Vantaggi
Response Mine Interactive is a privately owned agency headquartered in Atlanta. With about 70 employees, two different divisions and multiple people in entry-level to executive level positions, it's a big enough agency to feel like you aren't working at a start-up. There are people to learn from and enough staff to get the job done. Response Mine Interactive is a fantastic agency for innovative, self-driven entrepreneurial marketers who have the curiosity and drive to challenge the status quo. The work-life balance is unmatched, there is trust in your work as an employee and if you are willing to put in the work, employees can be rewarded with unmatched pay and title bumps for our industry. There aren't many times when you can present a solid case to the management or executive team and see it completely turned down. The agency fosters a sense of pushing the envelope and welcomes new departments to be created or new innovations to be adopted. Response Mine Interactive is fiercely loyal to their staff- allowing employees who have been out college for 2-3 years to run teams of people and large accounts and for those who have been in the workforce 5-7 years to rise to Director and VP level positions, taking a chance/bet on awarding loyal tenured employees the opportunity to learn, succeed, and/or fail on the agency's dime.
Svantaggi
Too often, the same entry-mid level employees who enjoyed the pay bumps, opportunities to rise to senior manager-executive level positions and work-life balance aren't equipped with the proper managerial training and years in the workforce to deal with the inevitable cons of working in a more entrepreneurial environment. Response Mine Interactive encourages recruiting junior level talent and training them up. While this has the benefit of teaching people the right (albeit at times more mechanical "old school") ways of running digital media- it leaves the agency with a bunch of employees who know Response Mine as their first and only job. Once the excitement and allure of working for an agency wear off, RMI's executive and management teams have to deal with managing employees who get frustrated by the same things that make them stay at RMI- and that make RMI one of the only agencies in Atlanta where mid-executive level management have been with the agency for 7+ years. It's difficult to manage expectations for employees who haven't been at another job to have something to compare it to, and the executive and management team don't focus enough on leadership training, employee development, coaching and team-building to work through some of these issues. The agency also waits too long to recognize when a department needs more assistance, attention or investment to make it successful. As a former employee, it was nice to know my word was taken seriously and listened to, but I'd challenge the management team to hold employees more accountable to their goals and step in sooner to provide additional resources or investments when a department or initiative isn't working.