Avoid - Senior Account Director The Mark Employee Review

2.0
11 Jan 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Good base salary and good intentions

Cons

Cannot drive new business successfully or retain beyond project based work

Explore other reviews about The Mark

1.0
28 Dec 2016
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

There is a bar next door. The office itself is quite nice and Liberty Village is a neat area to work in.

Cons

- The worst professional environment I have ever experienced. This is mostly fostered by the CEO, who emails and calls on week nights, weekends, during times where you're ill or when you've specified you will be with your children and thus, unavailable. The rest of the higher-ups follow suit. You are fully expected to be on call for late night requests. The "lunch hour" that is provided at most places of work doesn't apply here. Sometimes you'll have the time to scurry out and grab food but everyday, I saw people eat as quickly as possible at their desks. - The CEO caters heavily to clients on all creative projects and won't push back, implementing every change the client asks for, damaging the work creatively and robbing it of any chance to resonate with audiences. - The chaos I experienced in the CEO making unexpected/surprise decisions on the directions projects should be going in (after great satisfaction was expressed all along the way) only a few hours before something was due to a client was common and overwhelming. I often had to cancel my evening or weekend plans due to his whims, tell my children I could not participate in activities with them, spending my time working instead. His expectations often were communicated poorly in the initial stages, leaving guesswork to occur, and thus more overtime to be spent trying to understand what he actually wanted. - I have never seen such high turnover of employees in a small company. In the time I worked there, nearly half of the people who were there when I started had left.

1.0
5 Jun 2019
Anonymous contractor
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Nice office space. You will make some good friends here. They will be other newcomers or freelancers. They will become your allies, which you will most certainly need as they will help you maintain sanity through the madness of working here. They are your only means of surviving The Mark. You will form a bond with your allies, forged through shared misery.

Cons

Utter Chaos. You will sit at your desk waiting for work for hours on end, only to receive it at 5:15pm. You'll then be expected to start your work day. Your insight and opinion won't matter here regardless of your 10 or 20 years of previous working experience. Everyone is treated like inept interns. You will be undermined and micromanaged like crazy. Your creativity will be stifled with too many cooks in the kitchen and too many internal parties reviewing projects, emails and everything else before going to clients. You'll often feel like just a pair of hands, throwing away your skillset and years of working knowledge. You will spend half of your time trying to work around the many layers of internal friction and non-sense . You will battle with other members of the "team", versus creating great work together. No clear workflow... And no respect for creative...just a jumbled mess of madness. Micro-management is at an all time high here. AVOID.

1
avatar
The Mark Response
7y
Dear Painstaking, I’m sorry it’s taken me a few weeks to respond to your review which I (and your coworkers) found both disheartening and sad. It certainly stands out from the rest of the recent reviews that more accurately reflect the culture we are building. For that, I’m sorry. I did want to address some of your comments for the very reason that they stand out from what your coworkers have themselves posted, and it’s important to point out the positive flip side of what you observed. First, you are right that we have a lot of cooks and everyone has an opinion. We embrace that. We’re a scrappy entrepreneurial shop with a group of people that truly CARE about their work, their clients and each other. Yes, we have healthy debate. Yes, we disagree. But at least everyone has a voice and an opportunity to contribute. We don't want anyone to feel like they should just sit at their desk and encourage everyone to stand up and make themselves heard. Second, you are also right that our workflow isn’t as buttoned down as it should be. (This is likely the by-product of tripling in size in less than a year and adding so many amazing people to our team!) All I can say is that we have been actively working on fixing this gap through right-sizing teams, collaboration, role clarification and hiring. This does takes time, but we're working on it. My last point I is that I wholeheartedly disagree with is your comment about misery. I invite anyone to drop by our shop and tell me what they think. This is a hard-working group of folks that still take time to laugh, to play with the dogs, and to debate which pickle is the best on Taste Test Fridays. If that’s misery, then I want more of it. One last thing: I’m very proud to share that we were recently certified as one of the Best Places to Work in Canada. That was based on an anonymous survey from the staff, 98% of which said they would recommend The Mark as a great place to work. I’m truly sorry you couldn’t say the same. Tracy
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