Blackmore Partners Employee Reviews about "no pay"

Pros

-The interns -If you spin your experience well, can look good for your resume -A good intro into M&A -Obtained some leadership skills -Approximately 3 networking opportunities in 10 months

Cons

- The company structure, or lack there of - No useful training -Unpaid - Work demand (for an unpaid position) -The CEO - They primarily hire foreign graduates desperate to stay in the country, and employ them full time without pay and reap all of the benefits -Leveraged my letter of recommendation for a positive online review (this is my honest review)

Pros

It is incredibly easy to get hired at Blackmore Partners. This is due to the low retention rate of the internship and the people hired on tend to drop out before their start date. This is due to the negative reputation of the company. About 6-8 new interns will get hired each month and about 2 of those people will actually have the stones to show up for their start date. You have nothing to worry about in your interview. As long as you don’t completely suck you will get hired. You are evaluated on whether you understand what the company does (hint: they are a private equity INTERMEDIARY, include this word), your communication skills and your ability to ask questions. Prepare for your interview based on these guidelines. Your fellow interns you work with are the best part. I have met so many wonderful, cool people in this program from all over the world; particularly a lot of people from China. In my understanding of how people build relationships. It’s either through a common like or dislike and you will definitely bond over your dislike of Blackmore. You interact right away with the top corporate executives of the world. You hear cool insider information from the executives that would make the writers of Forbes magazine salivate. Your ability to move up in the program is tremendous. If you want leadership experience you can get that here. You have a great chance to lead a small team. The team leadership roles are Social Media Team Leader, Salesforce team leader, Talent Acquisition, and HR Team Leader. All titles have nothing to do with M&A. If you do well you get to work on the backend. You may never reach the backend. Salesforce is used in many companies. Good thing to have on a resume. Occasionally, there are company outings where management buys you pizza or tacos.

Cons

Let’s get the first one out of the way. There is no pay. It sucks to be unpaid. It’s just how it goes. The management is incredibly cheap. A good example of this is when a guy from Bloomberg did a presentation for the services for the company. Management had no intention of ever paying for the services. They just wanted to use the 2-week free trial. Blackmore has a negative reputation on Bloomberg as well. The front end is really awful and you could be doing that for 3 months. Much has been said in past Glassdoor reviews about how you are basically a secretary. You start titling resumes to qualify c-level executives for meetings with the Managing Director. Scheduling meetings does sounds like secretarial work. That is the most basic task in the office. Then you are placed onto two teams; the social media team and the salesforce team. Both feature their boring, repetitive tasks. The social media team is about spamming executives with potential acquisition deals. While salesforce largely deals with maintaining the database of executives. You also have responsibilities when it comes to Talent Acquisition. This isn’t really included in any of the intern descriptions posted online. Because Blackmore Partners do PE deals and such deals take a long time to complete. In order to keep the lights on, Blackmore has you generally do the work of a headhunter. This is done so when deals are being discussed with the PE firm. Blackmore can package not only a company to sell but also the executive to run it. However, not all TA positions you will find are meant for PE deals. Sometimes, they are just because companies use Blackmore as headhunters and the management wants to make money using you as free labor. The TA assignments are good experience if you are an HR intern. But generally useless for your resume if you’re an M&A intern or Marketing intern. The management treats you like garbage and views you as nothing. You are replaceable. You are dirt. You are nothing. There is no appreciation for you in the program. I’ve seen management call people “stupid” and “dummy” directly to their faces. You will never hear “thank you” or “good job,” no matter what you do. You will work hard because Blackmore Partners is always short-handed. You will be loaded with assignments that are time-consuming and mind-numbing. Then, yelled at for not completing them in a short period of time. The management is obsessed with making sure you don’t text and arrive on time. If you are late 3 times, it counts as an absence. All absences are added to the end of your internship. The management is so hateful of texting. Which is fair enough; people generally shouldn’t be on their phones at work. However, this can be taken to the extreme by management. One intern whose father was known to be in hospice care receives a text from his mother informing him his father has passed away. The Managing Director sees him reading this text and yelled at him for texting and “for being completely unprofessional.” Absolutely unacceptable and some of the poorest social tact I’ve ever seen. There is absolutely no trust between management and interns. The management hates millennials. They are used to interns leaving and assume you hate the job because you do. You will hear the same speech over and over about how millennials don’t know how to work hard. How we are self-absorbed and conceded. They are not above micro-managing you and having HR record your movements. How long you leave the office, how long you are in the bathroom etc. Absolutely no respect and no encouragement will ever be heard from their mouths. If you will take a sick day, you will immediately become suspect to management and your commitment to the program will get questioned. The Managing Director won’t remember your name. You will constantly hear him say people’s names incorrectly. The Marketing internship program is generally a joke. There really is no marketing program at Blackmore. There are few marketing interns who apply for the program. The majority of the people working there are M&A interns and to a lesser extent HR interns. I remember one marketing intern asking when he was going to start doing marketing. To which management said “everything is marketing.” All you do as a marketing intern is push Blackmore Partners on Linkedin. But all interns do that. It’s not a special duty reserved by marketing interns. All of it is sending out spam messages to executives to try and find people to sell their business or if they know of someone trying to sell their business. It’s just another repetitive task. There is a 3-month summer internship sometimes available in the summer where you basically will do the front-end for the whole duration. This shortened program is a huge joke and you basically learn nothing. There is so much pressure on the HR interns to increase intern numbers and retention. This proves to be difficult because of the negative reputation and toxic atmosphere that the management creates. When people leave Blackmore, they just stop showing up. I’ve seen good workers who were seen as model examples. Just leave and never return. If you are not a great English-speaker, you will not rise up in the program and won’t work on the back end. The backend is basically the whole reason you want to be an M&A intern.

Pros

Interns can get some exposure to M&A if they are Freshmen or Sophomores.

Cons

I would like to share my insights into this business and this position based on my two months of experience at BMP, and my suggestions for all the stakeholders. Those comments may be long, but it will be worth your time. Trust me! The core value of the business is to scam executives to buy their membership services so that those executives can help them source deals and close deals for them. Gerald said you did not have to pay them, and they will still work with you. However, he will not work seriously with you if he cannot get any money from you, since it is just a scam. They are also working with some deal partners to seek funds from LPs and GPs to close deals. But they only closed 4 deals in 15 years. Here are my comments for all the stakeholders. • For Executives: I know BMP and BMC will promise you that they will offer you great training and a great future with PE firms if you decide to pay membership fees. However, they are just drawing a pie in the sky! BMP will let you use your own resources to source deals for them and they can present the deals and you to PE firms. In other words, executives are helping them source deals so that BMP can get fees from PE firms, by GIVING MONEY TO BMP! One executive called the office and he got super emotional to Gerald since he worked with BMP for about one year and no PE firm hired him! The only thing Gerald told him about was to keep patient and work harder! • For interns: Your experience at BMP cannot be your resume builders. How many deals have they closed? Only 4 deals in 15 years! They are Humanetics, Northwest Mailing Service, The Lion Brewery and Logistyx. You can check their website. What kind of PE firm can only close 4 deals in 15 years!!!!! You cannot get any actual transaction experiences since they just cannot close deals with so many excuses! I know they are always trying to persuade interns that you will get more experience if they work with them for more than 6 months since you can get more exposure to transaction opportunities with longer internship programs. However, most interns will only do administrative works, and if you did those tasks in a wrong way, they will not hesitate to yell at you and tell you that this is finance world!!! There four main things interns need to do every day: 1. BMP posted a lot of fake jobs on LinkedIn and scam people to apply for those jobs. Interns check emails and title their resumes to sales force. 2. “Mandate emails”- Interns will find qualified executives and email them so that BMP can scam them to buy their services. 3. BMC Outreach- Email and cold call PE firms to market their conferences service. Intern will need to send more than 200 emails per month and cold call those PE firms. Some PE firms have already marked them as spams, and they may hang out in a minute if interns tell them that they are working for BMC. 4. NDA review- That is probably the most valuable thing those interns are doing. BMP cannot afford legal document review fees so that they let interns review NDAs and agreements, to support Manchit in negotiating with investment bankers and PE firms. You probably have noticed that most duties are not related to PE. That’s why I said interns cannot build their career by wasting their time and money in BMP. They always say that they want to pay interns, but those interns cannot help them, because of their limited contribution. First, BMP cannot close deals anyway, as I mentioned. Second, those interns are helping BMP organize BMC conferences every two months. BMP should pay those interns since they are helping BMC make money! • For PE firms: BMC actually recommend some really good executives to PE firms. I would recommend BMC’s conference services to PE firms. Those conferences are very helpful to build in person connections with industry experts. I spent more than one hour explaining why executives and interns should not work with them because I hope no one will be scammed again. I know job searching is frustrating but there is no easy way to achieve your career goal. I had one great paid intern and now I am working in a fast-growing finance institution, by my efforts, not by my experience in BMP. Actually, I never talked about BMP in most of my interviews because I know interviewers will google BMP and they will know BMP's glassdoor reviews, which will harm my personal brand. AND YOU DO NOT WANT TO HARM YOUR PERSONAL BRANDS BY WORKING HERE!