Unfortunately, there have been many mis-steps by senior management that have impacted the company's growth trajectory. At first there was an effort to try and improve the culture with some new executives and leadership structure that focused on being transparent and surveying teams to identify issues as a way to sincerely try to improve identified issues. However, the execution of this initiative and solutions never really went anywhere. There is a lot of communication from leadership, but nothing really changes. Operationally, there were some project executions made at the executive level which were not fully vetted and then required efforts of teams to go back and correct, adding to workloads and taking the focus away from their core objectives. While the team pulled together to implement fixes, many feel that the executive team did not learn from this planning lesson, as no one on the executive team took accountability for this mistake of their making, nor was anyone on the executive team held to account. Instead, there have been new hire additions of even more executive level staff, while at the same time, operational and team support staff have mysteriously disappeared every business quarter without any explanation. The feeling is a lack of stability in the organization, in a constant slashing to achieve short term financial objectives. The explanations of some staff having to depart for not being flexible or unable to adapt in a changing environment is sheer lunacy, as quality people who have made contributions to growth have just disappeared. The company prides itself on market forecasting and has one of the best economists in the industry on its staff, who has been communicating specific areas of growth and areas of weakness. The market is softening due to the current high interest rate environment, which will begin to change later in 2024, as construction starts will begin to improve when the federal reserve begins to lower rates. As starts begin to more widely improve, so will the company's prospects. However, unless we have the right people and processes in place, we will have leakage of opportunities to the competition. The task for being ready for that time is a challenge, as the company takes a short term focus and will not ride through a short term period of uncertainty and instead cycles through talent, which is costly, inefficient for our HR to manage, sets a poor reputation and sets us back from a productivity and institutional knowledge perspective. To many associates, the executive team feels insulated in a protective bubble and we just do the best that we can to avoid being targeted as a poor performer. From a product perspective, while the data itself is of high quality, how the output is presented sometimes isn't the best and could use a refresh compared to some competitor's offerings. The technical team that supports this effort as well as other technical updates seems understaffed and could use some help to improve the time it takes to launch updates and new offerings. It's ok to add sales reps and have more coverage, but we have to back up that sales effort with quality operations. From a management perspective, most of the people across teams are very friendly, supportive and want to help. However, there are some senior leaders who appear friendly, but will pull the rug from underneath you and reverse decisions which will simply drive you insane and leave you wondering every day if your job is in jeopardy.
