Bad culture, compensation and company outlook
Pros
EverCommerce’s positive qualities are outweighed by the negatives. If you have an offer to join EC, it can be a great steppingstone because you’re likely to learn a lot in a short stint of time. But if you have other career options – now or later – the alternatives may be better for your career and life. That said, I’m hopeful we can make meaningful changes in the years ahead. We must.
Cons
In this tight labor market, mixing together a mediocre culture, middling compensation and benefits, and no sense of mission (beyond maximizing profits for the executives and investors) is a fatal concoction for any company. Unfortunately, it’s EC’s cocktail by choice. The company culture here is mediocre at best, and the buck stops at the top. There is a real sense that the CEO doesn’t care about anything other than the company’s stock price and the money he makes when it goes up (or, more apropos of late, “ …*loses* when it goes *down* ”). He and a few of the other executives convey a complete indifference or even disdain to the company’s mid- and lower-level employees. No joke: there is literally a separate unmarked bathroom in the Denver office that is only to be used by the top executives, apparently so they don’t have to sit on the same toilet seat as all the little people that work for them. Certainly, there are some managers tying to positively correct the culture, but it’s hard to do that when the top brass aren’t aligned or engaged. Our compensation and benefits are also lacking, except for those at the top. Stories of EC employees leaving for 20%, 30% and even 50% salary increases elsewhere happen frequently, but are always promptly disregarded by management. And the benefits are lackluster as compared to peer companies, including relatively high healthcare premiums, minimal parental leave, and a PTO program that is hard to take advantage of for many people, given our crushing workloads. Employee turnover is a huge issue, and there are few signs that the bleeding is slowing -- perhaps this is intentional: it cuts “overhead.” Finally, and most importantly, the company’s corporate strategy and outlook are dubious. It seems the early company mandate was Grow-At-All-Cost … mostly by just buying as many random companies that loosely fit in a few different industries as we could, with little apparent strategic rationale. Later, the top executives were outed as having a hush-hush side deal that privately made them rich from these acquisitions – before the company went public, every time EC acquired a new company, each of the top executives received a large bonus check (millions and millions of dollars), under the table. Don’t take my word for it; you can look up the exact amounts they were paid in the mere months leading up to IPO by searching for “acquisition bonus plan” in the IPO document that is publicly available. No wonder there was an insatiable urge to buy so many misfit companies before the company went public! And no wonder we haven’t bought many companies since the IPO (i.e., since their sweetheart deal was cancelled). Now these executives are trying to back-engineer a plausible company strategy and peddle it to the market to make sense of the sometimes ill-suited, hodge-podge collection of companies that are inside the bag they are left holding. Based on our stock value at and since IPO, they aren’t fooling anyone. The fallout from all this is predictable: a high stress environment, minimal work/life balance, little sense of loyalty, lots of office politics, high turnover, etc. It’s worth noting that many of the positive reviews on here are either made by EC’s recruiters (think: the same people trying to convince you to accept an offer) or by other employees after they have been pressured to do so by the HR department.
