Stanley Security Solutions Reviews

Pros

An excellent experience. I worked with wonderful people and I recall my time there with fondness. Simply one of the best employers in Montreal. Stanley recently merged with Black and Decker and I'm always checking for news on the merger, hope everything goes well.

Paid vacation, great training, amazing colleagues, if you work in the surveillance field and want to find a new employer by all means think about sending your resume to Stanley Security Solutions.

Cons

More training required.

Equipment we work with sometimes is a little obsolete.

Huge pressure on the sales staff.

Pros

great branding
all the folks that work there are great to work with.
customers are very loyal.
pay is fair

Cons

Year after year the sales goals go up based on previous sales goal not actual!
Training is very scarce. Know the business or be prepaired to learn quickley or you will sink
closing 20 out of 28 offices by june 2012.
All the techs do is complain about sales.

Pros

Steady work, many promotions, good benefits and salary.

Cons

Culture in home office is very poor.

Advice to Senior Management

Culture and personnel in home office needs to improve.

Pros

There aren't many. They seem to be moving into a new building which is all they are concerned about. Their technology competes with itself and creates distrust among employees work for the same goal.

Cons

There is no training. The director is out of town all the time and there is no trainer. I spent weeks watchin bad videos. The only way I could actually learn was from the people around. Sales director there is not actually a director, but rather a glorified salesman. HR is also terrible. There is no trust involved, and lots of backstabbing from the dept. This is the dept that is supposed to support us. Everyone has their own agenda and if you dont get along with the HR lady and the sales director, you are gonna be unhappy here.

Advice to Senior Management

Hire a trainer, follow the rules, eliminate office politics, be consistent.

Pros

It's a great company if you are meeting their goals and do what they ask of you.

Cons

If you don't make your goals they will hound you from the top management on down. Right now there is way too much management and not a lot of leadership.

Advice to Senior Management

They need to simplify what is needed from their sales staff. We need to get back to selling and stop doing the conference calls, reports, and needless surveys.

Pros

The pay and benefits is comparable to similar companies. They are a good corporate citizen. They offer some decent partner/vendor purchasing opportunities to employees.

Cons

The annual performance review process takes so long that you don't actually get an annual increase, even if you do qualify.

Morale is low because turn-over is very high. During my short time there many people were let go.

There are some very large egos in senior management and not a lot of listening. Where there are personal conflicts the person who contributes most to the bottom line wins. Individuals are not valued. Expect to be undermined.

Training and development is not a priority for non-technical staff. Staff are expected to constantly do more with less. Head office knows best even if you are the one sitting in front of the customer.

Clients are more valuable than the employees that serve them. It is not uncommon for staff to leave Stanley to work for their customers.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to your employees. Really listen to them and give some respect to what they have to contribute. Yes, your customers are valuable but so are the employees.

Pros

As far as companies go, the parent company Stanley, is one of the better companies to work for but the choice of leadership and their decision making skills make it a company that I am glad I left last year.

Cons

They don't offer any training, you can't find a org chart to save your life, and they didn't see the need to keep knowledgeable people around after the acquisition of Best Access Systems.

Advice to Senior Management

Get your head out of the sand and realize that your decision to consolidate everything to Indianapolis was a mistake. You let people go who had 20+ years with best as combinators and customer service personnel in exchange for a team in Indy without a clue.

Pros

Pay & benefits are pretty comparable to other large companies, more than small private companies.

Financial stability

If you're in headquarters, it can be pretty exciting for a while, BUT read the first line of the cons before you jump.

Most areas have little beaurocracy.

Very high ethics, particularly on financial activity

Cons

SSS "actively adjusts staffing to meet market conditions", which means it's a meat grinder. It's OK if you need to make some money for a while, but don't fool yourself into thinking it'll be a career. There are always a few exceptions, but most people won't last too long.

Their growth strategy is almost exclusively thru acquisition, not organic growth. They'll spend a lot of money on acquisitions (some good, some pretty bad), but very little on your good idea. If you are an innovator, this is not the place for you.

If SSS buys your company, you better believe heads will roll. Headcount consolidation is natural for any acquisition, but it will catch still catch many people off guard.

If you're in a leadership position, then expect the strategic direction to change quarterly. It's unlikely you'll be given the time or resources for a significant initiative.

Bureaucracy is limited mainly because of thin staffing. This also means you're not likely to find a procedure or knowledgeable manager with spare time to give you direction.

Morale is pretty low in many areas because of the constant headcount reductions. The thin staffing burns a lot of people out and leads to short sighted actions.

Advice to Senior Management

Acquisitions are nice, and necessary to grow a company that fast, but start enabling more organic growth. The excitement will motivate your employees and change the culture from personal survival to owning a stake in the company success. Most importantly, treat people the way you want to be treated. I know some headcount reductions are necessary, but you can't kick that many people to the curb without killing morale. Most people at the line or supervisory level are only focused on personal survival, not your customers or company.

Pros

some of the people that you work with actually have a head on the shoulders...this obviously excludes sales, upper management, HR, etc.

Cons

a Canadian company forced to run like an American company 'do more with less' attitude is an outdated phrase
HR is a non-existent entity
salary increases are few and far between, no incentives given to anyone other than sales
staff are like cattle, pushed to produce numbers only to end up a number in the end

Advice to Senior Management

why not pay your people better to get the results you want?