Behr Paint Company reviews

When I started with the company, the position was entrepreneurial in nature and allowed a large degree of autonomy. The team worked hard and played hard and operated with a sense of family and tradition in just about everything. There was a specific focus and reinforced message to "do the right thing". Your ingenuity and desire for hard work could allow you to create your own success and with it, handsome compensation and opportunity. However, these days it is a heavily micromanaged position run by incompetence from some of the highest levels and filtered through a much neutered and mostly useless middle-management team. These are not necessarily useless people, though some are, but its the position that has become increasingly irrelevant based on the micromanaged direction from above the past several years. Even the sales rep position has been marginalized from what it once was and holds far less weight and credibility inside of a once proud retail partnership. I've met and talked with the former owner of the company, he retired many years ago, but came back to visit at an annual sales meeting to be honored and give a speech. It was immediately clear and easy to see how exactly Behr got to be a leader in the industry under his leadership and philosophy. His two sons now hold ranking positions in the company and to put it mildly, neither of them are their father. In my opinion, they have no business in their current roles. Their whole lives have been with this one company, and in privileged standing as sons of the owner no less. They have little real-world, average-joe experiences to draw from and have just been allowed to poison it in so many areas with their ignorance, arrogance, and ego. The universe operates according to their limited views of it and they consistently change the flavor of the day based on some trend read in a business magazine, TED talk, or some expensive consulting firm study with all the clarity and detail of a reading from a psychic at the carnival. In my opinion, the reports and findings from these consultants often look convincing on the surface, but once you start to think critically about how some of the conclusions are drawn and where exactly this data came from that these "facts" are based on, it often starts to wobble. Nevertheless, blind faith is given to these experts, so if you have an idea you want to sell about growing a business or disrupting a market, if it contains some trending buzzwords, there's a good chance they'll eat it up and run with it. These two brothers fancy themselves as slick salesmen, but they are buyer's all day long. It doesn't even have to be a good idea in my observable experience, since it doesn't appear either one of them have the humility to genuinely admit to a mistake, so its conceivable they could even double down on your next idea regardless of poor results. In my opinion, morale in the company has been steadily declining over the past 5 years or so. This company became the force that it has because it attracted the right kind of people with the right kind of incentives and based on some solid principles and good leaders for much of its life. However, it has been steadily declining in all these areas and not only are they not attracting as many of the same type of top-tier people these days, they are also losing some incredible talent at the same time. I believe it's only a matter of time before the product and reputation begins to reflect all of these internally broken pieces. In my opinion, much of the executive management has no business running anything at this level; many of them were in the right place at the right time in a growing company. Things moved so fast for so long, exploding growth masked much of the ineptitude these people had to offer, but now in more recent times that things have slowed and the company has matured, these lack of ability and judgement are much more apparent, but by now they have all promoted each other to a point where pretty much only the kid's are running the candy store. Some of them are good and capable people, hard workers, committed, passionate, and loyal to the brand; but they are in over their head or overruled by despotism. Also in my opinion, much the ego that swarms in that corporate side of things never allows anyone to get out of their own way to objectively examine the merits of their initiatives and ideas. The worst part is that more often than not, they seem to have a conclusion they look to support with data, rather than examining data to find a conclusion. I respect and love many of my former coworkers, and much of Behr is full of great and talented people that are successful in spite of their leadership, not because of it. Jeff the CEO is a down-to-earth kind of guy who is very approachable, but I don't know to what extent he really understands what goes on below him day to day. While this itself is kind of a problem, I have little doubt he genuinely respects the efforts and cares about his employee's. Though, this is less comforting knowing that some of the executives below him see them as resources on a board game they don't know how to play, will carelessly roll the dice knowing that even if they lose, they can just opt for a "do-over" because it's their game to set up with new pieces and play again. So while I really believe Jeff Filley is a good guy, I suspect he places too much trust in his lieutenants.