From a customer standpoint:
- Angry Parents and Schools, Lack of Communication. Schools and parents would be told one thing, and the customer would be told the opposite from our end. Lots of upset families due to high pricing for simple/small items. Difficult website interface had parents having little to no idea about what they are purchasing, even after reading the fine-print terms and conditions.
- Deceptive Marketing and Sales Tactics: Website displays higher end packages extremely large and "in your face". Many parents stated they are unable to navigate the website to purchase/book what they KNOW they want. If someone does not purchase anything from the high-end session types, Management is forced to call customers to try and get them to buy until management is borderline told to "stop contacting me".
FOR THE HIGHER END SESSIONS: Pricing for prints and digital downloads is given to the parent/student in the form of a brochure. This brochure is given to them AFTER the session is completed. Parents and students go into the session not knowing what pricing they will be paying until the end, when all their photos are taken. The only way they would have a glimpse of pricing is if they were to navigate extremely deep through the website before booking the session.
From an EMPLOYEE standpoint:
- Countless hours of work, zero sleep. Anywhere from 15-20 hour shifts would be given to employees without any management intervention
- Low pay, no benefits. Coming in, the company expects photographers to work 40+ hours a week, open availability 7 days a week, and provide zero benefits until that employee gets promoted.
- Little to no follow up in Management. Took me 4 months to get my benefits even though I was told I would receive them approximately 30 days after promotion. That did not happen. Took lots of emails and other employees voicing themselves for all of us to finally get our benefits. Some photographers were told they were promoted but did not sign an offer letter. These employees believed they have been promoted when they were still receiving base pay and no benefits. This would eventually be resolved 6 months later and was properly fixed and handled.
- Minimal Training, Constant Change of Structure: Took 5 months to be trained semi-properly and the layout quickly changed, reverting half of the training we just received. Training would last a few hours with lots of information thrown at photographers, and hoping they retain all thee information. Implement too many things at once. New ways of properly doing things were implemented too quickly without much revision.
- Little employee retention: New hires would spend a week filling out the necessary paperwork and clearances, only to come into being worked 40+ hours in their first week, waking up at the likes of 5am or leaving at midnight (or sometimes both in the same day, to wake up at 5am the next morning again). Some new hires would leave within their first few days, some in their first few weeks after understanding the workload that management expects the photographers to handle.
LIVING BY THEIR MOTTO (Management): They state they follow their motto and each individual part of it. I have yet to see an ounce of of that motto reflected in the management's work ethic, demeanor, or overall execution of how things should be run.