Merrick Towle Creative Reviews

From a developer's perspective, there's no room to grow too much since the company has been working only for Real Estate clients for too many years, so you might end up creating and maintaining the same kind of WordPress sites over and over. There's no IT Management, and it could be hard to get promoted.

Huge lack of company culture and camaraderie among staff. The only happy hours/work events that happened in my last 4 months of employment were "going away happy hours" for people leaving. No HR department and total lack of ethics code that the agency follows regarding how to talk to one another and clients. Lots of yelling, cursing and screaming (from leadership in particular). The company has been treading water for the last few years and as a result of that, the unspoken rule is quantity over quality. Produce as much billable work that you can churn out to maintain clients and keep the company alive without elevating content or deliverables or really impressing clients by giving the employees time to think while they create. Churn and burn. The entire social team quit within a span of three months because of how poorly the agency is run. At a small agency like MTC, it's expected that the owners are heavily involved in leadership and crafting an overall vision for the agency and it's employees. We had bi-weekly agency meetings directly in front of the owner's offices and in my almost year and a half of employment, there was only one meeting where both owners attended. Often times, mid-meeting, one or both of the owners would walk through it to go to the bathroom, get coffee, etc. It sent such a message to employees that the owners were totally checked out and didn't care to take an hour every other week to sit with their employees and listen to what we were working on, case studies we had put together, etc. The dichotomy between the owner's/upper management and the rest of the agency was a huge point of contention for most everyone I worked with at my time there, ranging from account to creatives. There's no COO or someone who is officially in charge, so there's an underlying power struggle of the few appointed leaders of the company that is palpable in any meeting you sit in with them. The tension in the workplace is often unbearable. People leave meetings crying or storm out. I am not over-exaggerating. When I left, I said it was because there was no room for growth for me since I was doing work similar to that of our intern when I left. We kept losing more of the senior level work and I was downgraded to work with what we had rather than help drum up new business for them. The VP told me they agreed and recognized that the agency didn't allow for upward mobility. So basically, it was acknowledged that no one can expect to nurture or grow their career there. This goes back to the "churn and burn" mentality mentioned previously. No thoughtful processes on how to retain employees and make it an enjoyable place to work. They're just living month to month and staring at numbers hoping the company doesn't go under.