Pros
You have the opportunity to work with some amazing clients in, let’s face it, some really fun industries. Smarty Pants focuses on kids, so you work with clients like Lego, Crayola and Netflix, which makes the work enjoyable (usually). I loved my clients, even if the owners of the company often didn’t have kind words for them (which I always found odd).
Cons
You will sacrifice a great deal of your personal time if you want to please the owner, but not necessarily the client. The owner has an almost unreachable bar to reach as far as what is and isn’t ready to submitted to clients. She fixates on minutiae, instead of big picture things, which put a great deal of stress on me and, consequently, my family. Further, her narrow vision of how things should and shouldn’t be ensures that company growth is almost impossible. They’re known to give employees very short leashes and firings are super common. Ultimately, I didn’t want a job that was my life, and there was no division between business time and personal time, such that the hours were very long and weekend work was more common than not.