Richard Thurman and the Small Business Community are Scammers

I received this in my email today:

Adam, 

Congratulations! 

I am pleased to let you know that Adam Jackson has been selected to receive the 2015 Best of Business Award for East Palo Alto in the Small Business category. 

We need you to confirm your award now. To accept your award – and to help the Small Business Community Association help you and your 23 million small business peers grow and thrive – please use the following link to start the acceptance process:  Award Acceptance Wizard   

The Small Business Community Association has been dedicated to empowering and recognizing small business owners who make a difference in their respective communities since 2006. About Us 

To become a more active part of this elite community of small business owners that comprise less than 1% of total business owners in the United States, please follow this link.
 
Award Acceptance Wizard   

We respect your privacy and your inbox. This is a courtesy notification from the SBCA Community. If you wish decline your award and stop receiving notifications please use this link now: Unsubscribe 

Once again, Congratulations twice on your nomination and award! 
 Here’s Rich’s Contact info:

Small Business Community
Rich Thurman
Founder

480-336-2578
rthurman@smallbusinesscommunity.org

He runs this website, the Small Business Community.

Here’s his personal homepage

and here’s his Facebook page.

If any of these pages or the name Richard Thurman in Chandler, Arizona (AZ) show up in your Inbox or social media space, make sure you inform him that he’s a crook, a scammer, a jerk and that he can get a real job like the rest of humanity instead of leeching off people who think they’ve won an actual award.

These kind of people, these expert marketers, these coaches who dish out common sense information to good people can all move to an island together where they can wear Hawaiian shirts and discuss synergy amongst themselves and perpetually pass around business cards while pretending their Blackberry just went off and it’s “super important that I take this”.

After I clicked one of the links in the email Rich just sent me, here’s an immediate email I get right after:

Hey… my name is Rich Thurman and I’m the founder of SmallBusinessCommunity.Org. I wanted to take a second to say hello and welcome you to the family.  

Seriously, on behalf of myself and the entire Small Business Community team I want you to know that we’re truly excited and grateful that you decided to join us…

I know this is going to be an absolute game changer for your business no matter what stage you’re in.

Here’s what you can expect from us…

We’ll publish fresh marketing tips and tricks and other content that will help you with your business to our blog once a week (on Wednesdays) and once it’s live we’ll send you an email with a short description of the new article, why we think it’s important for you and a link to read the full article.

We’ll also send you emails about new expert Small Business Community courses, software and other cool premium resources from time to time BUT only once we’ve vetted them.

Sound fair?  GOOD!

Here’s what you need to do now to get started…

STEP 1: 
Whitelist and prioritize all emails from SmallBusinessCommunity.Org and Rich Thurman. 

This is important! Not only will you receive updates about new articles on the blog, you’ll also receive notifications about new tips and tricks that will help you grow your business. 

But if our emails aren’t getting through to you, you will miss these important updates and you won’t receive the full benefit of being a Small Business Community subscriber. 

So please take the following simple actions to make sure nothing slips through the cracks: 

1) Follow the whitelisting instructions for your email provider at this page:

2) If you are a Gmail user or you use any other web-based email that filters broadcasts away from your main inbox, be sure to “drag” any emails from Small Business Community or “Rich Thurman” into your Priority Inbox. (Again, you don’t want to miss something.) 

3) Create a special “Small Business Community” folder where you can archive emails from Small Business Community as well as “Rich Thurman” AFTER you have read them. This is important…DO NOT setup filters to automatically direct our emails into these folders, or again, you are likely to miss something. Simply move them manually to the folder after the information in the email has been consumed. 

STEP 2: 
Take two-seconds and join the Small Business Community Facebook page, as this will be our primary method of communication outside of email updates, and again you won’t want to miss a thing: 

Facebook: 
https://www.facebook.com/SBCACommunity 

You can also join my personal Facebook Page and follow me on Twitter by going to: 

http://www.facebook.com/rthurman 
https://twitter.com/richt8020 

(TIP: If you need to get in touch with my directly, Twitter is usually the fastest. Just drop a tweet to @RichT8020 and I’ll do my best to respond.)

Talk soon,
 
P.S. Do you know the #1 reason/why 95% of all businesses fail? 

…I bet it’s not what you think.

I’ll give you the answer tomorrow, but for now spend a little time thinking about what it could be. If you’re anything like me, you’ll get more benefit from the “thought experiment” than from the answer itself.

See you tomorrow…

P.P.S.  If you have a second, I’d love to know:

Why did you subscriber to Small Business Community?…

What can we do to help you solve your biggest problem right now?

Just reply to this email or shoot me a quick email at:

rthurman@smallbusinesscommunity.org

Whatever Rich, the “Small Business Community Team” has two employees. Quite a team. Before you think I’m discouraging entrepreneurship, know that I support people having a passion and building a career out of something they love. It’s what I’ve done in my life. Rich isn’t an entrepreneur. He’s a snake-oil salesman and needs to stop robbing people blind.

How do I know he’s a crook, he’s telling me how to manage my spam folder so I don’t miss a single email. You know who doesn’t know how to white-list emails? People who aren’t tech-savvy aka people who will believe that they won an award in East Palo Alto, CA aka people who probably aren’t running their small business very well and need all of the help they can get from crooks like Richard Thurman

I’ve unsubscribed from his emails. If he mails me one of his newsletters again, I will report him to the FCC Consumer Complaints website for spamming.

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