Pros

Coming from a large agency, I find it refreshing to work for such a transparent company. Co-workers are talented and smart and I love the culture here as it feels like family. Iris Sleight is a smart and savvy business owner with outstanding negotiation skills and gives 110% to her clients. I appreciate the day to day, regular interaction I have with Iris as she truly values her employees.

Cons

Smaller company means more expensive healthcare but offset with a stipend for employee coverage.

Pros

As far as the creative team is concerned, it runs as almost an entirely separate silo from the account management side (which was a good thing as far as I'm concerned). You're not going to be doing any groundbreaking, amazing work, but you'll have enough to do. Small company so the team is consistently busy. You'll have to be super self-sufficient because you're going to be one of maybe two people doing your kind of creative work, if not the only one. That means you're the in-house expert and you're not going to get a lot of pushback from the team for the most part. If you thrive in a small, family-oriented environment (and yes, that can come with some drama), this may be a good fit. They really do care about the employees they hire for the most part. For example, the funds they received as a small business during the pandemic were given right back to employees, which was totally unexpected but supremely nice.

Cons

If you're coming onto the team, they make it very clear that you'll be doing things Iris' way to no way at all. It may not be the best way, but what Iris says goes. To be fair, though, they'll let you know this during the interview process. Coming from another agency, I could see that a lot of the services being sold to clients were not necessarily what they needed. There's a lack of strategy behind the decisions being made, mostly because the accounts teams are more than happy to sell clients whatever they ask for (likely to earn more commissions) instead of working with them to identify services that would best suit their business goals. There also seems to be a mentality of "get it done" over "get it done well." You're often so busy that you'll spend time making something you're not really proud of because you have to meet a deadline. This leads to less creative, more generic output overall. Leadership has been known to give away free services to try to keep clients, hemorrhaging the creative team's time for unpaid work instead of generating new sources of income. Working with third-party companies for SEO and website development can cause issues as well. Again, it becomes more of a process revolving around getting something built instead of ensuring it's built to last. Little to no room for upward growth as the leadership team is basically cemented in place until they retire. I also got a lot of weird, borderline inappropriate emails from leadership about politics and politics-adjacent topics. For example, at one point we got an email about how we should look into hydroxychloroquine for treating Covid because Trump said so. I'm not one to say you have to hide who you are or what you believe at work, but for a leader to be sending out wild emails well past 5 o'clock regarding non-work issues was jarring for me.