Pros
- Nice new office. The actual office is a bit sterile in my opinion but the workspace itself is great and the rooftop is fantastic. - The CEO (Dale) is hands on and cares a lot about his employees. The company generally treats its employees well. Benefits are good, pay can be very good (and sometimes bad, see cons) - If you're fresh out of school or relatively young, you'll probably have a good time. There's an almost frat/sorority like environment which is common among younger agencies. But there's enough professionalism to where its not too overbearing. I personally didn't care all that much about having beer on tap or having a ping pong table but I can appreciate that some people like that sort of thing. - Ovative (at least when I was there) is growing pretty rapidly. We usually hit our bonus targets and got full (or nearly full) bonus payouts. - If you want to make a career out of working in marketing, this is a good place to put on your resume.
Cons
- There are tons of downsides to rapid growth and Ovative is experiencing all of them. A lot of people are in senior management roles that have no business there. Good people management skills aren't really cultivated and sustainable business practices aren't really pursued. It's still very much an attitude built around rapid growth and addressing short term needs without any thought to long term strategy and growth. - The client base is still heavily focused on retail which is a problem as brick and mortar retail is still on a downward trajectory. - Lets talk about the engineering side of the business. Ovative is simultaneously trying to be an agency and an IT provider. I applaud the boldness of the vision but the execution on MAP is beyond awful. Far from building a product that will turn into a future profit center, MAP remains a massive loss leader and there's no sign of that changing. Everything is focused on keeping the system alive rather than actually building a long term solution that will work and fit the company's vision. - To further this problem, none of the leadership has any understanding of technology. That's fine as the leadership primarily comes from a marketing background. But the fact that the leadership doesn't acknowledge this as a problem or attempt to install a CTO (who has a software background) that can lead the engineering side of the business is a problem. - Pay can be all over the place. I think new joiners get relatively equal starting salaries but the work that they do can vary dramatically and pay should reflect that. Raises tend to follow equal trajectories as well. Really this hurts the data scientists and developers more than anyone else. On the flip side, the pay can vary quite dramatically at higher levels which gives experienced hires the opportunity to make good money. - Get used to meetings. There's no concept of delegation and empowering people to own pieces of work. Everyone meets constantly to litigate every decision and to create opportunities to provide "feedback." Also one downside to this is that it makes it really hard to work from home. Ovative isn't good at successfully managing meetings where people aren't there in person. Also in general there are too many meetings that don't result in an actual outcome. - Similarly, expect the same sort of thing when it comes to management. The culture essentially embraces micromanagement. You'll be asked 8 different ways what you're doing to address a particular project or problem and good luck if your manager doesn't understand the type of work you do. You'll get stuck trying to explain work that they don't have any background on. - Lastly, Ovative has the mindset that smart people can do anything which is largely true. But there are exceptions. You can't keep rotating the same group of people into different roles and just expecting things to just magically work. There needs to be some respect for tangible skills in a given area. This is most pronounced when Ovative moves people with no tech background into one of the MAP teams but you see this elsewhere as well.
