The people are everything here; they are as good as it gets. Objectively, as a 40-something man who had 20+ jobs prior to landing here, I can state with confidence I have never found a more genuine, intelligent, ambitious collective. You can make an outrageous living. Not just reasonable, not just good. If you work hard and can learn and adapt and have a proper mindset, there is nothing a sales engineer can't accomplish in this place. Every imaginable tool for marketing and measuring metrics, every provision that exists for lead generation, for refinement of systems, exists in one place. Is it perfect? Come on, of course not. Is it constantly being scrutinized and every facet pushed to perform and be better? Hell yes it is. Not everyone loves that. But Sweetwater isn't an "easy" place. It's a place for those who value excellence and integrity. Those could be considered meaningless Linkedin-esque buzzwords, but the level of performance and earnest work demanded here is not easy to find. Excellence is hard, and management will ask for it, occasionally even demanding it. Integrity isn't optional here. That's possibly the most important thing to me personally about Sweetwater. The top people in sales belong there. They have seen it all across this companies timeline. They have been here, invested, fought in the trenches alongside us, and made sacrifices. I know coaches and managers who have lost sleep over wanting the best for their roster, and honestly that is MOST of them. The sales engineers? My best friends were made here, and are here still, or left for their next adventure and have stayed in touch, on to great things elsewhere, typically in the same business. Some of the most impressive people on earth by any measure, I have met at Sweetwater. Some of the strongest lasting life lessons about loyalty and goodness and making an impact in the ordinary circumstances we can find ourselves, I have learned at my desk or watching and listening to sales engineers and managers here. I have also learned quite a great deal from my customers. You absolutely CAN half-ass it here, and you will burn out faster than if you're giving 110%. Good, straight and steady work is always rewarded. Results don't have much variety to those putting in the energy. It accumulates, relationships get built, trust gets built, and you can get incredibly close to customers. One of my current mentors (in life, not just work), I met through Sweetwater. He's a customer of mine, and has been for 15 years. He's like a father to me. It's hard to believe something so meaningful can emerge from a place of employ, but it does. He also got me involved and invested in writing music again, after a long hiatus. You can really find great meaning in the work we do. What about fun stuff? I've stepped onto some of the biggest stages in America with friends I met out on tour, got walkthroughs of their backline, met their techs. I've had the privilege of having some real and in depth conversations with a dozen of my musical heroes. I've met and messaged and become friends with engineers who recorded and mixed records that I listened to growing up. The level of "cool" that is possible to access at Sweetwater is incredible. I won't brag about it on social media, I won't tell most folks about it since this could cheapen it. To that end, Sweetwater has never once pressured me to advertise relationships that I have built with stars or big time customers. I kind of love that depth of respect and class. There have been conversations about family, about music, about what is good and meaningful in art, all that I have had TODAY with customers. It would take quite the effort to ever be bored here. If you can find another company that has the capacity to put the wind in one's sails more than Sweetwater, I'll be impressed. But you have to be the type of person who is... awake... to accept that sort of experience or appreciate it. Management has had some recent changes not long ago, and nothing dramatic, but certainly a handing off of the baton, so to speak. I look at John Hopkins with admiration and respect. I don't go and accost him at the coffee machine with my ideas. But I trust him to make decisions that are for the best of my family and me, and the now thousands of peers he is responsible for. Mike Clem is a brilliant guy who has a true sense of compassion and empathy, and who is an ardent business mind. Jeff Radke is an absolute rock of steady ethics. I have fought with him, he has come down on me and chided me, he's had to tell me to refocus where to spend my energy. But as much as sometimes we joke around out here and call him "Dadke," he's the real thing. A leader and a man of action who doesn't suffer unmitigated bs. People change a lot from 20 to 40, so of course through that time I've had to learn a lot of things about respect. He's earned it.
