Good pay & training with little regard to work/life balance; bad disconnect between executive management & local staff.
Pros
Their training program is excellent, and the only program like it out there, as far as I've seen. They have a company university offering a wide variety of classes on management, sales and equipment operation. The starting hourly and salary rates can be low, but once you get a few promotions the pay becomes higher than average. They have a large amount of available resources with equipment and labor on a national and regional level. They also prefer to service a higher caliber of hotel/hospitality accounts, ranging from 3 star/diamond to 5 star/diamond.
Cons
When I joined Swank AV, it was a mid-size company with a small family-owned feel. The Swank family still managed it, and it took care of its people. There used to be incentive programs and tokens of appreciation for a job well done. And on a local level, there was general freedom to do whatever it took to get the job done, maintaining client satisfaction and exceeding expectations. It was great place to work, and the positivity of the organization was apparent amongst the staff, clientele and the hotel accounts/staff being serviced. However, that all changed after the company brought in outside investors to bolster the growth of the company; with the goal of acquiring more accounts, inventory and staff. Unfortunately, the timing was bad as this happened right before the US economy took a turn for the worst. And ever since then, they have been trying to recover, as what was promised to these investors never came to fruition. This included salary increase freezes, lay-offs, reduction/shuffling of staff and overall heavy leaning on local level staff to do more with less. This is when the work/life balance became a huge problem, and the disconnect between the executive level managers/shareholders and local staff became immense. It seemed like they had no idea what their people were going through, and some of the decisions being made by divisional and regional management were questionable. It seemed like all they cared about was making their bonuses (with a few managers being very open and blatant about it). While the training program is great, it can be difficult to get approved for a class if it's not in your region, not part of your career path, or if business levels are too heavy to allow time to attend. And regarding promotions, they depend heavily on perception of performance, rather than actual performance. This mostly comes down to who your director or regional manager is, and whether you are on their good side. During my last months there, there was trend of replacing long time veterans making higher salaries (either by demotion/forced resignation or elimination of position), with 2 to 3 lower paid newbies, to the distress of those left in charge. I know this isn't the case everywhere in Swank, there are still great people on staff and in charge, this was just the experience in my region and division. Overall this was a great company to work for at one time, I was proud to be a part of the team, and I am thankful for all the experience I gained there. It was very sad to see this great people-oriented organization become just another bottom-line company.
