Boats Group is a Wreck - Anonymous employee Boats Group Employee Review

Compensation and benefits are consistently below industry standard. Performance reviews are typically months late, if not forgotten altogether, and typical annual pay increases, if they are given, are merely cost of living adjustments; there are almost never merit increases given. It very often feels that the C-suite managers deliberately instill a sense of chaos and uncertainty among employees. There is very little sense of job security. Executive management blunders from issue to issue without coordination among themselves. They manage by reaction, not proaction, and set arbitrary and unrealistic department performance goals, which they then inflate before communicating to the teams at large. Management has a penchant for hiring consulting companies that have pre-existing relationships with Apax, Boats Group's parent company. These consulting companies have consistently approached the projects they were hired to implement with pre-packaged solutions in mind and have not been properly diligent in gathering business requirements from knowledgeable workers or other stakeholders. The resulting systems are typically inadequate as a result, and the consultants have often broken previously working processes. Executive management does not seek out the opinions of employees who are subject matter experts or have a great deal of experience in the boating industry. Boats Group is very much a top-down, hierarchical company, where those further down the ladder are expected to be "yes-men" and just toe the line. Offering a differing perspective can get one labeled as "insubordinate". The Chief Technology Officer is a walking sexual harassment lawsuit waiting to happen. He's vulgar. He uses consistently foul and sexist language in department meetings. He feels he is entitled to hugs from female employees, even when they would rather that he didn't touch them. #HostileWorkEnvironment While there is usually a high degree of trust among members of individual teams, there is almost no trust between different teams. There's a good bit of sexist "bro culture" at Boats Group, and work groups function more as cliques than as cooperative teams. The technology systems are a mess. Boats Group is essentially a mini-conglomerate consisting of four different lead generation companies that have been acquired over time. Each of those companies has preserved their original business systems, so there are now multiple, inconsistently designed, lead tracking, inventory management, and CRM systems. If an improvement is needed to -- for example, address spam leads -- four different solutions need to be developed, custom for each company, and these all need to be separately managed and maintained forever afterward. The company needs to entirely re-engineer its information systems from scratch, but it won't make the investment. Management puts too much focus on generating revenue from selling display advertising on the sites instead of optimizing sites to help visitors find boats that are most interesting to them.