Avoid working with JLT Creative - Lorien Strydom

Zero project delivery, weeks overdue and refusal to refund money

I’m writing this review as Lorien Strydom aka JLT Creative has failed to deliver on a project for which we have paid in full, and has continued to simply ignore the vast majority of our emails and attempts to reach her.

She refuses to refund our money, claiming that work has already been done on the project but is incapable of providing any proof of the work having been done. To date, she has delivered 1 sample article and 1 article out of 86.

We have attempted to resolve this for weeks now via email, but as Lorien chooses to ignore most of our emails, does not answer any calls and ignores all of the LinkedIn, Facebook, Whatsapp and text messages we’ve sent, she has left us no choice but to escalate the situation.

Reading the rest of the Google reviews for her business, this seems to be her current modus operandi.

It should be noted that through our attempts to reach her, we discovered that her husband’s name is Jacques Strydom, who seems to be the same Jacques Strydom who had published two 5 star reviews for Lorien. Given that her gmail address contains the last name “Roux”, it is fairly reasonable to assume that the 5 star review by Sally Roux is also false and published by a relative.

In spite of the good impression that Lorien Strydom made in the first week of the project through fast communication and promises to deliver the work in the timeframe in which we needed it, her subsequent lack of professionalism, lack of communication and willful dishonesty leave us with no choice but to publish this review.

While we operate as a globally distributed company, working with service providers around the world, one of our main operational hubs is based in Cape Town. We would definitely like to partner with service providers to which we have proximity, but it is people like Lorien Strydom that leave us extremely skeptical of working with South African freelancers and businesses.

Based on my experience with Lorien Strydom aka JLT Creative, it is clear that she simply does not care about paying clients and has no interest in conducting business in an ethical manner.

I would strongly urge anyone seeking any of the services offered by JLT Creative to save themselves months of pain dealing with poor communication, zero project execution and a total lack of professionalism, and simply avoid Lorien Strydom and JLT Creative at all costs.

For a detailed breakdown of our experience with Lorien Strydom aka JLT Creative, please see the points below.

To date: - We had negotiated and reached agreement on pricing for the delivery of 86 articles of 2000 words each

- We made the payment, in full, for the delivery of these articles on 30 November.

- Lorien Strydom advised a turn around time of approximately 10 - 14 business days and we informed her of the high priority we placed on the project and the need to have it delivered before the Christmas/New Year break.

- Between 18 December and 7 January, we received zero communication from Lorien Strydom in spite of our efforts to reach her via email, phone calls, text messages, Facebook messages, and LinkedIn messages.

- As a result of Lorien Strydom ignoring all attempts to contact her, we were forced to go so far as to attempt to reach her via the two companies she lists as employers on her LinkedIn profile, CopyPress and Express Writers. Once Lorien Strydom had eventually responded to our emails, it turned out that these were, in fact, two of her clients. Lorien seemed more annoyed with the fact that we had tried to contact her via these companies than apologetic for the fact that she didn’t reply to any of the emails, direct messages, phone calls and text messages we’d sent her over a 4 week period. Truly shocking service when you’re a client who has paid for a project in full.

- On 8 Jan Lorien requested confirmation that she may begin delivering the still outstanding articles that week and assured us that she would "most definitely deliver this project 100%" When we inquired as to the reason for the total radio silence on her part, she gave no explanation and simply apologized for the delayed response.

- On 10 Jan she advised that she was working on delivering a batch of 20 articles, would be working through that weekend and that she would keep us updated. We received zero updates from her over that weekend and the weekdays which followed.

- After another week of sending email after email requesting updates on what was happening with the project, we finally received a response from Lorien on 16 Jan stating that she “felt so bad about this” and requested that we “accommodate us (JLT Creative) with delivering smaller batches of 10 articles to you every day/two”

- We requested a simple confirmation on when the first batch would be delivered and once again received no response from Lorien.

- On 20 Jan, after refusing to reply to our emails, and not taking any calls, for another 5 days Lorien shared a Google Drive folder containing 1 article accompanied by a one line message simply stating that completed articles would be added to the folder for review.

- At the time of writing this review, 09:16 CAT, 27 January 2020 No further articles have been added to the shared folder. No refund has been paid No explanation for the delay has been received from Lorien Strydom.

Should anyone like to verify any of these points, please feel free to contact me. I am willing to provide screenshots and screen recordings to confirm the facts listed in this review.