Pros
CLA appears to be really great at first. The first red flag that I saw was how they continuously emphasized “family,” how we are a “family” here. They would treat you to really nice catered lunches. They would gift you with swag gear, with their logo on it of course. You would meet a lot of really nice people who would say they absolutely love this company. Your expectations would be really high and you would be really excited about this opportunity. The pros of this company only lasted about one week after my hire date.
Cons
I am not sure that I could adequately state the many cons of CliftonLarsonAllen. This “family” is entirely fake. I was assigned to the Restaurant and Retail team (in Spoke) with the most demonic micromanaging Controller you’ve ever met. When I began working at CLA, I was under the impression that I could work from home as needed, but when I began that quickly changed into “No, we want everyone in the office every day, oh and you have to pay to park downtown in Winston Salem ($60/month). They began asking me why I would need to be home and I would have to tell them that I had a kid at home and frankly, I could not afford childcare. We finally got that solved after I went over their heads to make sure that I could work from home. After this, my experience only went downhill from there. I was micromanaged so much so that this controller was literally on camera with me watching me work for an entire day. We would only break from this video conference time for maybe 30 minutes. I was entirely new to the accounting world. I had no background experience and I was expected to do entire month end work alone for multiple locations for a specific restaurant. I was under extreme time constraints. I was told I wasn’t quick enough. I was constantly told that I had been “babied” compared to other people. It was the single most stressful environment that I have ever been in in my entire working life and I am in my late 30s. under no circumstances, should you ever work for this company. If you could somehow manage to find a really great team to work with at CLA, I would recommend it, but even then this company definitely underpays their employees compared to other accounting firms. I think this is a great place for a start to put a foot in a door, but other than that, this is not the place you wanna stick around with.
