Over the last year the company has started to wobble due to organizational missteps, and coupled with a toxic work environment it is hard to recommend Housecall Pro as a place of employment.
Leadership from the VP level on up is mostly not the right people to push the company to success. Thinking about strategic change and executing it is arduous, with certain leaders adherent to tactics that are ineffective at best and financially detrimental at worst. Many success metrics have not gotten better in years, presumably as competition has upleveled during the same time. In addition, the last three C-level executives that were hired externally as of May 2024 were exited from the company within several months of starting. Public companies would be pilloried by the Street if this happened once, let alone three times in a row. The end result is an organization that struggles to pivot to capitalize on opportunities or react to competitive actions.
Housecall’s issues stem partially from a lack of basic alignment on teams that have to work together. Sales and Customer Success do not report into the same C-level leader who leads Marketing, and the result is a very disjointed and siloed approach to customer acquisition and retention. This causes dysfunction, with Sales mostly leading actions that are to the detriment of leads and newly enrolled customers.
On its own this dysfunction creates an environment that is difficult to operate in and is also highly reactive, with incredibly short turn around times expected. This constant chasing of tails, combined with unrealistic expectations of teams and a growth at all costs mindset, has led to troubling personal experiences. In my tenure I have seen and experienced
Several people leaders reaching out so they could break down crying
When one people leader raised concerns on role clarity and expectations, the feedback they received was that they could leave the company
One VP belittling an analyst on another team to the point that the analyst broke down
One VP responded to a deliverable with a phrase meant to communicate they were getting aroused
Working in a fast paced, overmatrixed organization often creates stress. That's normal. But seeing this stress roll down hill and permeate throughout many teams has been beyond concerning. There is simply no way to execute the mission statement of the company with teams having to deal with low EQ leaders and misaligned organizational structures.
