Euromonitor Reviews

Pros

Great,smart people. Everyone is a team player

Cons

No growth opportunities and sales cycles are long with low pay

Pros

empowerment, environment, products, location, colleagues

Cons

facilities, international re location rules

Advice to Senior Management

keep trying

Pros

- relatively relaxed environment and business culture
- product-driven rather than sales-driven company
- genuine respect for customers and staff
- long-term sales strategy
- approachable and competent management
- relatively good reputation on the FMCG market place

Cons

- almost nonexistent benefits (no healthcare plan, standard 20-day holiday package...)
- pay and commission structure below industry average
- very scarce opportunities to travel and meet clients/prospects face-to-face
- incompetent analysts (very few analysts on permanent contracts, Euromonitor relying on a large
  network of unskilled freelancers) producing largely inaccurate data which is constantly (and
  legitimately) questioned by clients and prospects
- limited long-term growth potential due to a lack of consistency and cohesion across the business
  (Euromonitor it still run like a young SME but now needs more streamlined processes)

Advice to Senior Management

- invest more in research by hiring skilled (and more expensive) industry analysts
- align pay and commission structure with current market rates
- streamline processes and build more consistency between departments and offices

Pros

Good people some of the Smart people.
very nice place to work.
A decent working life balance.

Cons

Bad salary competitive
Low standard in training
In some department very poor management

Advice to Senior Management

Training, Salary increase and exposure

Pros

I absolutely love the people 50% of the people I work with they are the salt of the earth

The company has improved their sales staff tremendously

The company has low expectations and low benefits so they don't care if you work 9am-5pm, or less.

Cons

The company has let the research and cg departments fall to shambles, and they are the life blood of the company

The company doesn't have any true training set up, and uses sales people as gadgets to gather ideas, for what is a lack of direction. Training is also poorly set up and nothing is actually "taught". Rather we sat and discussed departmental adjustments and ideas, education and betterment were avoided.

50% of the employees are such mis-hires you wind you becoming an apologist for the company, arguing that they're not "all bad", to misdirect your own internal knowledge that "yes they are not good". It makes you wonder if nobody is vetting these people, or their lack of qualifications and experience. Or if the company is simply not interested in hiring the best.

There has been more internal shuffling of roles and quitting and rehiring it's been embarrassing, we're so poorly staffed and allocated.

Commission and sales structure is poor and set up for failure

Flexibility in schedule is completely based in favortism not based in need and company fairness.

The company tolerates bad behavior from managers

Benefits/perks: Laughable. They want loyalty and hard work from us, but do not want to give it back in return.

Advice to Senior Management

Dig into your pockets and remember, you pay for what you get.

Pros

global-minded, diverse, highly-intelligent workforce
international exposure
fun atmosphere
takes vacation/time-off very seriously (European style)
good-quality products and services, logical methodology
you can completely be yourself working at this company which is a rarity

Cons

pathetic pay, embarrassingly stingy, no training, pretty flat thus no real career advancement potential unless you stay on for many years (although to be expected from a high-growth, mid-sized company)
Management lavishes praise on sales while failing to recognize/appreciate the cogs that run the machine (e.g. research/consulting/business development) which is exacerbated by the pedigree/educational mismatch between the former and the latter and corresponding pay. At the very least, they should offer the cooks a similar bonus structure to the messengers who are less deserving.

Advice to Senior Management

Invest in your employees or settle on chronically high company turnover. Decide what kind of company you want to grow into: one that hires the best talent and strives to retain it or one that settles for the cheapest bidders who will leave you. The recession won't last forever. A mass employee exodus would spell the end of for this company which is possible if and when things turn around. And that would be a shame because the company has a great model and product and thus enormous potential. Finally, our CEO once referred to Euromonitor as a "publishing house." It most certainly is NOT. The future of the company is in consulting and/or providing research solutions (and there are growth and revenue stats to back this up). Recognize that and the company will survive provided you pay us a market rate for the work that we do. Most in Euromonitor's consulting team are qualified to work at BCG, McKinsey, Bain, etc. Sometimes I wonder if the senior management is aware of this.

Pros

Company - Every job is what you make it. For the most part, the office is filled with smart, fun and engaging people which makes for a pretty decent atmosphere. Euromonitor is a growing company with a fairly good product which is a definite plus.

Advancement - Early in your career it is all about moving up and, for the size of the company, there is actually some opportunity. You may not get a huge new title, but they do make people “Senior” and that sort of thing. I am not sure what people expect when entering an organization of this size, but there are not going to be layers and layers of management to move into.

Benefits (not really a pro or a con) - The 401k has a 3% match, very standard with other places. Health insurance got less expensive this year. The PPO is still pricey but covers almost everything. Do people see the headlines and read about what is happening with healthcare in this country? 15 vacation days to start, above average compared to other places I worked. Started pre-tax transit this year (finally), big plus. I have seen better benefits at smaller companies and worse benefits at larger companies. It all depends what you compare it to. Euromonitor is not Google or Yahoo and to compare the benefits to those companies is just silly. Could the benefits be better? Absolutely! They just need to spend more money! But many, many companies seems to be in cost-containment and cost-sharing mode with benefits these days.

Events, etc - Company events and parties are better than average. The summer event is held on a week day and you go there instead of the office (first time I have ever seen this and it is great). Fresh fruit every week, good coffee, beautiful office, quarterly-ish happy hours. The policies for travel, expenses, office, etc, are not remarkably better or worse than any place out there.

Cons

Leadership - Senior leaders (ie London management and owners) do not seem to provide any long term vision for the organization. They try to disguise this by saying we are an "entrepreneurial" company but in reality that is no longer true. By nature, a mid-size company like Euromonitor needs objectives, strategy and vision with budget, resources, plans and systems to support these efforts. Ideally, this would be accompanied by charisma and leadership. Local managers in Chicago try - some have awkward or unfortunate personalities and some are restrained by the owners/senior management - but it’s not like they are bad or evil people. Working in any privately-owned company you are subject to the whim of the owner(s). Honestly, the ownership can be a bit odd, not employee-friendly, make things unnecessarily difficult, and get in the way of progress, but why not focus on your job and what you can do rather than things out of your control?

Salary - Salary is on the low end of adequate and they need to take a serious look at adding a real bonus program for non-commission people. The minimal bonus (1-2%) at Christmas is really not motivating and seems cheap when the company is doing well. It would be smarter to put something variable in place tied to the company's success or create a bonus pool to distribute based on merit. I suspect when the economy improves, Euromonitor will find that people can and will leave to earn more money elsewhere.

Advice to Senior Management

In general - Make sure your expectations of any organization are realistic. And if you are unhappy (wherever you are) then do something to try to change it or put your efforts into finding a new job. Learn everything that you can and use your position as a stepping stone in your career - that is all any job is. Euromonitor may not be a place you stay for 20 years, but what company is these days? If you can't find something better, maybe it is time to look at yourself in this equation rather than blaming everything on the company. No company is all good or all bad. And it is also crazy to assume that every post which is not entirely negative is from management.

To leadership - You have really good employees here. Focus on the best ways to utlilize their talents. Provide the leadership, guidance and investment to accomplish what needs to be done. Believe in your employees and trust what they tell you.

Pros

The Company - Generally, the office has a handful of smart and social colleagues which adds for a fairly survivable environment (depending on what department you work in, admittedly certain departments need serious overhaul).

Career wise - It's not a big company, and they start you at a low pace, so moving up feels easy to start. But flattens. Largely, the titles are frivolous and don't prompt much change in responsibility, but since salaries aren't competitive, they consider titles a perk. Some might challenge my saying that moving up can "feel easy", due to the fact much of the moving up is out of turn over, or need to desperately fill shoes to expand and hire new talent in similar low title roles. But it is, what it is.

If you work in sales (and are a top seller) you will be invited to an awkward dinner and work minimal hours.

You get 15 days of vacation - basic, to be expected, certainly average. However, with the wave of changing benefits in newer white collar offices within their own industry, this could stand to be improved and keep up with the times. However, if you're coming from a place that had less vacation time, this is gold.

I have seen better benefits at both smaller companies and at larger companies. It all depends what you compare it to and the industry. Based on their own upcoming markets and favored clients,it's not very good, and not competitive, and certainly not cutting edge.

They like to brag that they allow you to drink beer around 4pm on Friday - this is standard and normal in office culture these days. (unless you chose to work someplace that's extremely conservative)

Cons

Leadership - Senior leaders in London and the owners do not show any long term vision or investment in the organization. They try to say they are "entrepreneurial" but that argument isn't fooling even the dumbest employee.

Common sense says, a mid-size company like Euromonitor (in order to be competitive, successful, long term, and innovative) needs smart strategy, the brightest talent, cutting edge vision, with a generous budget to invest in cutting edge resources, this has never happened. And probably never will. Lower mediocre product and vision has been the bar of measurement and acceptance.

Chicago Managers - some are very nice but are forced by the owners/senior management to tow an unfaithful company. I once heard an employee say "The company wants loyalty, but loyalty is a two way street". That is very true and sadly the Chicago managers are not empowered by ownership or company operations to be very loyal to the employees. (eg: ownership would not close the Chicago office during Chicago's epic history making "thunder snow" and then said any employees that didn't show up would be charged a vacation day, so managers banned together to say everyone came in, however, it should never come to that. Managers also tend to tell people they did all they could to retain departing staff, when in reality, no competitive offers were made.

Turn Over: They tend to wait to tell staff that employees are leaving, often until a few days before or day of, or after they've left. Not allowing for much reorganization time, and stimulating much gossip as to, why wait, what happened, and why were they so paranoid about telling the truth. At times, there's such little communication, we don't even know someone left, and it causes issues with projects and staffing and meeting planning. They also tend to tell staff they did all they could do to keep the employee from leaving, when in reality, no competitive offers were made; or they did not extend themselves at all.

Pay - Pay is on toward the low side of adequate. The minimal bonus (1-2%) at Christmas is really not motivating and seems cheap when the company brags in their annual state of the union that it's doing well. The owners followed that up by telling us, that now is not the time to become complacent.

Advice to Senior Management

Try harder at being more honest and open. We all go through up and downs, and should go through them together.

Maybe the company makes the money you claim to make, but apparently it's not enough to finance the new "smoke and mirror" offices and simultaneously support the previous employees benefits, and all the new enployees; without down-scaling the benefits (eg: the health care used to be $0 deductible, and that was taken way. the 401k used to be 100% vestment, now it's not til after 4 years. etc?)

Either you're making tons of money and you can afford us but choose not to. Or you're every bit as profitable as you say but your paying for your expansions by screwing over the employees (like when you cut benefits to be far leaner, and gave everyone 1-2% raise). Or you're not nearly as profitable as you say you are, and you can barely afford the employees and the expansion but want to inflate value. You need to be more clear.

Pros

This is a much better company to work for than what is being portrayed here by a number of angry (likely former) employees, who seem to expect a bit too much.

Some pretty solid pros:
- solid compensation (particularly for higher performing sales reps)
- above average time off, and extremely flexible work/life balance compared to similar firms
- young, dynamic work environment
- opportunities for people who succeed, and relatively quickly given recent growth. Most managers have been at the company 5 years or less.
- a fair amount of day-to-day automoy in different roles / not much micro-managing.
- great location
- generally great people (apart from your usual batch of malcontents).

I'm sure there is a fair amount of "I dont like my boss" or "why didnt i get promoted within a year", but in my experience the company is pretty fair, if a bit unorganized at times. People who are good do very well here. People who aren't tend to leave (and write negative reviews at sites like these). I'd note also that turnover is pretty low compared to other places i've worked (I'd guess about 10-15 out of more than 125 people last year).

Cons

Many comments here abou substandard benefits. I don't think they as below average as people here seem to think given recent increases in health costs nationwide, but they do feel a bit lower than average. It feels like employees bear the brunt of increases each year, and senior management does seem to worry a bit too much about cost control in this area - particularly as more employees have families.

Advice to Senior Management

Acknowledge the workforce is getting bigger and a bit older as the company grows - where things like benefits and security weigh a bit more heavily than they might have previously. Praise high performers and do a better job of globally communicating initiatives; it often feels like we are alone in this office and not as connected to London or the other offices as we should/could be.

Pros

Great, friendly people
Decent Pay
Opportunties for Advancement
International feel (I talk to multiple countries every day)
Reasonable work/life balance and hours

Cons

Not much interaction across teams (sales and research)
Benefits could be much better than they are (particularly health coverage, and nearly all my freinds have better 401k matching at 4%)

Advice to Senior Management

More communication about global initiatives would be nice... so would a 4% 401k match, and a few more events that bring both sides of the office together.