Honestly, where to begin? You know when an older apartment building has a ton of character and original architecture, but then it gets "modernized," but in reality every unit is identical, everything is just soul-less and none of the appliances work quite like they should? That's probably the only appropriate way I can describe what's happening to Commonwealth. It used to be a great place where everyone looked out for one another and as an employee you wanted to make the company grow because that meant you grew with it. Now, it's turned into a company that preaches togetherness to its new hires and sells service to advisors, all while exploiting the efforts of their current staff. Don't get me wrong, I love providing a good service experience for our advisors, but it has gotten to the point where 65-70% of advisors don't even know how anything works anymore and expect to snap their fingers so they can sit back and watch the seas part for them. When I first hired, we had a collaborative relationship with our advisors where we would assist them while also educating them on the procedure to make them more effective in the future, but now, we are essentially henchman who are only expected to sit and wait for the advisor to say jump so we can ask "how high?". And don't even get me started on the compensation. We used to be paid below the market rate because we had an awesome perks package, which was dissolved with the LPL buyout, but there was no pay increase to balance it out. They think that it'll all be better if they wheel out fun treats a few times a month, but in reality, all people want is to come to a place where we feel valued. I do want to say that not all of this was a direct result of the LPL buyout though, this has been a slow trend for the past 4-5 years - the buyout only accelerated the deterioration. Management knows it too and they do not care what anyone below them on the corporate ladder has to say about it. A few years ago they changed our Employee Satisfaction surveys to be all multiple choice and removed all of the open response sections for us to provide our feedback because they know that they allowed this company to rot from the inside out and chose to do absolutely nothing about it. What has happened to this company is such an unfortunate tragedy, and I for one am just waiting for my opportunity to jump ship.