Tailspin - Anonymous employee Essendant Employee Review

Executive Leadership Team. Starting with CEO David Boone. David is not an effective leader and is quite frankly destroying the company from within. We all understand productivity cuts, operational changes, more responsibility for associates, and even layoffs. Some of those things are necessary if we aren’t profitable. But his strategy is a “spray and pray” right now. Most initiatives are not well thought out, vetted, or implemented correctly. They simply roll some giant overhaul of a process out, get immediate feedback customers, etc, and then reverse course. Then, to make up for the mistake, they make a knee-jerk reaction and mess some other process up. Rinse and repeat. It’s causing havoc in operations and with customers. Just terrible leadership, David is on the board of Sycamore Partners, the firm that owns Essendant. This seems like a conflict of interest in some ways, but Sycamore should be concerned about his leadership. My message to Sycamore Partners: David has no idea what he is doing. And honestly is incompetent. Essendant's value is plummeting and will be worth a fraction of its previous worth soon. It is rather obvious that you would like to sell Essendant, but you aren’t going to get a solid return. Customers are jumping ship left and right and the few employees left will as well. It’s an untenable situation. Most colleague are looking for new roles elsewhere. Many of us were optimistic that things would level out, but under David’s leadership, it is obvious that we are going down. We can hear the violins. A few other things: - benefits dropping including 401K - no merit increases in years - zero advancement opportunities due to reductions - workload at an unsustainable level and confusion on who does what anymore due to layoffs - active compensation management practices and rug pull on bonuses and incentives…. Many have been discussing class action lawsuits due to this