Nice People but Growing Pains and Lacking Support
Pros
During my time at TDR, the people were wonderful. It was a relatively tight knit group of people who genuinely enjoyed hanging out with each other. Additionally, given the fact that TDR is an agency, I was able to gain additional marketing knowledge as I was immediately introduced to projects and client work.
Cons
TDR is a small company that can’t seem to get over its growing pains. There has been consistent turnover for over a year and a half with not many people hired as replacements. During my time there, I saw over 10 people leave (approximately 1/3 of employees) and an additional 5 left shortly after I did. As a result of this turnover, employees were taking on more and more work and were experiencing massive amounts of burnout. To make matters worse, management never really had a plan to alleviate any of the stress put on people, it was merely passed from person to person. In terms of compensation, it was not great, especially given the amount of work people did and the amount of time they invested into client projects. Clients and even prospects were consistently put above the wellbeing of employees and the company lost a few great people due to the treatment they were receiving from clients and the amount of stress they were under. TDR also has zero opportunities for vertical career progression. Towards the last six months of my time there, management began to introduce career progression planning meetings with each employee. Unfortunately, nothing really came from these meetings and employees were told that if their interests did not align with the TDR’s, then measures might need to be taken. I saw several extremely well deserving individuals make their case for new titles and they were told they had to wait, pay their dues, but could take on more responsibilities (without additional benefits or compensation) in the meantime. TDR as a whole has a lot of potential. However, the lack of transparency about what was going on with the business, what the business goals were and how TDR was going to accomplish these goals, was glaringly obvious. This lack of business direction resulted in “company shifts” every six months or so. For example, in 2020, management wanted more enterprise clients. When this didn’t work out, six months later they wanted to focus more on building certain kinds of websites. This pattern repeated itself over and over and made it very difficult to set expectations for clients and build any kind of consistency or stability for employees.
