I'm here to tell you what this company is about, since the CEO who conducts the interviews will masterfully tiptoe around any topic that doesn't serve his interests.
The interview process has a first and second interview. For the first, you will come to the office in Independence and speak 1 on 1 with CEO Brian Tidwell. He will do most of the talking, give you his personal story, and tell you about how successful his business is. Then he will tell you that they sell electricity, internet, or other utilities and that you will be going door to door to get new customers. He will schedule you for a second interview where you will shadow a senior staff person to show you the ropes.
You wouldn't know it from the job postings, and they are various, but this is a door to door sales position, no matter what the specific posting you responded to says. Mostly they sell electric power.
When I sat down with Tidwell he was wearing a shirt that says "Energy Harbor". Here's a little bit about them. Energy Harbor is an Akron based energy generation company, formerly known as FirstEnergy Solutions, that owns and operates coal and nuclear power plants. There are two nuclear plants in Ohio, which FirstEnergy Solutions (FES) owns, and they are both past their planned 40 year lifespans (read more here, including the "5th most dangerous nuclear incident in the US": shorturl(dot)at/mCKMT). Due to their declining efficiency and the falling prices of wind and natural gas energy, FES filed for bankruptcy in 2018. In 2019, FES successfully lobbied the Ohio legislature to approve a consumer bailout for their generational assets in excess of a billion dollars, after which they emerged from chapter 11 and rebranded as Energy Harbor. Energy Harbor now sells itself as "safe, clean, reliable power," despite that power coming from coal and nuclear plants and having actively lobbied against the approval of other companies developing new renewable energy (wind/solar) in Ohio.
Anyways, it turns out that Tidwell was wearing this Energy Harbor shirt because Stand Up Management has recently signed a contract to do the door to door sales for Energy Harbor electricity contracts. I already knew about FES/Energy Harbor and I expressed my concern to Tidwell about selling their products. He assured me that their management had been completely replaced by Constellation NewEnergy, a branch of US energy giant Exelon. I was unfamiliar with this development, so I left it at that. However, when I got home, I researched further. In 2018 Exelon had made a deal to purchase existing FES energy contracts outright, but their bankruptcy restructuring plan wasn't approved until the eighth attempt, and as a result the sale was canceled. I called Tidwell to clarify what he had said. He claimed that it was Constellation's management that had specifically been "headhunted" to take over only the sales department of Energy Harbor (which I was able to verify). I believed I had made it clear to him that it was the management of the corporation in its entirety that concerned me and that nothing had changed except the name. In fact, if he had ever bothered to visit the website of his client, he would have seen that almost all of Energy Harbor's current executives are previous employees of FirstEnergy Corporation, including the CEO, John Judge, who worked for FirstEnergy for at least the past twenty years. In any case, when I brought up this discrepancy, he claimed it to be "above his pay grade". And since he is the CEO of Stand Up, apparently it is no one's job there to vet their clients or verify the ethics of their business practices.
For these reasons it is clear to me that Tidwell could not care less about who he works for or what he sells as long as he can get paid, and I believe he intentionally misled me in the hopes of growing his sales operation. You can probably expect these kind of deceitful tactics in their sales training too.
