Pros
A good company to access senior business leaders across the c-suite and practice consultative sales techniques. During my time with the business, the focus shifted from selling one-off membership subscriptions, predominantly to CEOs, to bigger-ticket leadership team development programmes with more of a key account management emphasis. As soles roles go, this is a really interesting one, lots of face to face interaction, very strategic conversations and you feel like you're making a difference. Good learning ground for young sales people and can be lucrative, depending on your patch and targets.
Cons
The power base within the business lies with the CEO, who looks after sales, and his wife, who is responsible for support functions. The CEO is a typical ‘owner-founder’ who combines being relatively absent from the business with an aversion to putting the right processes and people in place to take the business to the next level. Those managers who have come into the business and tried to change things, generally haven’t lasted long and the CEO surrounds himself with ‘yes-men’. Staff morale during my latter years in the company was pretty low, mainly due to the rather false and ‘carefully positioned’ communications that came from management. Over-stretching sales targets during a period of transition also didn’t help, or the politics between the leadership team.