Skip to contentSkip to footer
      employer cover photo
      employer logo
      employer logo

      Sweetwater

      Engaged Employer

      Sweetwater reviews

      4.0

      77% would recommend to a friend

      (540 total reviews)
      avatar

      Mike Clem

      88% approve of CEO

      72% positive business outlook

      Ratings by category

      4.1

      Culture & values

      4.0

      Diversity & inclusion

      3.9

      Compensation and benefits

      3.9

      Career opportunities

      3.8

      Work/Life balance

      3.8

      Senior management

      Sweetwater has an employee rating of 4.0 out of 5 stars, based on 540 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Sweetwater employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Retail & Wholesale industry (3.4 stars).

      Ratings by demographic groups

      Reviews by job title

      540 reviews
      3.0
      Oct 21, 2015

      Potential, but think it through

      Sales engineer
      Recommend
      CEO approval
      Business Outlook

      Pros

      Sweetwater is a great looking Facility. The building is constantly being updated and expanded every year. The interior design is a bit dated, but I have noticed that is just a midwest thing. There is constant construction going on at the facility.They provide a decent gym, a hair salon (with the best barber/stylist in Fort Wayne), and a decent dining cafe and coffee bar. The new retail store is gorgeous and puts all other music retail stores to shame. The employee discount is decent on certain items, but it might be years before you can make enough money to afford to buy anything you actually want. The lending library, that the manufacturers provided for sales engineers, is a great tool to get your hands on actual gear and provide customers with hands on experience if you can find the time to actually use the gear once you are off the clock. Sweetwater is growing and there is potential to make good money if you just decide to dedicate your entire life to the business. The highest earners make really great money, own decent houses and cars, but they look about 20 years older than they should. Maybe it is the stress, but hey they are rich, right? . . . My main advice to people considering working at Sweetwater: You really need to think this through if moving to Fort wayne from out of state. Will people actually use their vacation time to come visit you in Fort Wayne, IN? Are you willing to put up with struggle and frustration long enough in hopes of possibly making a good salary years down the road? Are you willing to give up your life outside of work in hopes of making more money? Do you actually want to do anything creative with audio/music or do you want to sell gear to people actually doing creative things? Can you really make 80+ calls everyday and not burn out constantly? This can be a good job if you put the years into it and have no real aspirations with music, but really think about all these questions before accepting a job offer. I am sorry, a "Career Opportunity".

      Cons

      A bit of an elitist environment. Mangers have their own specialized parking for their Porsches and oversized Pickups which only shove their higher incomes in your face every morning as you walk the quarter mile to the employee entrance. Which is completely fine. Honestly, most Sweetwater employees could use a longer walk. Work life balance is not something you usually expect in sales, but when you have to go to 3-4 unpaid meetings a week on top of your full shifts it can be really exhausting. You get a few days off a year, but they do not offer any sick days so that will be deducted from your vacation days. Most meetings are filled with some sort of redundant product info and a sales manager filibustering for the rest of the allotted time. The Monday morning meetings are the worst. They are usually put together last minute and leave you questioning why you left your bed that morning, but they must be attended by all new sales people under two years to qualify for SPIFF points (a way to earn free stuff from manufacturers for selling their gear). If you miss a meeting your opportunity for this program is automatically forfeited. This always seemed unjust to me. You earn points from the manufacturers (separate from Sweetwater) for selling their gear during sales promos and Sweetwater gets to pocket that cash and use it on their own events if you miss a Sweetwater meeting. You should be responsible and go to the meetings, but sometimes things can come up in life. Next is the insulting base pay. Imagine taking home minimum wage home for 50 hours a week of hard work. Sweetwater puts you through the trek to Mordor and back during the interview process before being offered a "Career Opportunity" email. They want their employees to have specialized college degrees and great experience, but do not turn around and take care of them the way they should (this applies only to people making under a certain amount of course). Help out the guys starting out. Too many new people are struggling to make ends meet. You have some really talented people on that floor, take care of them and show them they matter just as much as the senior sales engineers. Why do you have double standards? Senior sales engineers are idolized by management and you can feel the favoritism. How can one employee be expected to make 100 calls a day with 7 hours of logged in time and the senior guy next to him is only expected to make 15-30 calls a day with maybe 4 hours of logged in time. That is if they are not taken away from their desk by a member of management to play ping pong downstairs for half n hour a few times a day. Everyone in sales does the exact same job, so lets make sure they are held to the same standards. The best sales people in the building work in HR. The biggest thing they sell you on is the idea of the cheaper cost of living in fort wayne. It is true, Fort Wayne is cheap and can be beautiful certain times of year, but lacks culture and entertainment. It is growing and some areas of town are pretty cool, but your free time is scarce and it would be nice if more was closer. Chicago is about 3 hours away and Indy is about 2.5 hours away. There are some decent restaurants in Fort Wayne worth checking out (Caliente, Seoul Garden), but most the town is over run with Arbys, Wendys, Steakhouses, and strip clubs (about 15 of them -no joke). If you have a family this place would be much easier to settle down in, but if you are single I would not consider it. I am trying to not make this sound negative, but just honest. Sweetwater can be a great place for people who do no aspire to more in the music industry. At the end of the day it is just retail sales and you will be reminded of that in emails from time to time making you feel even more worthless.

      avatar
      Sweetwater Response
      10y
      Whenever we hire a person, we want it to be a “Win-Win” scenario, where it's a positive experience for both parties. It's unfortunate that wasn't the case here, despite some of the kind remarks this former employee makes. We value all input we receive, so let me attempt to address some of the issues this former employee presents: We realize that the Sales Engineer job is not for everyone so we're careful to not only point out the great things about our company, but the challenges of working in an environment that's very fast paced and all about excellence. We very emphatically explain during three different interviews that the job is demanding, requires a lot of patience and perseverance as you build your business, and is ultimately commission based. This means income will fluctuate from paycheck to paycheck and also that some people will do much better than others. The notion that pay is minimum wage is, sorry, totally incorrect. Most Sales Engineers will make between $29K to $32K during their first year because the job doesn't become more commissioned based until the seventh month of their first year. During their second year, the average Sales Engineer makes somewhere between 35-45% more than they did that first year. Some do even better than that. That's a very long way from minimum wage. We clearly communicate that the work week for Sales Engineers is a mandatory 44 hours per week (not 50 hours as this reviewer suggests), four hours of which are training meetings, which helps new Sales Engineers become experts quicker and increase their earnings faster. Yes, Fort Wayne is one of the most affordable cities in the country to buy a house and, according to a recent AARP survey, the most affordable city in America to rent an apartment. So your money goes a long way here, and we aren't afraid to “sell” that....it's a great benefit. In fact, the majority of second to third year Sales Engineers are already home owners. It's baffling that this reviewer felt there was no culture or entertainment here. There are three major 2000+ seat entertainment venues in the city, a number of other 400-600 seat venues, the fourth largest night club in the United States, and over thirty venues that offer entertainment every weekend here in town. For a city of about 300,000, we think that's pretty extraordinary, and so do literally hundreds of our employees who play out in a band on a regular basis. There are three minor league sports teams, a Philharmonic orchestra, multiple dance and ballet companies, four theater organizations, over 60 movie screens, a world class zoo, four museums, over 65 miles of connected hiking/biking trails, countless parks, 60+ golf courses in a five county area, 60 lakes within an hour's drive, two major shopping malls and tons of other small business retail options, a plethora of restaurants: not exactly nothing to do. Yes, we do have some people with nice cars, but the vast majority of those nice cars are parked in the main employee parking lot, not just the manager's lot (which actually is for employees who park near that entrance and is not just for managers.) This reviewer eluded to expensive cars but no profit sharing, which is also incorrect: we have both a 401K retirement plan after the first 90 days, and then profit sharing after the first full year of service. The notion that we don't do anything for our employees is curious. Take the virtual tour of our facility at our website, which is constantly compared to Google's, Apple's or other forward thinking companies. Most of the over the top amenities you see are geared for the convenience and pleasure of our employees. We also have a Concierge team whose function is to make life easier for our employees. This year we have taken as many employees as cared to go, with their families, free, to a minor league hockey game; Cedar Point Amusement park (including chartered coaches and a nice meal), and a picnic at a baseball game in a park recently voted “Best Minor League Ball park in America.” Where many in “Corporate America” have eliminated annual holiday parties, we have two, and at one of those employees' children aged ten and under receive a personally selected gift from Santa Claus. We also give every employee a turkey at Thanksgiving and regularly have lottery drawings to give out free tickets to entertainment here in town. The owner and his wife hand select a gift for every baby born to an employee's family. How this can be construed as doing nothing for our employees is a mystery to us. This is a unabashedly a "career" opportunity and not just a job where you show up and get a paycheck. For those who work smart and take the long view, the rewards are incredible. --Jeff McDonald, Senior VP of Human Resources
      3.0
      Apr 6, 2014

      It's a call center, cube farm in the worst part of the country BUT...

      Sales engineer
      Recommend
      CEO approval
      Business Outlook

      Pros

      You get gear at cost and the facility is state of the art. They have a lending library to try out gear. The training is great and I like the mgmt. They are there to help and Brad and Dave give great advice. If this company were located anywhere else or we could do our job remotely (totally doable), it would be tolerable.

      Cons

      No room for advancement. You will be a salesperson forever so a lot of industry talent is overlooked. You have to make at least 80 calls when you "roll out" or you will get warned and then fired. You have to come in for 3 early morning meetings that somehow do not show up on your time card. Senior sales guys will try and steal sales with no intervention from mgmt. They will also dig through your sales and try to find referrals that have no or insanely vague connections. If you've dealt with referrals, get ready to be shocked what they consider a legit referral. Eg. A college kid attends a university, the sales guy who "has" that university will try and take the kid. Yes, it's insane and mgmt will not define or clear this up. Also, occasionally the CEO will ask us to do strange things, like walk faster into work. He parades everyone by his Bentley (yes, a Bentley in Fort D'wayne is hilarious) or whatever ridiculously expensive car he drove that day so that's a real moral booster when you're cranking out 28k a year. My poor family probably resents me for moving them to a frozen tundra full of religious zealots and just flat out mean-spirited people. Boy, were we duped,

      2.0
      Apr 5, 2023

      Not the company it used to be

      Sales engineer
      Recommend
      CEO approval
      Business Outlook

      Pros

      Access to insane gear discounts and a wealth of intelligent, kind, and talented colleagues; genuinely edifying "office hours" with manufacturers and reps; and the beautiful wide world of musicians I got to use my knowledge and talent to help. Friends were made, and good times were had. Even when no one ever quite knows what management's got up their sleeves. Frequently, that's what we bonded over. Not great...

      Cons

      They used to respect and support their salespeople, but no longer. When I signed on, we were treated with respect—we really were! And I don't want to directly blame the buyout by Providence, but over the course of '22-23 after it happened, the company went from a supportive, honest, open place where managers and colleagues had my back to a constant source of anxiety and stress; honest mistakes became grounds for termination when the same mistakes used to just be a matter of "sorry boss won't do it again." Again, it's not really the managers' fault themselves, but as a collective, the leadership of the company made it extremely clear that they didn't trust us or have our backs. By the time I left, managers had been actively gaslighting everyone in the department for a year or more in a pathetic attempt to make us think nothing was wrong. We began getting paid less for the same work (they'll argue that point because it was a lot more complicated than that, but some of us did the math and it's pretty damning), morale plummeted, downright insulting attendance and phone-stat standards were implemented (hence the newly fertile grounds for termination), and tenured SEs began leaving right and left. They're knowingly replacing us with people of lower caliber, maybe hoping to increase the chances they'll be satisfied to be treated like just any other retail worker. "We have a slide!!!" isn't enough. Sweetwater, you made me risk my safety at least once a year to drive there during horrific storms while bragging that you've only had to close twice in 40 years. Yeah. That number is nothing to be proud of. Shame on you. And you, prospective employee, can forget about trying to change any of this. When I was hired, there was a decent amount of productive dialog between management and salespeople. Now, if SEs try to talk to their coaches about anything of the sort, absolutely nothing gets done. I, like most of us, got writeups that any decent person would agree should've been expunged, but I was summarily shut down every single time I tried to have that conversation. "Rules are rules" - even when they make no sense, didn't exist when I was hired, and directly contradict the company's "do the right thing" policy. Interdepartmental communication also broke WAY down during this growing-pains stage, making simple tasks take hours multiple times a day, in addition to the fact that the company is still clinging to software from the early 90s to drive the entire business (seriously - entire). I'd be able to deal with things like this... if management had still been on my team. But as of early '22, they weren't. It's particularly upsetting that things have gone this way because there's no way all of the sales managers like it. Indeed, there are managers who never would've made it through the year while they were SEs, had the new standards been in place. Even I would've been fired when I was new because of the specific standards they set for new rollouts, and I was doing quite well by the time my book of business matured. I'm deeply disappointed. I really believed in what this company was doing when I joined. I wanted to retire there. But when the only policy was "do the right thing" and I no longer felt that I had the same definition of "the right thing" as management, I had no choice but to leave. Within a few years, at this rate, the best sales floor in the industry will be little more than a normal call center.

      Viewing 4 - 6 of 540 Reviews
      Related searches: Sweetwater jobs | Sweetwater salaries | Sweetwater benefits | Sweetwater interviews
      ReviewsSweetwater reviews

      Glassdoor has 569 Sweetwater reviews submitted anonymously by Sweetwater employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Sweetwater is right for you.