Adept Marketing

After a wonderful first couple interactions with Adept, I can say that I left my experience with them quite underwhelmed and disappointed.
I had three interactions with them in the introductory/​discovery phase. The first was a 30 minute phone call, followed by an initial discovery meeting at their office (a nice place in Grandview) and a second «discovery» meeting at their office. All told, I probably invested five or six solid hours of my time. I didn’t mind, however, as I assumed it would lead to a thoughtful proposal that would detail their plan for our account. To put it bluntly, they were the leader in the clubhouse simply based on their thoroughness.
Then the proposal came.
A three paragraph, eight sentence email informing me that they would require $ 5K to «evaluate and plan» what to do with my Wordpress website and spend $ 25K on the website renovations itself. No PDF. No detailing of hours to be spent. No projection of where this would get my site in the Organic or Local listings. Nothing about Domain Authority. Nothing surrounding integration of a blog. Nothing about a Case Study gallery. None of these things.
Just the price… $ 5K upfront for them to «evaluate and plan» and $ 25K for the site, maybe. They would know more after I spent $ 5K, I suppose.
When probed about what exactly that money would go towards and offering Gail Sech (my Project Manager/​Account Rep) a chance to provide a thoughtful proposal, the next email was sent back saying they were declining our business.
I won’t pass any judgement on Gail or Adept at a personal level, but this was my experience and I certainly couldn’t recommend them to any of my colleagues after the way it devolved in the end. I was just a solid, thoughtful proposal away from spending $ 25K with them and now I’m giving a (generous) 2* review. It’s unfortunate.