Pros
Working for a family owned company can be a great advantage. The benefits with Collette are very good, healthcare plan is good, 401k, vacation/sick time is plentiful, etc. Depending on your manager, they can be great at working with you in times of illness, family issues, etc. There are many team building activities for the HQ employees, great gym next door for employees as well! And of course the opportunities for travel. In the sales side, the base is low but the opportunities for commission have always been very good, as have the cash incentive awards, although those have both decreased somewhat recently.
Cons
First let me note, that management reads this website. And after a few particular reviews last year they began "encouraging" certain employees to write "honest" reviews. So as always with everything online, they all should be taken with a grain of salt. I would encourage people to read them all, but to look for the bigger picture as well. What one person hates, another may find beneficial. The cons for me are first, a lack of focus. Every year, there is a new "focus", a new idea, a new technology. How many times I have heard the phrase, "this is not going away, we will be doing this every week/month/year." And inevitably, a year later, that is no longer important and we have a new focus. There has been a great deal of change within the company in the last several years, core values, the goals, etc. I think HR and some of the new executives were eager to prove themselves. They were pushing so hard to change, and they swung the pendulum way too far to the other side. I work in sales, and you cannot treat a sales force the way you treat an IT person or a Customer Service Associate. A sales person needs to be able to sell, they need sales training, product training, not training on emotional IQ or life goals. The favoritism has always been an issue for this family owned company. Many thought it was coming to an end, but it now seems it's just a different set of people's favorites. There is also a real lack of mobility on the sales side, in part created by the favorites issue. They tried to address this in the last year or so by creating new positions. It was however, all illusion. Before positions were even announced, they were destined for certain people. If people expressed interest and weren't the favorite, they were talked out of even applying. The lowest move was creating a "Senior" position and telling all the senior sales people they wouldn't want it because there was going to be no pay raise and it would take extra hours and time away from their territory. The positions were then awarded to a few folks we all expected, the majority were not even close to being senior, and were actually given a raise. Very insulting to the actual senior employees.