund: your first request came in June, after months of participation. Support escalated it beyond standard policy, and your advisor was reassigned. On May 28, before any refund request, you asked us to turn off auto-renewal. We did so immediately and you replied, "That's great, thank you very much." When you later requested a full refund for both memberships, we reviewed it against the membership terms and declined. Declining doesn't mean we ignored your concerns. I don't want to minimize your disappointment. You invested real money and expected a different result. Those are real facts. But there's a difference between "I didn't get the outcome I wanted" and "there was no support, no engagement, no work done." The record shows 49 events, extensive engagement, multiple deal reviews, an LOI at bank underwriting, a member-requested move to Boardroom, additional advisory support, and hands-on webinar help. We can always improve, and we should. But we won't accept a public characterization that leaves out that history. I wish you success with the business and the book. I mean that. But for anyone reading this review, the complete record matters. Codie Sanchez CEO, Contrarian Thinking LLC