Pros
Free parking 50% discount Good location
Cons
This company is clearly flying apart at the seems. It has all the symptoms of an unhealthy company: 1) The employee turnover is insanely high. I personally witnessed over 25 employees get fired or resign within a six month period all while head office continued to ignore this issue. 2) The company is overloaded with debt. Loans are being paid off with loans that are being used to pay off other loans! During my time there, cash flow was consistently negative. 3) All knowledge and talent has left the company, and the individuals left there have very little experience within the industry. Many high-level tasks are now being handled by individuals that do not have any practical experience nor do they have the determination to learn. 4) The company is overly-reliant on a single large-volume client to survive the year, and this is a client that is extremely unhappy due to the company’s consistent failures to both fulfil outstanding orders and ensure product quality control. 5) There is no money to pay suppliers, and as a result, there is no inventory, and there is no product to ship or sell within the retail operation side of the business. Suppliers are at the point where they want cash up front only and refuse to work with the company otherwise. 6) This company has barely made payroll in the past three months. I particularly want to emphasize this to individuals wanting to work here. 7) There are closed-doors meetings every single day, and most employees are locked out and there is no information flow, leaving a constant atmosphere of anxiety and uncertainty. The root cause of all these issues is the CEO and owner of the company, Jacqui MacNeill. This individual has no business acumen, no people skills, and no sense of responsibility for the business. She prefers to remain ignorant on the actual nuts and bolts of the business and prefers to micromanage all her employees even in areas where she lacks skills. Her office is a reflection of the mess this company is in, incredibly disheveled and disorganized. She is fonder of rambling speeches than digging deep into the company and repairing the chronic, systemic issues. Ms MacNeill is convinced that she knows how to run this company as she continually maintains that she’s been doing it for 25 years. The truth of the matter is, her previous partner was the individual keeping this company afloat and keeping operations in line. After she took over total ownership of the company three years ago, that is when the company began to fall apart. Costs have outstripped income for far too long. I’m not sure what else you can expect from someone that says they’ve been running a company for 25 years and had no idea what a CRM was until three months ago. Ms MacNeill is very condescending, insulting, demeaning, and abusive towards her staff. She comes up with unworkable ideas and then abuses the staff when they attempt to explain why her idea will not work. Even if someone tries to explain how her objective can be accomplished in a different way than what she wants, she will abuse them or act condescending towards them. She hires experienced people, and then proceeds to ignore them. If an individual is experienced in finance, HR, or supply chain, she will believe she knows more than them and if questioned on a particular subject, she would rather question their experience or knowledge rather than listen with an open mind. The only individuals she listens to are either ‘yes-ma’am’ or people who reinforce her ego or ideas. There is no room for healthy critiques or critical thinking in this company. There is a constant revolving door of consultants who bring in different ideas, frameworks, and plans that she believes will save the company. These consultants come in, bleed the company of money for a couple of months, and then leave after she decides that they cannot fulfil whatever product vision it is that she has. And rather than accept responsibility or try to figure out a constructive way forward, she simply chooses to blame everyone else. Company planning and communication is abysmal. The biggest issue here is that the staff is stretched thin beyond their capacity. So much staff has fled or been fired from the company, that the people left are scrambling to fill positions that they have no experience or education in. This is the only company I’ve ever seen where multiple receptionists have been shuffled into management positions within the span of a month! There is a culture of fear and anxiety here where there is no camaraderie. People throw each under the bus constantly to try and hold onto their paycheque rather than work together to find a way forward. The staff is beaten down and demotivated. The strategic thinking in this company is beyond poor. Last year, the CEO decides that it would be a great idea to discontinue the top selling products with nothing to fill the gap. Not a single individual had any idea what was the point of this, and the products were eventually brought back as “new” products with slight name change. There was just no common sense in this kind of decision making. Speaking of these products, the products at this company are made without any quality control or quality assurance. This is certainly one of the most pressing issues here. This company uses chemicals and fragrances that have been rotting on the warehouse shelves for two years. They add other products and fragrances and sell them as “new fresh products”. Every product here is manufactured without any quality assurance or sanitation controls. It is very uncomfortable working for a company with no proper product control, especially products that people use on their skin. Customers deserve better, and I truly wish that the CEO of Escents had more respect for her customers than to flog them these products. I also believe the staff here at this firm deserve better than they get with this CEO.