Vantaggi
Good wide range of experience for entry level roles compared with other entry roles in the industry if you are self motivated. Good for getting a foot in before moving on. Plenty of hard working and well intentioned colleagues who are willing to help out. Customers are professional and pleasant to deal with, good rapport with the staff. Hybrid working can be good for work life balance.
Svantaggi
Significant office politics. Leadership is actively dishonest or at least surprisingly incompetent. Despite now being employee owned the company has never been more hostile to colleague input. EOT is poorly implemented and intentionally constrained. Decision making is often overly defensive and paranoid. No room for real criticism and any voicing of discontent or grievance is handled by pushing out the member of staff in question. Pay and benefits are low, workload is high. As a result of all the above the company is consistently unable to retain experienced or skilled staff, but denies a staff retention problem. Company seeks growth but cannot maintain a consistent standard of service due to fluctuating staff and subsequent poor skill/knowledge retention of the team. Leadership is blindly focused on rapid profit increase due to the additional financial stake the directors have. There is a clear effort to cut the fat, but an insistence on growth at the same time. MD wants to boost revenue and pay off previous owners ASAP so that they can maximise their own profit share. This motive is evident in all decision making and is at the root of the defensive and paranoid approach to criticism. This is sold to the rest of the company as a good thing as 'everyone gets a bit of the profit share' but that comes with a lower base pay and less benefits than other companies in the industry, and what the staff get in profit is not enough to make up for that. Profit share does not always come in as well, which leaves you severly underpaid. The directors each get an additional 5% of all profit on top of the share, plus a six figure base salary. The incentive to focus on profit is much higher for them than the rest of the staff. MD came in looking for part ownership of a regular company and is now very clearly unimpressed with the employee ownership structure and keen to minimise colleague involvement in decision making, again for the reasons above. MD wants enthusiasm and engagement to help generate new ideas and business but responds aggressively to any staff suggestions that could threaten their control or their profit. Most good staff with something to add play it safe and keep to themselves as a result, usually while looking for opportunities elsewhere.