Pros
- relevant, meaningful, engaging industry - increasing brand awareness and generally positive reputation in the space, huge sense of pride and community at Classy - a company that's changing and evolving so rapidly that veterans and new hires alike are valued for their opinions and their unique personalities - a CEO that anyone here would have taken a bullet for - dog-friendly office, beautiful space, work hard/play hard culture - inclusive and fun work environment - genuinely incredible people from diverse backgrounds - chance to be a part of The Collaborative in Boston - people leave higher-paying jobs or more tenured positions to work for Classy - large office-wide meetings that highlight certain nonprofits or social movements with catered Lemonade lunches - encourages volunteering, fundraising, contributing to social good - guaranteed: walking into the office every morning, thinking, "how did I get so lucky?" - your coworkers WILL become your best friends and family. People joining Classy from out-of-town are immediately welcomed and, depending on how quickly you drink the cool-aid, absorbed into the culture, experience, the contagiously energized work environment.
Cons
- frowned upon to work normal hours, ideal of a hardworking and valuable employee is one that stays beyond 8 hour days and doesn't take lunches - procedures and rules and even quotas change monthly, pivots are sudden - decisions are made impulsively, drastically affecting some peoples' paths to promotions or bonuses, then management plays dumb and moves on to other things - lack of experience managing in the sales department. Either way no matter how successful you've been in the past, how large your deals were in your prime, even if you were an AE closing business previously - selling to nonprofits is a completely different world. Honestly in sales the people that were most successful came in at 6am and left at 6pm, kept their pipelines fresh, had high activity, and never took vacation. It's a numbers game, this isn't a place where you can hand-pick what you want to work and spend your time doing. - lack of logic - management was asking team to perform 70+ outbound calls daily because working backwards from number of opportunities to number of calls, it was the bare minimum they needed us to do in order to show new senior leadership that they were trying. - bad budgeting decisions - degrading into a hire/fire and churn/burn environment - hiring the wrong people from outside and promoting the wrong people from within, this is a really delicate balance that's easy to screw up - 2017 started micro-managing, demoting, laying off many people - morale can become extremely low, no structure or process to achieving success and management will blame the employees and question them and threaten with performance plans resulting in dismissal as early as 4 months employment at Classy - have not found the balance between efficiency and volume - lack of prospects, lack of strategy, lack of opportunity, too many salespeople, too few salespeople... - as with most SaaS companies - you build a tool and then it becomes a heavy sales organization with one goal of licensing it out to as many new clients as you can. Too much emphasis on acquiring new nonprofit business, not enough focus on retaining existing clients or fine-tuning tool. Ran into better competition too often without much to differentiate ourselves. Tech team is sharp but changes take way too long to happen. Beta-testing, unexpected delays and quick changes are hard to keep up with internally and are confusing and discouraging to current and prospective nonprofit clients
