Pros
There is opportunity at Precept. It is a rapidly growing and evolving company. You need a thick skin and nothing will be handed to you. Your managers will not support your development or teach you anything. You are on your own to sink or swim. If you can survive, it can be lucrative. Precept has a lot of potential, should management decide to look inwards and truthfully and honestly evaluate themselves. They have an opportunity to keep and foster some great talent, and they could do amazing things. Precept attracts a lot of talented and genuinely good people. It was a difficult decision to leave the company due to all the friendships I made. Luckily I am still in contact with many of those wonderful people to this day.
Cons
You need to work a minimum of 50 hours/week. Your performance is not evaluated on your productivity, but on the time you dedicate to Precept. The biggest performance indicator for Precept managers is sending emails outside of working hours. Employees would finish projects during working hours and send them out later in the evening to give the appearance of putting in extra time. I did this too, before my role evolved to requiring ~12 hours a day just to maintain. It was the main focal point of my yearly reviews from 2015-2018. You are always on call. You are not allowed to put on out of office notifications. 15-25% of your compensation will be a bonus, subjectively decided by someone who is not your manager. It is not tied to any concrete performance measurements. This is assuming you are not applying as a sales person, in which case you generally do have case and dollar volume goals. I was also told directly by my manager not to discuss my salary or bonus structure with other teammates. This highly illegal tactic was used often at Precept to keep lower earning employees in the dark. The CEO is… eccentric. You will be consistently embarrassed, degraded, and ridiculed by this person should you be unlucky enough to have contact with them. Most managers protect you from the CEO so you don’t have direct contact but they will not advocate for you. They pretend to be a motivational speaker on company calls, preaching love and togetherness, all the while screaming at his employees behind closed doors. At the yearly Christmas party, the CEO once compared working at Precept to cocaine addiction, also coining the phrase “you have a choice to work here.” This essentially meant “if you don’t like it, you can get out.” That statement turned out to be true. Now that I’m removed from Precept, I miss the drama. It’s exciting, but unsustainable. Gossip and information is the main currency at Precept. Reminiscent of high school. I was asked by an executive to encourage my teammates to write “positive” glassdoor reviews, when they were having trouble attracting the right applicants. Executives and sales make most of the business decisions. Depending on the role, you would spend most of your time making spreadsheets, updating powerpoints, and doing data entry. This is time consuming work and there is a lot of work to be done. Rather than invest in systems and infrastructure, Precept prefers to pay for cheap labor. You are hired to complete a task and nothing else. This creates a cycle that gives you no real experience or responsibility. Because you gain no applicable experience, Precept tends to go with the outside hire rather than promote from within when looking to fill higher level positions.
