C-4 Analytics Reviews

Workload Past the first 3 months of employment, or the initial training period, is when problems start to arise. As mentioned, the training program is great and during this time you will be introduced to the client facing side, where 95% of these clients are automotive dealers (this will be touched on later). While the company preaches continuing education and training, once you receive clients, many times this is impossible to take advantage of because of the workload you receive past the training period. It is not uncommon once a client services member is placed on a team that they will work 60+ hours a week, and are expected to take work home with them after they have left the office, respond to client requests and emails on weekends and days "off", all while being compensated less than the average digital marketing strategist. It is common for employees to feel guilty about taking sick days and vacation days because of their workload, and the company, whether purposeful or not, breeds a culture where you feel your half hour lunch break should always be taken at your desk just in case a client "emergency" comes up. Despite being a digitally based company where 99% of job responsibilities can be done remotely, you are only allowed 1 day to work from home per month, which is seen as the highest of privileges and can be taken away at a moment's notice if certain requirements are not met. Attempting to work from home more than once of a month is more than frowned upon and many times denied, forcing employees to take vacation days to get anything outside of a 60 hour work week accomplished. Because of this, there is no work-life balance for the majority of employees, which becomes evident for outsiders looking in in a short period of time. As is the case with digital marketing, the field changes rapidly and is always growing. What this also means is that the responsibilities of a client services member has doubled in a short time frame, while the company provides the same or less support and monetary compensation for their employees, as their profits become larger and the people that are on the ground doing the legwork are worked harder for the same, non-competitive salary. Clients/Client Handling As mentioned before, 95% of clients are automotive dealers. These are some of the most demanding, unprofessional and cutthroat people that you will work with. While this is great practice for any client facing job moving forward, what makes it more difficult is the way the company caters to their clients without thinking about the employee. The sales team and management are constantly overpromising clients things that they will never have to deliver and then handing the work off to the people under them with no semblance or thought for their fellow employees. The client always comes before the employee at C4, and this becomes more obvious the tougher the client is. Management is quick to listen to client complaints about employees without any pushback, no matter how ridiculous the complaints may be and rarely will have the employees back. Meanwhile employee complaints are not taken seriously and are typically explained away, creating a rift between management and those under them. Management Being a company that made their money with automotive, they run on the same, thin profit margins as their clients do. Management is always looking for ways to cut costs no matter what, and the first way they do that is by underpaying and overworking their employees. Most of management has been internally promoted over the years, which from a company intelligence standpoint works. What does not work is that they were promoted based on how good they were at their jobs 3-4 years ago, not how well they do with managing people, something they were never trained on. To put it simply, the company grew much faster than was sustainable - management focused on hiring salespeople to grow the client base instead of listening to employees and giving them internal support to keep the clients they already had. When this caught up to them and they began losing clients because of the overpromising, the first thing C4 decided to do was create trainings on "client retention", insisting they were not throwing any blame towards overworked employees while also taking no responsibility for the lack of support that caused the issue in the first place. In many cases, employees are looked at much more as assets than they are as people, which furthers the animosity between management and those under them.

I've dragged my feet on writing a C-4 review, because it's hard to sound balanced when reviewing this company. I'm reviewing this company because I believe in paying it forward and helping other people make the right decisions regarding employment. I know that there will continue to be positive reviews on Glassdoor...yes, because the company encourages current employees to leave positive reviews but also legitimately because some people are really pleased to be there, occasionally for months at a time. In short, I wouldn't advise working here outside of your first couple years out of school. If you have a couple years of experience and have become accustomed to defined goals, meaningful projects, and having the time to (at least occasionally) create good work, you are likely to struggle here. I was sold on a growing company, blablabla startup, blablabla data and analytics and technology, oh my! This phrase was big when I started: "A year or two from now, you'll be amazed where you will be." A year from then, I was seeking literally any other offer. Two years from then, C-4 will be a distant, funny-in-retrospect memory. C-4 feels like a smaller company than it is, because a) few things that the company does are very complicated, so there is very limited process, b) the owners treat the company like their sandbox, and c) there is not much in the way of professionalism. (Oh and possibly also because they have half a dozen people squeezed in every office, nook, and cranny.) Everything runs on the owners' whims. They subscribe to Shiny Thing Management (sometimes called ADD Management) Theory, which states that if you are in charge, the most important thing is the thing that has caught your attention Right That Minute. It's a complex theory, but it's beautifully put into practice at C-4. Suddenly, you'll be put on a special project, Emergency! due by EOD!, and then it will languish in the partners' inboxes for weeks and ultimately be scrapped. Your time will not be respected; the work you do will not be respected. If you're okay with that, you'll be fine. If you feel remotely like an adult, capable of running projects and accustomed to having some small level of authority, it will be less fun. Regardless of your position at C-4 (with maybe one or two exceptions), expect to be doing very repetitive work. The automotive industry is crazy broken, and so C-4 has developed a niche of serving dealerships with PPC, SEO, and a lot of repetitive creative produced overall. The vast majority of accounts are dealerships or dealership groups. When I was there, at any given time there were over a hundred individual dealerships and a handful of non-automotive clients. The few non-automotive are local businesses, such as movers or appliance centers. They tend not to keep non-automotive accounts for very long. If you work in a service department (anything aside from account management), it's pretty standard to have dozens of clients assigned to you, and your clients will change often. Churn is the name of the game at C-4--especially employees but also clients. Because people leave quickly, promotions also happen quickly, particularly for account managers, whose work is more visible to the owners. Promotions are often dependent on your relationship with management than on your work, though everything is linked because the clients you get may depend on management, and your clients' perceptions tend to be key to your success. (Perceptions is the key word here.) There is really very little in place to make promotions mean more meaningful work, so you might get a fancier title and more money, but there is almost nowhere to go in terms of changing your day-to-day. Being part of management here mostly means a little more contact with the owners and some deeply irritating meetings. The owners perform all reviews, though they MIGHT ask you as a manager to write something before that review. It's unclear to me whether they will also read what you wrote. A lot of reviewers mention the people at C-4, and indeed I worked with a lot of great people, but it's tough to talk about employees when, a couple months after leaving, you're likely not to know the majority of people there. You will join a company of 50+ people, likely mostly close to your age, and the culture tends to push people together, so you will likely come out with a core group that you trust and really like working with. There will be others you do not trust and do not like working with, partly because the culture encourages nudging colleagues toward the underbelly of large, noisy, and fast-moving people transporters but also simply because, generally, a lot of people suck, and if you stay at C-4 for any considerable period, you will work (briefly) with a lot of people. Law of averages and all. Oh yeah, the benefits are not-so-great. They sort of rely on most people remaining on their parents' insurance. Honestly, financial considerations like this one kind of went out the window when I was at C-4 just because I was absurdly unhappy there and my health insurance premiums just didn't seem like my biggest problem. The office is also kind of the worst, unless you really, really dig Route 1 in Saugus. And you've never been remotely scared that you might get stuck inside a poorly functioning elevator. Oh, and company-wide emailing is a thing there, and management really cares who contributes. So expect every chain to be a nightmare of enthusiastic one-upmanship. A POSITIVE ATTITUDE expressed with A LOT OF exclamation points is the greatest gift you can give C-4!!!!!!!!