AND Digital Reviews

Thanks for your review. We're truly heartbroken to be in the situation we are and for the impact it is having on our people. In the light of the economic slowdown and the effect it’s having on the tech sector, it’s with a heavy heart that, for the first time in our history, we’ll be going through a consultation process to make a number of redundancies from around half our Clubs (our local business units) and our supporting teams in the UK. Given the autonomous nature of our clubs, and in line with UK legislation, each club is an independent ‘establishment’. While clubs that are impacted are looking to reduce their costs by the equivalent of around 15-19 ANDis, those that are performing and forecasting well aren't impacted. As you mention, many of the great parts of what it’s like to be ANDi have been on pause over the last few months as we’ve tried to save everything we can without impacting roles. We hoped these small savings would get us through but the impact of the economic slowdown and the effect it’s having on the tech sector, has been greater than we anticipated. Though painful in the short term, taking this tough decision will enable us to return the full ANDi experience in line with our people value proposition as soon as possible. To minimise the amount of redundancies we need to make, we’ve had to make the difficult decision not to increase salaries at this point, based on the benchmarking that you mention. This will be disappointing to lots of ANDis, but we had to weigh up the impact on our business, and ultimately made the decision to keep as many ANDis as possible. The main problem has been our growth rate. In the last year AND grew by 55% and we had expected to achieve a similar trajectory in 2023. We have been successful in engaging with new clients and continue to deliver with our existing clients, but the pace of growth has been much slower than we anticipated. As we now expect growth this year to be in the 20-25% range, we have taken the decision to rebalance for this lower growth environment, which should set us up well for the future. We are truly sorry for the distress that this will cause to our departing ANDis, but we will do everything within our power to support those affected during the process and to set them up with the greatest chance of success in securing their next best opportunity. We remain grateful to all of our ANDis for their brilliant work.

I'm sorry to read this and it certainly has been a tough time, culminating in the redundancy process earlier in the year. Responding to reviews like this is not the best part of my role but I do believe it's important to correct inaccuracies for the readers, as they can reflect badly on AND. If an ANDi's experience has sadly been far below what we'd hope and aim for, that doesn't reflect everyone's experience. (btw, I'm not in PR or marketing.) Going through a redundancy process is always horrible. Treating distinct parts of a business as 'independent establishments', like we did with the clubs, is quite common and had the advantage of better-performing clubs not having ANDis at risk of redundancies. It was difficult time but one that was necessary to go through and effective in getting us to a more stable and sustainable footing. We're seeing a more positive environment now. I'm sorry to hear your views and best wishes for the future.