Pros
-High degree of autonomy - the entire team only meets together once or twice a week -Learned critical skills in the areas of personnel management, sales, marketing, and customer service -Technicians have the ability to earn commission on product sales and service upsells, management the opportunity to earn commission on new customers and new services -Compensation for gas and phone -Was given an advancement opportunity from technician to operations manager within a month and a half of being at the company. I was given several consequential raises which increased my compensation by 173% from the time I started to the time I left the company.
Cons
-Extremely high turnover. I'm not sure if it was simply the area we were in, but we would go through hiring classes where many people simply did not show up for work the day after being hired. Most would quit with no notice, let alone two weeks. This lead to me averaging about 70-80 hours worked per week during my 2+ year tenure as operations manager, because the burden was usually left to me to cover for missed work from people quitting. The advise of management in this scenario was to delegate work to the technicians, which is difficult to do when it's a Friday afternoon and they are expecting to go home for the weekend. Which leads to my next point, already hammered home by others who have reviewed here- -No vacation time or benefits built in whatsoever. For a technician, this isn't usually a problem - as long as all your customers are serviced during the calendar week and you are communicating with them everything runs smoothly. For management, this is a major thorn in the side. During the time I was operations manager, from December 2016 to February 2018, I managed to take THREE personal non-weekend days off, and maybe two days early leave for being sick (happens pretty frequently in this business, even when using the proper PPE.) I had to cancel two separate vacations (of three days each) due to technicians quitting without notice. -The corporate office. I credit the individual franchisees, I really do. Even when we butted heads on certain issues I found my franchise owner to be an astute businessman who was fair to his employees, especially when you consider that his life savings went into purchasing this company and he only took home a paycheck a few times during the time I worked there. Things may have changed in the last year since I left the company, but while I was there the corporate office seemed keen on making decisions that will eventually drive the company into the ground. They operated the entire company based on what looked good for their investors, but ended up harming many individual franchises. To this point-about a year into my position with Enviro-Master, our corporate office strong-armed my franchise owner into purchasing our neighboring territory. When the outbound franchise owner of that territory announced he was leaving the company, the corporate office piddled and paddled around with finding a new owner until they just forced my franchise owner to do it. My franchise owner had to go save that dumpster fire of a franchise from certain demise, get it stable, and put it back on track for growth. My franchise owner then spent about 85% of his time (justifiably) in the neighboring territory to take care of all that, and I was left to run our territory (about 6-7 times the size of our neighbor) all by my 24-year old lonesome. I was passionate, I was driven, and I was willing to do whatever it took to make sure our franchise didn't go down in flames, but I was one person who had never run a business before. I needed leadership and direction and the decisions of our corporate office had made sure that my franchise owner was able to spend as little time focusing on our franchise as possible.