Avantages
As the CEO of Rise, I want Glassdoor to provide prospective employees an honest view of the pros and cons of what it is like to work at Rise. I unfortunately believe that the majority of posts on glassdoor do not provide a true reflection so I want to give the pros and cons from my perspective: Outlook: The majority of the more recent posts have a negative outlook on Rise. When I see this, I am always unsure if they are referring to the financial outlook or as it relates to employee engagement. In my personal opinion I believe that the outlook looks very positive for both aspects. From a financial perspective, Rise has had double digit or triple digit growth every year since 2004 with the exception of 2009. 2018 seems to be continuing this trend and I believe that the outlook for 2019 looks great. Additionally, Rise is ahead of our goal from a profit perspective and our balance sheet has never been better. As it relates to employee engagement, one of our three main goals is to invest in our team. We have several initiatives focused on this and based on the weekly pulse report on employee engagement I get we are definitely making progress. That does not mean that there is not more work to be done, but I believe that 12 months from now the engagement will absolutely be higher than it is right now. Quality of People: The people that work at Rise are highly intelligent and analytical individuals that will push you to be better. I hear all of the time how people after they start working at Rise are amazed at how smart everyone else is in the company. Digital Marketing Knowledge/Philosophy: Rise has grown from me working out of home to approximately 220 people and the way we have been able to grow is to offer phenomenal digital marketing services to our customers. I would put our approach and the returns we generated for our customers up against any other firm. If you join Rise, you will learn this philosophy, as well as gain a skill set that will give you an edge regardless of whether you stay at Rise or go somewhere else. Promote from Within: Rise has a very strong belief in promoting from within the organization. This means that if we continue to grow organically by double digits every year there will be substantial opportunities to get promoted. Transparency: In 2018 we are making a huge effort to be more transparent as it relates to our strategic plan, financials, as well as how we run the business. This includes me speaking in front of the company twice per month, as well as bringing other leaders to present to the company based on its other initiatives.
Inconvénients
I also believe that there are several areas of improvement that we are working on addressing. Below are some cons or things that you should be aware of as it relates to working at Rise. 2016/2017 Missteps: As the CEO of Rise for the last 14 years, I personally believe that holistically over this time period I have done my job well. That does not mean though that every year I have performed as well as previous years. If I had to rate myself for 2016 and 2017 I believe that they were two of my worst years as a CEO. To put this in perspective, Rise’s Glassdoor rating in December of 2015 was over 4.0 and my personal rating was in the 90s. Today, it is a 2.2 rating overall and 40% of the people rating approve of my performance. So what happened over these two years: The first thing is that Rise became a very different company that needed to be managed differently. From 2004 to 2015, Rise was a boot strapped organization with no debt and no outside investors. With the vision of growing a technology platform as a major differentiator, we decided to use debt and equity to fuel the growth of the business. The management style to run a negative EBITDA business with debt and outside investors is simply different than running a boot strapped organization and I personally did not adjust my management style quickly enough. There were four main areas that I could have done better during this time period: *The first is that we did not set realistic revenue goals. The goals we set-out to achieve were too high. We adjusted our expenses based on these revenue goals rather than growing our expenses in a more conservative manner. *The second mistake was we did not lower expenses quickly enough. This caused us to burn cash at a faster rate than expected which caused us to have multiple rounds of layoffs. *The third is that we were not transparent with the reality of our financial situation. I personally went in front of the company numerous times to talk about our record breaking revenue numbers but did not share that we were missing our profit targets. *The fourth is an absolutely horrific rollout of 2017 bonuses. Due to profit numbers being lower, the bonus pool was substantially smaller than usual. Additionally for the first time ever we paid bonuses out in March versus December or January with very poor communication regarding this. There are a few results of these mistakes are that we created. *The first is that we created hardship on some existing and previous employees. *We also have lost a substantial amount of trust amongst existing and previous employees, as well as suffer reputational damage in the Chicago market. There are many previous employees that did not have a good experience and would encourage others to not work at Rise. *Another result is that we are aggressively working harder to learn from these past two years and make improvements. One major change is we are back to running the business in a debt free profitable manner as we did for the first 12 years. Transitional Time Period: Although Rise is still focused on rapid growth there is more emphasis on profits than previous years. This means that we are all having to do more with less resources which is definitely an adjustment for everyone at Rise. Promote from Within: Although I listed promoting from within as a benefit there are also challenges with this approach. Often times someone is taking on more responsibility before they have grown into their new role. I still believe though that the benefits to the employees of knowing we are always going to look from within and give them the chance to grow their careers outweighs the patience we all need as our team members have to learn their new roles. It is also a very common diversity and inclusion problem. We are on a journey of improving diversity and inclusion and recognize the challenges that this philosophy can create. It is a hard job: Rise is definitely not for everyone. We are looking for ultra-ambitious individuals that are excited about competing against multi-billion dollar companies that have substantially more resources.If you come to Rise you should know that you will have to work extremely hard.It is important that you understand this before entering the job.