I had a good experience working at this business. I learned a lot and the pay was good.

I feel hiring Kevin Corson and his Marketing Engineers Company turned out to be one of the worst business experiences in my thirty-plus years in business. It resulted in losses of thousands of dollars to my company and an entire seasonal year in delays of product development.Our company hired Kevin Corson and his Marketing Engineers company to code and develop our proprietary web-based Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) product. We had a four-month timeline to a final version.I made the mistake of agreeing to his request for half the money up-front so he could pay his people.Once the funds transferred communications from him became much less frequent. The more time that passed, the less communication I received.Kevin gave me lots of work to do up front on my end and kept me busy for weeks in the beginning creating database fields. A few weeks later he said the database was then ready for sample data and he gave me that new task.After three months, and missing a milestone laid out in his agreement, I received a strange email from Kevin asking for more money to pay his people. I replied that Id prefer to stick to the schedule in the agreement and pay the balance on delivery of the product. His reply complained that he was out of pocket money now but he agreed.A couple of weeks later after hearing nothing from Kevin or his crew I had placed phone calls to Kevin that he did not answer. I left a voice mail stating I was concerned about the timeline and could he get back to me to discuss. I received no replies.One week later and now four months into the project, after missing two development milestones in the agreement, one of Kevins workers sent me an email with an Excel file with the work they had done to date with a note that he and I were to work on the database. The file was so basic and had none of the tables, fields, or data Kevin had requested from me in the weeks and months prior and stated to me on the phone was completed. Instead of being close to finished with the database it looked like they had barely even started. I had the file reviewed by an expert and he said there was really nothing to it, very little work there.At that point I replied by expressing my displeasure with the Excel file and asking for Kevin to call me. Instead of calling me, Kevin got angry and condescending in an email. In my view that was not the response of a legitimate business owner.I replied that this was obviously not working out and wanted a refund since there was basically very little work done. His email replied with Read the contract. I can stop anytime, there will be no refund, and you own nothing.I had three Oregon lawyers review the agreement and was basically told that though I have a strong case even with his ambiguous agreement, this guy is a marketing company and its likely his only company asset is a checking account, so even if I win a lawsuit he could have drained the funds by then or gone bankrupt and Id get nothing except lots of lawyer bills. This was their general experience with marketing companies that get sued.In the end, thousands of dollars were lost and product development delayed for a whole seasonal year at the very least.Lessons learned and what the lawyers suggested to me for the future:1. Always use an escrow when paying large sums for contract work. This allows funds to be released as work is completed per an agreement.2. Never pay such large up front payments. Use a work timeline and pay accordingly thru an escrow account.3. Never sign an agreement without consulting a proper attorney.