Good snacks in the 'kitchen', but Ridiculous Management, Culture of Fear, Lack of Growth Opportunities, HIGH Turnover - Anonymous employee Scoutmob Employee Review

Is this box long enough? Where do I start. There were about 70 employees in 2012. Now there are 15 or 20. That should tell you something. This company got it's start in 2010 as a daily deal business about 16 months after Groupon started. Groupon has 7,000 sales reps and is worth a few billion dollars while Scoutmob barely makes $1.5 million per year from their daily deal business. Simply put, executive management didn't care about revenue; they only cared about protecting the "brand". As a result, they turned down partnerships with some fairly big corporations (Whole Foods, Moe's Southwest Grill, etc.) with the idea that protecting the brand was more important than GROWING the business. Subsequently, morale suffered as people were let go due to these poor "brand" decisions. Customers don't give two poops about a the sanctity of a "brand" or product, they care about the value that a brand or product will provide them. In terms of advancement, there is none. In order to get promoted, you have to work directly with executive management, and that's a long shot if you start at the bottom. You have managers and "team leads" managing people that have no business managing anything. In order to manage, you need people skills, and you also need a little creativity as well. These people had NONE. The only good manager they had was let go because he was fed up with the politics and lack of executive leadership. The notion of positive reinforcement is non-existent within the Scoutmob management playbook, and they habitually "lead" by creating a culture of fear. "Everyone here is under a microscope," said one manager. "Everyone here is replaceable," said one manager. "I don't care if you don't like coming here, we all have jobs to do," said one team lead. "We've had 11,000 people apply here in 2 years so you need to keep that in mind when you talk about how dissatisfied you are here, " said one manager. Woopie. 11,000? I'm impressed. The CEO once told a bunch of us, "I don't care about face time, all I care about is results." Nice message. So basically you don't give a rip about me as a person or whether or not I'm happy with my job, right? Management only care about results, but the CEO and the rest of management made it so damn hard to grow the business and achieve good results with their "brand" consciousness rules that made the"results" they wanted us to generate incredibly difficult to muster. In terms of culture, everyone in Atlanta thinks Scoutmob is soooo cool and, therefore, must be soooo cool to work for. But the culture sucks, for lack of a better word. Most employees are fed up with a lot that goes on, most notably all the layoffs. I couldn't tell you what a few people in upper management did on a daily basis. Most would stroll in around 10:20 or so and leave by 5. The engineers were really the only ones that stayed late and worked hard. Certain people get away with murder as well, especially if you've been there a long time. Oh, and the COO left as well to begin a start-up incubator because he sees the potential dwindling.