Pros
There are still some genuinely good people at Zonar. A lot of talented, hard-working employees are still trying to do right by the customers and keep things moving despite everything going on around them.
At one point, Zonar had a strong identity and a real place in the pupil transportation space. The company understood school bus and student transportation customers in a way that not many others did, and that history is still something worth acknowledging.
Cons
Zonar is not the company it used to be. Over the last several years, the company has been gutted by waves of layoffs, constant restructuring, outsourcing, and leadership decisions that rarely seem to make sense to the people actually doing the work.
Morale has been destroyed. Teams have been cut down over and over again, and employees are expected to keep delivering with fewer people, less support, and no clear direction.
One of the biggest mistakes was refusing to innovate and abandoning the pupil transportation customers that made Zonar what it was. Those customers were the foundation of the company. Instead of continuing to invest in that space, leadership seemed to lose interest and chase whatever new direction sounded good at the time. Those customers took the hint and started leaving too.
The company now feels like it has no real product direction. Instead of building strong Zonar products, it feels like a bunch of other companies’ products have been white-labeled, stapled together, and sold as one platform. Internally, it is confusing. Externally, customers can see it too.
A lot of work has also been shifted offshore, especially to Colombia. That may save money on paper, but it has also come with the loss of experienced employees, lost institutional knowledge, and a general feeling that the company is being dismantled instead of rebuilt.
Leadership is also a huge part of the problem. The CEO’s direction feels erratic, short-sighted, and disconnected from what employees and customers are actually experiencing. The focus seems to be on cutting costs and chasing whatever looks good in the moment, not on building a stable company or supporting the people who kept it alive for years.
Good employees can only hold things together for so long when the strategy is broken, the culture is gone, and the customer base that built the company has been pushed away.