Great people, but poor leadership. Know what you are getting yourself into.
Pros
I was referred to the company based on my previous work experience in events and tech. From a technical standpoint, the product suite is overall pretty interesting! Some of the events that we would work on were high profile and provided a great learning experience. I have only positive comments and praise about individuals I directly worked with. The CSMs and Producers are top notch professionals who worked extremely hard to make the clients satisfied. Everyone from Sales to Development was very friendly and easy to work with. Pay and benefits were my main incentives for staying at the company, even though I saw multiple red flags that it was an unhealthy work environment. However, Pay does not seem consistent amongst CSMs . There is "unlimited PTO" , but it is very tough to step away from the job based on the workload.
Cons
For the CSM role, the hours are really long and everyone seems to be overwhelmed. There is not enough support and it does not help that leadership assigns clients on the same week in the opposite time zone. My schedule often had multiple days a week where I would start at 6 AM and end at 9 PM then work on the weekends. I mentioned my poor work life balance multiple times to my direct report. Even though we had "unlimited PTO", I could rarely get the amount of time off to balance the long hours. The way I was released from my contract was unnecessarily rude and conflicted with the company culture it claims to have. The company claims to preach that the people are what makes BL different and even sends a ton of Brandlive swag to encourage everyone to represent the company. On the day I was let go, I was invited to a late meeting with a blank title/ description by my manager and then ambushed by hr. I was told that based on feedback from two low level contracts I was being fired (both issues from technical errors from an unfinished product). Then I was told "its a business decision." Even on terminations, the company can not seem to pick a lane. The management did not care about hearing my feedback and told me "there is no sense arguing" when I tried to understand the reason I was getting let go. That is not a proper way to treat people who spend 12+ hour days and weekends supporting your product. I created documentation to assist in the obvious holes the department had and was tossed out as if I had stolen from the company. I was given no prior warning that I had issues with my management and never received negative feedback from management or poor survey reviews. I received a bonus the week before I was fired! How does that make any sense? The main con I had while working at Brandlive is the lack of support and resources upper management would provide to the CSMs to be successful. A Product launch had a large amount of bugs and was unfinished, but it took upper management a month after the launch to accept that was the issue. We would receive lectures for issues that are out of our control like features of the product not working or clients submitting custom dev requests. During a live event, you would pray that the Greenroom wouldn't have issues. If so, the process was to communicate over our messenger platform Slack's public channel only to be berated by upper leadership about how you/Producer could do it better. We would receive a public lashing for the product failing and leadership wouldn't set documentation in place for a quick recovery or jump in to help.