Rqtekure-p

Our restaurant hired Sean Lewis and his firm RQTEKURE Partners (also going by Genie LLC) on July 27,2017 to be our architects for our restaurant build out. Per the terms and design times Sean Lewis wrote in his contract we were looking at a restaurant opening later in 2017. We were also assured of this. His timelines to complete drawings were as follows 1. Evaluation and planning 1.5 wks. 2. Schematic and/Conceptual (We provided) 3D Renderings and the entire space drawn out showing all items excluding kitchen. We also sent him the CAD so it was already pretty much completed. 3. Development Design 1.5 wks 4. Construction Documents 3.5 wks Total time before the first round of submittals should have taken to be able to submit would be 6-8 weeks. So putting us around August 15th or so. Give or take roughly. Keep in mind we went into this wanting to be open by Nov 2017. During this time we paid RQTEHKURE PARTNERS ( Genie LLC) 1. Deposit 7/17/17. $10,000 2. Deposit 2 11/11/17 $6,449.57. Which was the entire contract. We were made to pay prior to dropping off plans to be submitted to county. Deposit 3 for $3,000 was out of no where and we were told was extra charge by the MEP firm. Total to RQTEKURE $19,449.57 Excluding outdoor work and cost. The firm finally submitted to Arlington County Deceber 28,2017 finally and as we were waiting for the architectural firm to resubmit the 2nd round revisions from MEP etc. We stopped getting responses from Mr. Lewis. He made over 7 promises in a 27 day span of when we would be receiveing the revised plans to resubmit. We received countless guarantees regarding dates and times. There was no reason for the delay since all the firm had to do was stamp the plans and turn them over to us. We sent Mr. Sean Lewis and his firm a demand notice followed which we did not receive any work back from them about. We sent countless email and messages trying to resolve this situation prior to having the make the business decision to terminate them due to lack of performance. Upon terminating them. We found out that Mr. Lewis had not paid the MEP contractor that he made us pain him in full for. The MEP contractor sent us over the 3 invoices for payment they had sent to the his firm. So here we are the small business trying to open a restaurant and the architect has been paid and did not perform nor pay anyone else. To this date we have not received a response from Sean Lewis or his 1 man firm RQTEKURE PARTNERS so we do not want anyone else to be scammed by this person or his firm.