TFA (UK) Reviews

Due to the previous iteration of this review being deleted, I want to disclose that the points raised in this review are 100% mine and consist of a personal interpretation of true events that occurred during my time at TFA. All claims are made on the basis of opinion and are subjective in accordance to my rightful personal expression. This review was written solely by myself upon serious reflection and frankly, therapeutic release. ____________________________ To be concise, if you’re considering TFA as your next career move, I would sincerely advise you to reconsider. If you can, exercise some patience to wait for other employment options with proper benefits, a non-predatory contract, fair salary and a clear path of progression. But if you have time and don’t mind an extensive reading session, I promise you will be a lot more knowledgeable about the landmine you could potentially be stepping into. I’m writing this in the scenario that you have been offered the opportunity to work at TFA. Given my former position at the company, I believe I am best placed to depict an accurate reflection of the business. I would strongly advise you to read this review and the others that also share a similar sentiment. Side note: If you browse TFA’s Glassdoor profile, you are likely to stumble upon the 4 & 5-star reviews posted earlier in 2026. While I can’t dispute their authenticity, as everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I can say with more certainty that these reviews are dubious and anomalous at best, both in their nature and the context behind them. This is because these favourable remarks came shortly after the CEO’s rant on Slack about Glassdoor, in which he stated ‘there are a handful of ‘really whingey rants from former young, female members of staff’ that ‘doesn’t do much for management positivity.’ It was also stated in his outburst that an employee’s willingness to leave positive feedback at the time of their performance/yearly/periodic review will prove to be an ‘acid test’ and provide an indication of who the company will or won’t try to ‘hold on to.’ (As outlandish as the aforementioned claims seem, there is evidence to validate them) As prefaced in the prior sentence, there was a real impetus from the CEO to change the narrative on Glassdoor. To the extent that both current staff (not for the first time) and former employees were requested to leave favourable reviews. The fact that only two came from current staff members is a startling indictment pertaining to the overall perception of TFA. Personally, I believe that the majority should rule in this circumstance. So if I was in your position, I would come to deduce that the reviews that are rooted in nuance and not inherently positive provide a more accurate reading of the general experience at this workplace. However, the fact that you have made it this far, I have full confidence that you have come to that conclusion yourself. __________________ Initially the listed positives will be felt in the beginning of your employment, yet their effect will certainly diminish after the first month of working here. By the 3rd month, feelings of burnout will emerge along with the realisation that you are indeed being underpaid for the mental and emotional demands of the role. You will inevitably cling to any sort of reprieve, whether it be the upcoming weekend, any planned annual leave or even your lunch break. Frankly, there are a barrage of things that I could complain about, such as the following; - Non-existent/lack of bereavement pay. There is no mention of it in the contact with the exception that the company can instruct you to take leave. On the contrary, it should be the employee that should have some entitlement to request leave in the unfortunate event of a family member or friend’s passing. - Working from home is practically impossible. For most marketing agency or digital-centric roles in 2026, this can be considered a norm or even expectation to some degree. At TFA, it is only possible in very exceptional cases. - You’ll more than likely be working on slow desktops with some of them being over 10 years old with outdated RAM and processors. Simple tasks can easily turn into a chore with the constant lagging and eventual forced closure of an application. To make matters worse, the server being non-functional at times has led to work coming to a complete standstill and files being corrupted, therefore prompting team members, involved in the delivery of creative assets, to restart work that had already been completed. - An eight-week notice period is specified in the contract for all staff members who have passed a three-month probationary period. Although not uncommon, such a notice period is generally reserved for senior employees with two or more years of service at other companies. This can be seen as hostile and crippling for anyone that is looking to move to greener pastures. In particular, the significantly shorter period of garden leave underscores an imbalance within the contract, serving only in the best interest of the company. - The annual leave allowance is less than what you’d receive at similar businesses. Due to the fact that a considerable portion is allocated to the agency’s Christmas shutdown. - Like it has been stated in other reviews, your contract forbids you from divulging your ‘personal remuneration,’ or ‘benefits,’ to other employees. This is a secrecy clause that is present within a ‘revised contract,’ which indicates the uneven playing field when it comes to remuneration at TFA. It is a flagrant violation to Section 77 under the Equality Act 2010. However, curiosity will prevail and you’ll find out that there is an inequitable pay structure in place through conversations with various colleagues. It is possible to find out that a more junior colleague is either being paid the same or more than that of a more experienced, senior colleague. In summary, your negotiation skills or relationship to key decision makers will either leave you feeling chuffed or cheated with your salary. - Another point worth highlighting is that you may not even receive a contract on your first day of employment. Instead you may find yourself waiting 2-3 weeks before one is provided without any satisfactory explanation. This is extremely unprofessional and inserts a new starter in the precarious position of working without knowing the terms that govern their employment. I wish this was all I had to grumble about because I’m sure the majority of the above drawbacks can be addressed with amendments to contracts. However, I must stress that the single biggest problem at this workplace is the CEO, which seems to be an issue that can’t be fixed. You will come to understand that all issues at this workplace have a common denominator and stem from the same person in question. This is not just a personal frustration, it is a viewpoint that is shared by others on this platform but also within the business. I will start by acknowledging the fact that not all CEOs are required to be technical experts in their field but instead are exemplary in their leadership and people management. At TFA, the man at the helm falls terribly short in both respects. After attending meetings, participating in discussions and observing his mannerisms, it became clear to me that the CEO carries the ego of Elon Musk but without any of the intelligence, strategic foresight or charisma to justify it. From the moment he enters the building, the tension and uneasiness that follows is palpable. His arrival is always signified by the lack of a greeting to his staff members followed by a silent scamper to his desk. On days that he is not in the office, the atmosphere noticeably shifts for the better, employees are more at ease, more jovial and generally, work is more pleasant. It is needless to say that this shouldn’t be the matter when discussing the head of an organisation and it suggests that he is not the aspirational figure that you want to find yourself working under for an extended period of time. What’s more concerning is how this manifests day-to-day. There is a noticeable absence of clear direction, discernment and active presence in his leadership. In which, the overall strategy feels half-baked, contingent on decisions made on impulse rather than being centered on sustainable success for clients and the agency itself. For months, there were no concrete KPIs established in-house for clients, making it difficult to gauge if the efforts from various teams were actually successful. Even when these success metrics were eventually decided upon, they were born from generic figures that could be found on the internet. Moreover, they didn’t have any consideration of the client’s historical performance, size, budget or geographical market. Essentially, we were shooting in the dark, hoping that we were hitting targets. Additionally, there is a perceptible sense of delusion that permeates his decision making and proliferates across many areas of the business. I mention this because it would not be uncommon to find that the CEO has introduced a new business idea without any clarity of their origin. One of these ideas is Garilla, an online raffle competition aimed at young women. Alternatively, there is a suite of business tools, one of which intended to help enterprises in workload and time management. The irony of this proposition was comically hard to ignore given the agency’s own internal struggles. Whilst, the CEO’s ambition and enthusiasm for his ideas can be commended, they become problematic when they cloud his judgement of the reality at hand. This was exemplified with Garilla and his frequent references to BOTB, a significantly larger, more established player in the online raffle competition market. Garilla is still a very young company that has only hosted a handful of competitions. It is currently still in the early stages of building brand awareness and this was certainly evident when it came to evaluating the ticket sales of each competition. So it was alarming that the CEO kept advocating to adopt a pricing model similar to that of a disparate competitor, choosing to overlook that the two operate at a completely different level. Fundamentally, the comparison lacked logical basis. For example, Garilla’s competitions typically centered around beauty products, experiences, handbags, gadgets that do not exceed the value of £500-£1000. By contrast, BOTB’s flagship competitions involved supercars, luxury vehicles, houses and watches worth many multiples of that amount. Not to mention, the sheer difference in brand recognition and target markets. As a result, it seemed unreasonable to price tickets in a similar manner and expect purchasing behaviour to be comparable. Particularly, within a target audience that doesn’t exhibit the same appetite for competition-based spending. What made this even more puzzling was the lack of consistency in his oversight of Garilla, as meetings were often postponed or even missed entirely. While this may have been understood in isolation, it was ultimately a problem of his own making, as Garilla was communicated to be on the same footing as the agency’s existing client commitments. Consequently, this proved to be a bottleneck, since the CEO would occasionally question why certain tasks hadn’t progressed further, in spite of the fact they required his final approval. Both businesses are good ideas in concept, however, it is a different story in practice. Due to the fact that they were disconnected from the agency’s operational realities. At the time, the agency only consisted of 25-30 employees, who were already struggling with meeting quotas for several clients. It became painfully obvious to everyone except the CEO, that further recruitment was essential to meet current client obligations and the growing workload. Consistent with the law of diminishing returns, staff members were required to invest increasing amounts of energy, time and resources, yet the results sometimes failed to reflect their exertion. With the continued insistence of bringing in more clients, ad-hoc tasks, such as ‘base reports,’ were introduced to an already very stretched team at very short notice. Therefore, it was certainly understandable if work was occasionally rushed and missed altogether. This would put the agency on the back foot, needing to expend even more resources to rectify any resulting fallout. I would also like to refer to the fact that some of us were being underpaid, thus meaning there was no motivation or excitement for the new business ventures and additional workload. Common sense would suggest that you should work on fully developing the agency’s capabilities and cementing its long-term success before embarking upon uncharted territory. In turn, you would be able to exercise the financial strength needed to recruit aptly and undertake such endeavours. Failure to recognise this meant that employees could be seen feeling on-edge and constantly under pressure, trying to achieve the ambitions of the CEO. Everything outlined up to this point is underpinned by a communication style that rarely extends beyond surface-level messaging, often leaving staff uninspired and dumbfounded. At times, his rhetoric can be interpreted to be undermining, spiteful and insensitive. An anecdote demonstrating his communication style in a public domain can be found in a response to a Glassdoor review, where he stated ‘sorry to read that we took a chance on you when nobody else would,’ a remark that is reflective of his petulance. In fact, such responses to feedback will most likely serve as a microcosm of what some individuals in the workplace had to endure at times. He doesn't show any hesitance to place blame on former employees in meetings for past mishappenings. Even if this was indeed the case, a degree of finesse would still be expected in his delivery, particularly in light of his position and the message it conveys to the wider business. Some employees, especially those in more junior positions, often felt they had to tread carefully around him and were extremely apprehensive about making mistakes. This is a culture that should not be prominent within a company that prides itself in its employment of apprentices. Occasionally, during meetings, he would interrupt discussions to share a point that had no relevance to the conversation at hand. In one instance, I recall that a client had decided to partner with a different agency as opposed to renewing with TFA. Rather than being fully attentive to what was being discussed, he opted to browse the opposing agency’s website on his phone and state that their website looked ‘boring.’ What made the comment even more striking was that TFA's website matched that exact description. No one at the table had any words that would serve as an adequate follow-up to that statement, so it was met with a somewhat awkward silence before the conversation resumed again. In totality, the CEO failing to identify this exact parallel spoke volumes of his obliviousness or resistance to acknowledge his own failings or those of his agency. In addition, when the CEO’s perspective is challenged, it is instinctively met with defensiveness and a reluctance to look at the bigger picture. On the occasion that unfavourable results would arise, a valid argument would be presented to the CEO that would fall on deaf ears. Regardless, if you provided relevant data to substantiate your claims, whether it be budget limitations or a fault with the client’s touchpoints, stubbornness would be returned in your favour. This is a situation that would take place not once, but a number of times until it was deemed as an acceptable rationale. More often than not, it was too late as the situation had already deteriorated further. So you can imagine a scenario like this can leave you in a state of limbo, feeling powerless with resentment towards your role gradually festering over time. At TFA, you will only feel motivated by the pressure of unnecessarily tight deadlines, an unwieldy workload and eventually, the foreshadowing loss of a client. These are all symptomatic effects of a CEO that has a chronic habit of over-promising. In my opinion, the CEO’s previously referenced delusion becomes more emboldened in the proposals sent to clients and the assessment of the agency’s workload capacity. Frequently, proposals presented to prospective clients were based on uber-optimistic projections of what could be achieved within a relatively short timeframe, drawing on decontextualised and overly bullish data stemming from A.I. Sadly, this information would be communicated without the consultation of the relevant personnel about the viability of the proposed strategy. Also, there would appear to be little consideration of the current working capacity across various departments. Given the fact that he alone does not possess the strategic acumen or skillset to actually execute said strategy, he appears to underestimate the amount of work required to achieve the lofty claims made in proposals. From the outside looking in, securing the client was seen as the highest priority, with the aim of improving end-of-month revenue figures. This produced a number of negative downstream effects, in which employees would have to work extensively hard to try to meet the client’s and CEO’s expectations. I must emphasise, ‘try,’ as most of the time, the success criteria for clients were simply unfeasible, subsequently, leading to threats of cancellation. On the topic of cancellations, that indeed did happen during my tenure at TFA for one reason or another, ultimately culminating in redundancy. I can empathise with the fact that redundancy is sometimes necessary and never easy for all the parties involved. However, the manner in which it was carried out was certainly staggering. It can be simply summed up to a combination of miscommunication, disorganisation, apathy and simply befuddling decisions. The decisions can be characterised as befuddling, as they were made at a time when infantile business ventures were announced to be receiving further investment. While the bread and butter (the marketing agency) was being made to suffer and essentially made weaker. Perhaps I am being ignorant in stating this, but up until the point I left the business, the marketing agency was responsible for most of the revenue generated. It would therefore make sense to focus on the agency irrespective of the new businesses' potential. Notably, a newly-hired apprentice on their day off and an individual, who had just returned to work during postoperative recovery, were made redundant. In the week preceding these departures, the entire office was informed of the impending redundancies and effectively placed on notice. In principle, this meant that all employees were considered at risk and therefore entitled to an individual consultation regarding the rubric used to inform the decision-making process. However, these consultations only took place with those who had already been selected for redundancy, making it painfully obvious to more observant members of staff who the affected individuals were. This, in itself, created an unnecessary atmosphere of discomfort for those impacted by circumstances that were ultimately beyond their control. It was evident that the emotional and professional implications of this approach had not been adequately considered by the decision-makers. After the redundancies were finalised, a staff member had been approached to hand over their key fob on their final day. In response to this, the staff member requested an apology after an unpleasant conversation that I and much of the office was privy to, was rightfully described as ‘disgusting’ and ‘disgraceful.’ This inquisition was met with the following blunt and insensitive response; ‘Really? Then no.’ The conversation ended there and was left unchecked. Considering the wider context of the situation and the preceding conversations that took place regarding the individual’s health concerns, I found it to be callous and deeply unsettling. All in all, this was the very last interaction that the employee had before departing the business, leaving a very sour lasting impression on both myself and the individual. The more significant issue is that these colleagues’ final day was not known to the wider team until the moment they left the building. They left abruptly, precisely 2 days after the decision was made to make them redundant. Their hasty exit also meant that there was no handover and no official plan to accommodate the extra workload, not due to the fault of the departees. An employee of nearly 2 years, who had completed their apprenticeship during this time, was required to leave with only one week’s garden leave. Shockingly, this was identical to the apprentice of 3 months. Moreover, this was compounded by the complete absence of any public acknowledgment of their contributions from the CEO and colleagues. The latter was not given any opportunity to properly express their gratitude due to the sudden nature of their exit, which exacerbated any tension within the office. I found the entire process to be emblematic of the toxic culture within the business and overall, the company’s mentality to its employees. Apprentices are plainly recruited as cheap labour without a clear, structured plan for their development and therefore easily discardible (as witnessed in the redundancy process). In fact, the CEO rarely checked up on the apprentices in regards to their wellbeing and their overall progression. While this might be more understandable in a larger organisation, given the size of the agency’s workforce, it is a duty that should not be overlooked. Instead this responsibility was entirely left with their team members to help them along their apprenticeship and this was not always easy with their burdening workload. Whereas, employees are viewed as mere cogs to make the agency tick over with an indifference to their developmental needs or emotions. As a result, this has led to high employee turnover at TFA, with few staff members present that have worked at the agency for longer than 2 years. This has undoubtedly harmed the company as there is a lack of custodians within the business to ensure that team cohesion remains strong in the face of adversity. To put this into perspective, 6 employees voluntarily resigned from the company in the space of 7 months. An unusual churn rate for a company of its size that describes itself as a ‘great company to work for.’ Unfortunately, this couldn’t be any further from the truth, as it currently isn’t a great place for employment nor has it been for a long time. If you visit the website, you will see a slogan feature prominently on the homepage, suggesting that The Fuel Agency (TFA) intends to help clients ‘outperform' their current performance, 'amplify,' those results and finally 'accelerate,' towards to the client's long-term goals. Personally, I would argue that the fuel being used, in fact, has become watery, diluted with false promises and under-delivery alongside the emissions of an internal toxicity that has steadily polluted the agency’s ability to actually deliver on their strapline.