Pros
The people beneath the management level (sales reps, technicians, inspectors, office staff, etc.) were an absolute pleasure to work with. They were actually the main reason that I stayed as long as I did. We were all in the trenches together, trying to make a difference in our communities and in our organization.
Cons
It's tough to stay positive while speaking about a company such as this and the Cons section will certainly overshadow the Pros section. Where do I start? 1) Poor company culture. Dennis Furden, self-proclaimed CFO, is a hot head with anger management issues. Dennis is quick to get angry and has quite the explicative vocabulary to follow in tandem. Verbal tirades and personal tear downs are the common rhetoric with Dennis and what is worse is that management just shrugs it off as "Oh, you know how Dennis gets" when he is on one of his rampages. As a C-Suite level executive, one should act accordingly and lead by example not by belittling those around him. This certainly makes the "Open Door Policy" one to be feared for any issues that may arise. 2) The company does not pay its bills! This pill was a tough one to swallow especially since the culture is to berate their own customers by threatening property liens and sending them to collections for their bills even before the net 30 terms are up. Tri-Signal refuses to pay their subcontractors for work which they are contracted to do because Tri-Signal "has not received payment from their customers yet." This is just poor business practice. The subcontractor should not be punished because Tri-Signal wants to collect every cent for a project that is not 100% completed due to longer construction schedules. The subcontractor's work is completed and has been signed off, therefore, that subcontractor should be paid. As a company in the service industry, it behoves you to cultivate and nurture business relationships with clients, customers, and subcontractors alike. I was placed at Tri-Signal by a recruiter and I come to find out that they company which placed me at Tri-Signal is no longer offering services to place individuals at Tri-Signal because they have not paid their bills to the recruitment company. 3) New employees do not get paid time off (vacation, sick days, etc.) for the first year of employment. I am not sure how that one slipped through the cracks, but it is in the employee manual. Naturally, the go-around is to explain to your immediate supervisor that you need time off and it won't be reported to corporate which further begs the question or why this is even in the employee handbook if your own mid-level management is going to disregard the policy in the first place. 4) Very little resources available. I was promised a company cell phone, laptop, and a gas card when I started. I never received the gas card, the laptop that I was provided had a broken screen and only worked when I was physically plugged into the network at the office with a monitor so that I could see what I was doing, and the company cell phone only allotted 1 Gig of data a month from which to use in the field. As an individual that was required to be in the field more than the office, this certainly made doing my job much more challenging. 5) "Remote" office locations have to succumb to the will of the corporate office. The word, remote, is used here to signify that if you are not physically working out of the corporate office in Sylmar then you will not get much support unless it is to get a high dollar value contract signed because profit seems to be the only driver here. God forbid that you are asking for help with a customer's billing issue because all billing has become centralized through the corporate office. Yet each "remote" office is charged a "meager" $70K per month which comes out of each office's P&L for "corporate services." Even if an office were to refuse the services of the corporate office, the monthly charge would still be incurred. $70K is the annual salary for two administrative workers, don't you think that money could be put to better use? 6) Very disorganized office structure. There are no formal training opportunities available for any positions within the company. On very rare occasions, there would be a few spots available to technicians for product training, but most of the paid spots would be for technicians of the corporate office. If spots were still available then the other offices would have to fight to get their technicians trained. The company does not utilize a CRM and mistakes such a double billings, missed inspections, and unordered parts are quite the norm. 7) This privately owned company is run by a group of individuals that have "industry" experience, but are generally bullied by their self-proclaimed CFO into taking the business in a certain direction. There is little foresight into business expansion and growth opportunities because the old adage of "We've been doing this for x number of years" or "It's never been done that way" gets thrown around in random conference call conversations that are guised as structured business meetings. There needs to be a certain level of trust with your various offices and managers to expand the business. As a board, you beat up the Group VPs for year on year growth, yet you do not provide them with the tools to do so. Naturally I could go on and on, but I believe that this fairly and accurately gets the message across. Every company has their issues and no company is perfect, however, there are those companies that recognize their problems and actively address them so that they can foster a pleasant work environment.
