Pros
Some genuinely kind, hardworking people doing their best
Cons
This is not a business where most people are set up to thrive. You can still see glimmers of how the founders probably wanted the culture to be – fun, vibrant, and ambitious – but that start-up DNA has long been quashed by the way the business now operates. The business has a major leadership capability gap. Many individuals are promoted into manager and Head Of level with little to no leadership experience or support. In several cases, you’ll find managers overseeing other managers and large departments without any grasp of even the basic fundamentals of management – how to run effective 1:1s, build engaged teams or set clear goals – let alone how to lead at scale. Any strong leaders that do exist tend to be external hires – but they rarely last more than 18 months. There’s no meaningful people strategy behind these appointments – and it shows. There is also no Learning & Development proposition to speak of. No performance or behavioural frameworks, no structure to help managers lead better, and no focus on engaging or retaining talent. Many new leaders simply mimic what they’ve seen others do before them, because they’ve had no opportunity to develop a leadership style of their own. This means poor habits and bad practice take root and thrive, compounding the problem. The culture is not collaborative or challenge-friendly. Decisions are made in silos, implemented without consultation or context, and frequently unravel later when the gaps become apparent. The business has been frightened by CarWow, and rather than continue to be innovative and roundly better, the instinct is to kneejerk and copy what they do. With any other problem, the instinct is to “chuck people at it” rather than address the root cause strategically – so instead of building resilience, automation and proper capacity, the business spins up teams to manually handle clunky, risky processes. A prime example is the so‑called “Customer Sales” team – really the “Supply” side of the marketplace – whose job is simply profiling cars for auction through lengthy, manual call‑centre conversations with customers, no selling involved; imagine eBay needing a 30‑minute phone call to list every item in 2025. It’s a clunky, bloated process with a clunky, bloated team to match. On top of that sits a “Sales Completion” team, set up like a sales function but – like the Customer Sales team – not actually selling anything, created purely to push stragglers through the funnel this inefficient model creates. Then there’s a large “Escalations” team bolted onto Seller Customer Service, dealing mostly with reactive clean‑up for problems that front‑line teams are too disempowered to resolve. Very little of their work feeds back into product or continuous improvement – it’s just firefighting. All of this is bloat on top of bloat: wildly inefficient, expensive and archaic. They’d save enormous amounts of money – and deliver far better, simpler customer outcomes – by channeling that cost into fixing the issues at source, future‑proofing the customer journey and building a customer journey that actually works. Turnover is abnormally high. People regularly leave without explanation, often very suddenly and quietly. It’s a pattern that’s impossible not to notice, damaging to morale and must be incredibly expensive. Pay is well below market rate for most roles, particularly given the cost of living in the locations where the business operates. While there is a structured review process, it’s not tied to clear KPIs, goals or performance frameworks – and decisions often feel arbitrary or finger-in-the-air. There’s no transparency or alignment across areas around salary bands or progression, and it’s not unusual for people doing the same role in the same team to be paid wildly different amounts. Lower-performing individuals can end up earning significantly more than their peers, with no clear mechanism for redress or equalisation. Benefits are similarly poor – and actually declined during my time with the company, including the quiet removal of the already limited L&D budget. Diversity is surface-level, if that. While it may appear diverse at the C-Suite level, representation drops off quickly across the rest of the leadership layer. If you don’t fit the dominant identity type, progression becomes noticeably harder – and the culture can feel exclusionary, even if unintentionally so. The HR function is choking the business and is probably the biggest risk to its long‑term success. It prioritises external visibility, networking and performative initiatives over the difficult, strategic work needed to fix deep‑rooted cultural and people issues. It’s baffling that so much energy goes into cultivating an external image when the internal culture is clearly so damaged – just look at these reviews; they’re not exaggerating. A truly effective People function in a growing business should be an engine of people‑growth and development: empowering teams, creating clear role and level frameworks, embedding a performance‑ and behaviours‑driven culture, building resilience and retaining talent while keeping costs and risk under control. Instead, this one feels like a relic from the 80's – rigid, unauthentic, process‑driven and reactive – and the result is high attrition, disengaged teams, and the toxic culture repeatedly described across reviews from different areas of the business which is costly and full of risk. Perhaps most stark is the divide between the London and Brighton offices. London staff enjoy high-spec equipment, generous perks, and flexible working as standard. Brighton staff, meanwhile, are given refurbished low-spec laptops that frequently break, severely restricted autonomy around remote working (limited to one day a week, requested like holiday), and infantilising office food like raisin boxes, Rice Krispie Squares and Ribena cartons in a tired office where even the toilets regularly break. It’s a strange approach for a business operating in a city with one of the highest costs of living in the UK – Brighton is almost on par with London – yet it’s treated like a low-investment, high-output battery-hen call centre rather than a fully integrated, valued part of the business. If there’s no real intention to invest in that office or integrate it meaningfully, some tough decisions are needed. The longer they’re deferred, the more damaging the impact will be. Despite all of the above, there are pockets of the great culture this business is trying to build. People who care, who collaborate, and who want to create something better. But those pockets are shrinking fast – and without urgent, meaningful change, the business risks losing the very things that could have made it great.
