Almost an opportunity..for some - Marketing Representative Improveit! Home Remodeling Employee Review

I’m going to be very thorough here. The point is not to disparage – I actually bear very little ill will toward the company, despite my many complaints. But I want to inform and hopefully give some ideas for improvement. What the job is: This is a direct marketing position (i.e. sales). You’ll be in Wal-Marts most of the time – and occasionally street and county fairs – at a booth or walking around and talking to people. You will have to directly approach and cold open people in every part of the store. The job pays a fairly low hourly rate, plus a commission. You bonus based off of two things: One, signing people up for the ImproveIt contest, which acts as lead generation, and Two, setting in-home appointments for sales reps to talk to customers about either windows or bathrooms. The bonus structure for the latter is a bit complex, but is how the job can actually pay decently. The pitch is largely scripted, and you’ll be talking to 200-350 people a day. If you’re motivated, good at sales, etc. it's not the worst job out there. But if any of that sounds terrible, walk away now. As far as I can tell, Improveit does as good of work as other major players in the industry. The stories I heard from those who had used them ran the gamut, but the majority were positive. From what I know, there are cheaper options that provide the same quality. But ImproveIt does good work, in and of itself. A bit about me: I’ve had success in sales positions, and had moderate success in this role relative to my peers. I would always approach the numbers I mentioned above (200-350 people a day), to give myself a statistical chance to succeed, and was praised by management for my work ethic and ability to easily converse with customers. Some others did better than me in the job, but many did worse. My experience is safely in the top half of those who were in the role during my tenure with the company, at least in the Columbus office (I can’t speak to others, though their month-to-month results were similar). This also does not cover Sales Reps., who were the ones going into homes. Misled in Interview/Training: I was told that the job offered full benefits, including PTO and sick time, health insurance and a 401K. What I wasn’t told until after I began is that qualifying for PTO was dependent on bonusing a certain number of weeks in a given span. Once you are told this, it’s mentioned in passing as though it’s inevitable (and at the time, you don’t know any better). In my eight months with the company, no one ever qualified or even came close, and the only one who had before I arrived had been with the company nearly five years. I never heard a word about the 401K either. I was also promised at or near 40 hours per week. This proved to be untrue (more on this later). I based my decision to take the job largely on these factors. I consider them misleading at best, and in the case of the hours, outright lies. Bonusing: In short, it was always possible but rarely sustainable enough to count on. When I began, the number of leads I generated was such that bonusing was a constant possibility. This changed a few months in for a few reasons: 1. Our scheduling changed from frequent 8-hour shifts to primarily 6-hour shifts. This knocked hours down to 30-32 a week, instead of 34-38. Besides the hourly pay, which can be a big deal for many in the role, it gave us less time to bonus. In many weeks when we were close to bonus, it’s likely those extra 4-5 hours would have gotten us hundreds of dollars more a week. 2. The 6-hour shifts were from 9am-3pm or 3pm-9pm, instead of in the “meat” of the day from, say, 11am-7pm. Especially during the week, this kills the number of people you can talk to. At many stores, it wasn’t uncommon to have more employees in the store for the first and last hour or two of the day. The response management gave to this was that it’s Wal-mart and there are always people to talk to. While technically true, there’s something very different about being able to hop from person to person, as opposed to having to hunt for individuals and having 30 seconds to a minute in between each. It adds up. For reference, few, if any other vendors in the stores were open in these earliest and late hours. I imagine the hour-to-hour ROI reflects this, but I don’t have those numbers. 3. Improveit generally stays in stores for long periods of time. And in those stores we had been in longest, it wasn’t uncommon for >50% of the people you approached to have already been approached. Again, there was always SOMEONE to talk to. But in a job where the little things matter, going half a day without seeing someone who hadn’t heard of us was an uphill climb. In a couple stores, you’d frequently hear lines like “You guys talk to me every time I’m here” or “I rent” before you had even said anything to them. These aren’t people we’ve talked to once or twice. These are people that can spot us and rebut us before we speak. They’ve been approached 10-12 times minimum. As weeks turned into months, it’s a statistical inevitability that the number of fresh approaches we could have would decrease. 4. Two stores would not allow us to walk around (we were restricted to the show room), which severely hurt the number of people we could approach. Everyone’s numbers were worse at these stores. Again, setting appointments was always possible, but was very sporadic. Also again, when everything is meticulously managed with the pitch and small things can be the difference between failure and success, cutting the number of people you approach and talk to by 30-50% (based on my rough estimates) is a big deal. Any one of these things likely wouldn’t have killed it for me. All of them together surely did. And when they happened, you could see the department’s collective numbers dip. Their response to these things was twofold: One, they doubled down on training. This was fine. The training was excellent, and Anthony knew his stuff. If you absorbed and applied his training, you were giving yourself the best chance to succeed. The other response was to ignore or, worse, squelch inquiries into these concerns. After hearing about – or directly hearing – management shoot down people by accusing them of giving up, I learned not to open my mouth. The only message that was allowed to proliferate was that the entirety of our success lay with us and our attitude. They’d trumpet the exceptions at bad stores and chastise us for not always hitting those numbers, seemingly oblivious to the variance of the job. I was the exception on occasion, as I was desperate to find a way to produce regularly and applied myself even more at such stores. But success was never regular enough to produce more than mediocre results. The bittersweet part is that their message is and was largely true. You really do need to go in with the attitude that you can succeed, or else you’re done before you begin. Sales is a different world in terms of how mentality affects success, so the constant reminders company-wide weren’t out of line. I just think in doing so, they ignored very real issues and contributed to the disgruntlement of employees. The potential was always there. But the reality was more muted, regardless of effort and enthusiasm. And when literally dozens of people came through the role during my time there, and each saw similar results and had similar observations, I can feel safe in that assessment. With no kids, manageable debt, and in a small apartment, I didn't make enough to live on during my time there. I got by, barely, but nothing else. And again, I wasn't at the very top, but was undoubtedly in the top half of performers in my department. Misc: Between 1-2 mandatory weekly meetings, conference calls twice a week, corporate trips, and your 5 workdays, most of us were on the road for the job 6 days a week (7 for a few unlucky souls). For a job where I only averaged maybe 33 hours a week, it often felt like 40+. I was also encouraged more than once to work while sick. If I called off, I called off. But I can’t fathom the rationale for not encouraging taking time off. In a job dependent on talking and being positive, a severe cold was often a death sentence. Again something that I feel hurt both company and employee. But, bizarrely, this sentiment was echoed as far up as ownership, which, in a monthly meeting one time, openly mocked those who took time off because they were sick. Online ads for this job on job boards promise quite a bit of money. I did the math on what I made on average, as well as what my best paychecks prorated out to, and those numbers are wishful thinking. Maybe there's 1-2 people pulling them (and also maybe not), in a company that sees hundreds of marketing reps come and go a year. Do you think you'll be in those 1-2? Moral is, be careful about the numbers they throw around.