Vantaggi
Within a year, this company will be mostly indistinguishable from any other major home care chain. Any pros will be the same as working for Visiting Angels, etc. If you really need a job and don't care about culture, benefits, etc., there will be little to no difference. At the caregiver level, the culture, pay, and benefits will vary depending on who owns the franchise.
Svantaggi
Here's the real story that every one of us who worked there knows. FirstLight was founded by the Bevis family, funded by two investors, Bernard Markey and Bill Stewart. Jeff Bevis is an incredible man who is caring, kind, fair, and hard-working. If he had any major flaws I noticed, he was perhaps too trusting of people who ultimately took advantage of his good nature. Bill and Bernard were scarcely seen or heard of prior to November 2020 outside of some occasional updates. None of us had any hint of what was to come. At some point, behind closed doors, he was fired. The official communication was that he voluntarily left, but no one believed this. Our franchise owners did not buy it and forced Bill and Bernard to admit that they had lied to everyone. From that point on, the changes we saw were disappointing to say the least. Our culture went from open communication, honesty and fairness to one of secrets, half-truths, and poor follow-ups . The irony of them stressing communication to their employees is that it only goes one way. The ones close to Jeff Bevis are being fired or quitting, despite us trying to prove that we still care about the company as a whole and were willing to work with the new management. Some of the others showed their true faces and seemed to relish the fact that they no longer needed to perform their jobs acceptably or communicate effectively, not that some of them ever did even under Bevis' tenure. It's beyond disappointing to see the company sell out everything that made the company great in the name of slightly better profit margins. Our company is financially solvent and was doing great, even during the COVID crisis. While everything can be fine-tuned, there was nothing that was not fixable and it certainly did not necessitate a complete overhaul. While the goal of every company is to make money, every change that has been made has solely benefited the investor's bottom lines. A few months prior to November, Glee McAnanly was hired, ostensibly for another role. In November, she became Jeff Bevis' replacement. It quickly became clear that she had been groomed for this role by Bill and Bernard weeks prior, despite her statements that she had only found out about Jeff Bevis' termination the day it happened. Glee is outwardly a nice person, but you quickly discover how little she really cares. There are constant meetings where no substantive developments are made on any issue. The goals change from meeting to meeting, with vague requests, and little to no communication regarding them. It's amazing how with so many meetings there could be such poor communication. Instead, we get some groan-worthy story and fake attempts to be relatable. She has no idea how much of the business operates despite repeated attempts to explain the same things to her or why certain things are important. Some of this is understandable, as she had only been with FirstLight a few months prior to Jeff Bevis' termination, but that's why you don't promote a fresh face to the head of the company. She clearly has business experience, but it's obvious that she's just a plant for the investors to make as much as possible for themselves and they needed someone with no ties to the Bevis family and the attitude needed to make it happen. Her communication, requests, and fake candor are all atrocious. The investors did not promote someone from within the company, because they know how much we all care about the company culture, not their bottom line. They do not want any remaining employees who worked for any significant length of time under Jeff Bevis. The benefits are being chipped away at, little by little. The modus operandi is to redo anything that looks like it could be changed. But there are few questions asked as to why these processes are in place or any ways to improve them, they're simply done away with or "fixed" and then it's somehow repeatedly surprising to them when it comes back to bite them. Then it becomes a game of who to pin the blame on, which is laughably impossible owing to the ridiculous aforementioned communication problems. In the end, the story of FirstLight is the story of most big American businesses. Develop a good product or service up to the point where you become big enough to no longer care about your employees or customers. We all truly thought it could never happen here, but it did.
