This once-stellar industry leader has dug a hole for itself with it's new SaaS platform and continues to dig in deeper and deeper. Truly horrible management /leadership that is leading the team - especially the agency side - to it's eventual demise. Their all-consuming obsession with becoming profitable drives every decision they make, including cutting key team members, adding unnecessary services, and refusing to invest in tools that could make employees' work better and faster. It's giving...Scrooge, before the 3 ghosts visit him on Christmas Eve.
Aspire is known as a SaaS company with an agency arm. As a SaaS platform, most people would expect that all aspects of an influencer campaign can be run on the platform. Right? WRONG. What most people don't know is that most of the work that the agency does for clients (and that many SaaS clients do for themselves) has to happen off-platform. This requires internal teams to create massively complicated spreadsheets for creator management, approvals, content management, payments, and more. Almost EVERYTHING is manual, in spreadsheets. Many on the agency side say that the platform is only useful for discovery - if that.
As with most agencies, Aspire is the type of company to say "yes we can do that!" to a client, and then have to quickly go figure out how to do "that." Unfortunately, Aspire fails to realize that investing in additional team members, providing tools and training - which is a nonexistent concept on the agency side - is required when committing to big things they've never done before.
The company talks about work/life balance, but that's all they do: talk about it. In reality? Campaign managers are working on average 50 - 60 hours a week to make up for the work their associates can't complete within 40 hours (because associates are paid by the hour, since for some reason, the company doesn't consider the role to be "skilled labor" and therefore it falls under an hourly payment structure). The number of times we each had to talk another employee off a ledge was...too many. Tears were a common occurrence. The Sunday Scaries started for most team members on Saturday. Many employees talked about not being able to sleep at night. Most were not taking time to eat lunch (much less eat lunch away from their desk), and hourly employees were working after having clocked out because overtime was frowned upon (which is literally illegal).
Instead of giving raises at review time, they gave most salaried employees a quarterly OTE bonus structure. This is a common practice at many other agencies, but what isn't so common is your employer setting completely unrealistic goals based in fantasy, not fact, thus resulting in coming in way under target every single quarter. The bonus structure was presented as a way to "earn more!" but in reality, it was a way for them to pay their employees less than they are worth.
They hire so many newbies with little to no experience who grow to be more advanced newbies with a lot of holes in their knowledge of influencer marketing. For example, no one at the company understands analytics. They define metrics completely differently across teams. Some team members don't even know how to calculate engagement rate. It's BAD. It's embarrassing.
The company is being run by a man with an electrical engineering background and absolutely no experience in the influencer space. He has never - and I mean never - had an original thought in his entire life. Typical tech bro who listens to one podcast episode and regurgitates it as fact, using it to completely change the course of the company, department or project, or has one single conversation with a leadership team candidate (who he never hires) and proceeds to ignore all advice and input given to him by his ACTUAL, current team.
My advice? Don't walk, SPRINT faster than Sha'carri Richardson from this company. There are so many other better places that you can work, get industry experience, and feel like a valued employee.
