Pros
a couple times a year they buy Longboards for lunch - another company thinking a free $9 lunch will make up for such a lousy working environment.
Cons
Quite possibly the worst company to work for in the KC metro. Where do I even start…The owner, Karlo, is an absolute clown, he optimizes every negative used-car salesman stereotype in the book. He will FORCE the homeowner to kick him out of their house when he is there on a sales call. His mantra is that the longer he stays in your home asking about the deck and your sconces, the better his chances are of wearing you down and signing the 30-year lease. He went to school to study engineering, and he may be a decent engineer, I don’t know; what I do know, is that he is a terrible business owner, manager, and leader. This guy would sell his grandmother if he felt like he could make a dollar off the deal. Also, the man constantly bad-mouthed his then fiancé, now wife, daily, in front of his subordinates. Karlo promises all his salesman that over 80% of all the leads that come in will be generated by the company, and you’ll be running 3 sales meetings a day. None of that is tracked in a CRM though. Karlo just pulls up an Excel spreadsheet and shows you what you can make if you do X, Y, and Z in sales. I’ve never worked for a company with worse leads. The process they have in place to “qualify a lead” is a joke, basically anyone that calls in and wants some info is a qualified lead. I called some people back one time that were college students trying to do research for a paper, and they got qualified in the funnel as potential leads. Or families on an extremely-fixed income who can barley feed their family and keep a roof over their head – QUALIFIED. SunSmart loves to use fear as a sales tactic too. It is commonplace for language exactly like this to be used, and when I say, “exactly like this”, I mean that ingratiate it into the onboarding and training: “Did you know that the average energy bill 30 years ago was $19? Today it's $237. That's a 1,300% increase. So, it's not inconceivable to think that in another 30 years, your energy bill costs you 20 grand.” Really solid business tactics, amigo. SunSmart preys on the elderly for many of their sales, much like the folks at the Home Shopping Network. Promising to reduce energy consumption by 80-90% if they just sign this 30-year loan agreement. A loan agreement with interest rates that increase if you don’t pay a minimum amount to the principal by the end of year 1. Not to mention, the solar panels decrease in efficiency by 1%-1.5% per year. So, when you are halfway through paying off that 30-year loan, your solar system is operating at 77%-80% efficiency compared to the install/conversion day. SunSmart makes much of their revenue from financing, and their exuberant services fees on the backend. This company is run by a man with a medieval moral compass and zero empathy. Turnover rate at SunSmart must be close to 50-60%. While I was there, they didn’t have a single employee who had been with the company for 6 months or more. "High turnover" rate is considered 28% of your employees quitting within their first 90 days. The company that they outsource their HR to, HR Prairie Fire, is also a joke. You could tell their HR person, “hey, I need to leave an hour early on Wednesday because I take my sick grandmother to her dialysis treatments”. And HR will look you dead in the face and say “so what you’re saying is…”, and then totally flip your words around to make it seem like you don’t care about your job. If you are currently employed by SunSmart, I would reach out to a local recruiting / staffing firm and see what openings they have, because I promise you there is no career at SunSmart.
