BVA Reviews

Working here is an absolute rollercoaster of effort, emotions, and stressors that likely mean you will love it one day and then absolutely hate it the next, over and over again until you decide to look elsewhere. The most recent hires above staff level in delivery are some of the worst people I have ever worked with and they have no way of steering the company in the right direction. At this point, it only seems like the C-Suite is positioning the company to sell after realizing that running an agency such as BVA is not as easy as they would have thought and they want to cut the losses they already have faced. As you get further down the staff chain, you start to see some real talent and ideas on how to better position BVA for success as these are the people seeing each problem day-in and day-out. Unfortunately, none of this matters if you are not a part of the executive leadership team that seems to consist of only those that get the chance to speak to the C-Suite or management regularly. Any ideas on how to improve that are raised are likely to fall on deaf ears and you will resort to trying to keep your head afloat and your team morale as high as possible. I do not believe there is a single management level employee at BVA at this point that seems to know what they are doing and any type of feedback from their team(s) seems to fall on deaf ears. Reviews, Learning and Development, and lots of other implemented strategies to help morale, work quality, and growth of their staff only last for 6 months before it just becomes another thing that gets in the way of billable hours. And of course, you need to do those things as "extracurricular" after you are done working your 40+ hour week or you can certainly expect it to come up in your review. Some of the best people in management positions have long left and been replaced by people who simply do what they only assume is right; nothing here is being driven by facts or realities, nothing at BVA is driven by data simply because they rarely have a way to collecting it. Systems and processes to help only end up hurting project delivery and there is no accountability for anyone. Clients will always come and go but don't be fooled by the BVA website. Nearly all of the big names that would be great to work on have left likely due to some mix-up and bad client relationship management. It starts from day one with any client since the sales and delivery teams are so far removed from one another that promises are made that are nearly impossible to deliver on with the Shopify platform that BVA is said to be "experts" on. BVA seems to survive on the fact that they can convince clients they can do nearly impossible work for a cost and date that the client sets. They then burn out employees by forcing unreasonable timelines, and after heated client conversations, deliver mediocre Shopify site builds on outdated technology. In terms of technology, for anyone interested in joining a technology-specific role, you should likely not expect to work on anything relevant within the last 2-3 years in terms of frameworks or libraries. Of course, a lot of this has to do with the Shopify eco-system itself but there is no desire by management to look at any other solutions, platforms, or a way that technology can grow. The "culture", the conflict between offices, lack of strategy, and having nearly no strong tie with Shopify directly means that any push for using new technology leads to a bunch of uncertainty followed by management not wanting to take the risk. Last year they made a "big move" in acquiring the agency portion of a nearly unheard of e-commerce platform and essentially did nothing with it. So many people left after this alone and it seemed like such a waste of resources. Since BVA acquired 2 different "agencies" nearly all of the original staff of both have since left. Project management here is a mess. It is probably the worst I have seen in any environment like this. Project staffing also falls under this description but that is another story. Of course, there are a few really strong staff in the department that break their backs and make BVA shine but I highly doubt they are getting the recognition they deserve. Nearly every client team follows a different process with little structure or guidance from management. On top of that, they vocally hired two people to help fix the problem after taking no action for nearly six months. After letting the team just figure things out with no oversight for 6 months they hired two higher-up roles that seem to just spend most of the day awkwardly flirting with each other and joking about how things are being done so poorly and how their last job was so great. Beyond being completely inappropriate and creating a very uncomfortable environment for their staff, they seem to have done little-to-nothing in actually helping technology and project management get aligned on the process of delivery. Instead, they have hired their friends from previous jobs and are building a culture that is completely forced and does not align with the outwardly known "BVA culture." Any step in the right direction only comes with 3 steps backward trying to force the process into projects that have so many other issues. Pay is below average for anyone senior or above and they often use a "bonus" as a way to make it seem like you will make more than market in your role. To this day I have not met anyone that has seen said bonus or even what the bonus structure is, outside of the sales team. Most of this seems to be trying to attract young talent with snacks and 'unlimited PTO' that are willing to overwork not realizing there will be little future compensation increase or benefits offered. This has caused a huge gap between the 'boots on the ground' and the management that think they have control of what is going on. The culture is constantly shoved in your face to try to make something inorganic work the way the leadership teams see it. Be ready to have to publicly share your "wins" even if you had an awful week. The CEO himself has made it clear that he has a pretty low tolerance for anyone who does not want to follow these requirements by telling those to exit the company. So much so, that they had implemented policies to "help" people leave at one point. In my time at BVA, these type of policies only team morale more and more around me and it was pretty obvious it did not send the right message. The COVID related situation only made this show more in my opinion. Of course, like many places, there were layoffs and furloughs. What is worse is that management could not even get their act together to tell those that were affected promptly and thus, at least a handful of people were told in a company-wide meeting that they no longer had a job. For BVA to say they care about keeping people on staff, building culture, and that they care about employee morale and then they cannot even figure out how to properly communicate anything with them is unfortunately sad.