Pros
The culture at Connelly Partners is difficult to match anywhere else, it really feels like a work family. The agency regularly has events to bring everyone together, whether it's the spring fieldhouse day, the summer outing to one of the Boston Harbor Islands, the infamous CP Thanksgiving or the winter holiday party. The agency is also a unique size in that people usually work on multiple clients across various industries. When accounts are lost, no one ever gets laid off because of this structure. The location is also really great, it's rare to find the space in the South End to put 120+ employees, but Connelly Partners is a unique gem surrounded by fun food places and little shops. The office itself is somewhere you feel really cool walking into every day, especially with everyone rotating music day. On a final note, starting at Connelly Partners early in your career sets you up well to leave to go client side or to another agency because of all the hats you tend to wear working at a small agency.
Cons
First and foremost, they cannot pay the industry standard to their employees. Most accept being paid less than they would at the big agencies because of the culture. Entry level hires start below $35k, which isn't particularly livable for anyone looking to pay Boston rent. They also tend to make employees wait longer to be promoted, which can almost feel as though they're tightening purse strings to keep you at a lower salary as long as they can instead of progressing you through at a pace more standard to other agencies. This of course wasn't the case when the strategy department was down to 2 members and one guy that was entry level got promoted twice in a year to get him up to a better client-facing title. That was frustrating to watch play out when some wait 2+ years for a promotion. While the Disney trip is a great perk, many wish the company would just outright give them the money instead of the trip. It's hard to struggle financially working there and then watch the company drop a huge amount of money on this trip instead of giving it directly to their employees. Over time, it can get frustrating working on multiple clients at once since you can never really level with them and say they're not the only account you work on and can't receive 100% of your undivided attention all the time. This can certainly compound when you have 5-6 clients all knocking down your door acting like you're 100% staffed on their accounts and you need to juggle them and just deal with it. Connelly Partners is of the size where the clients have the final say, to the detriment of the creatives. At the end of the day, the agency needs to keep the lights on and will do anything it can to please the clients, including bowing down to crazy feedback in the name of the relationship. There is also a bad track record of acquiring other agencies only to watch them disintegrate. Over the years, CP bought a healthcare agency which saw all of their employees leave over a few year span. They also bought a digital marketing agency named Almighty which originally had 20ish employees when it shacked up with CP, but now only has about 3-4 remaining.