Pros
- As most people note, there are lots of great people at CLEAResult. I made some great friendships, and I can certify that among rank-and-file employees, 99% are great human beings. - Because of the high turn-over rate, there are certainly opportunities for career advancement. Leadership does promote from within, even if the pay raises are minimal, the better title and more responsibility count for something. (FYI, because raises are some minimal, I highly recommend negotiating the starting salary as much as possible). - CLEAResult delivers consulting services to utilities. These services do fall in general "Product Lines." However, the reality is that most programs are built custom for each client. In practice, this means that you tend to have a lot of influence with the specific client if you work directly for a program.
Cons
- There is a general disorganization and lack of standardization that makes working at CLEAResult very unpleasant. For starters, the IT systems are a mess. CLEAResult has acquired 10+ companies in the past 7 years, and integrations were never fully done properly. As of 2017, there were still multiple programs being managed with legacy systems from companies acquired 5+ years ago. The company is constantly promising that standardization is coming, but for all the talk over the years, nothing seems to happen. Everything IT is just very antiquated, such as an in-house data center that often breaks down, a VPN connection that is so slow it takes minutes (!) to open a simple Word file, computers that are super slow and are supposed to last 4 years, and many other issues. The IT Support folks are great, and I often felt bad asking them for help since they can only do so much. The problem, I think, is a general lack of investment in modernizing IT systems. - Layoffs happened every year I’ve been with the company, usually towards the end of the year. If you work directly for a program and/or are over 90% billable to a client, then you’re probably safe. But if you work in some central/shared service such as HR, IT, Marketing, etc., there’s a good chance you’ll be let go at one point. It seems that the company is super bottom-line focused, so they want to squeeze as much revenue as possible out of each employee and minimize other expenses. The rumor is that CR wants to either go public (highly unlikely IMHO since the company is just not growing organically as much as would be necessary to please the market) or sell itself to another, bigger energy services company. If this sale happens, get ready for mass layoffs! - The company’s innovation and growth strategy is unclear at best and misguided at worst. CLEAResult is clearly trying to consolidate the industry, which seems like a perfect response to the consolidation happening in the utility industry. However, there is almost ZERO investment in new and innovative products (Demand Response is probably the only exception). You would think that the acquisitions should lead to new, innovative ideas being applied across the company, but that hardly ever happens due to the lack of organization and decentralization noted in a previous point. So, you’re left with a company that provides face-to-face customer engagement services and some in-house energy calculations services. Nothing digital, nothing modern, just plain-old calculating energy savings and talking to people about it. That’s all good, and maybe you can build a nice company around this. But it’s definitely NOT innovative and forward-thinking. - Some senior leaders, managers and HR partners can go on power trips and make rash staffing decisions without fully considering all options. There was one circumstance where a colleague of mine was accused of something that she didn’t do, and I got the impression that everyone thought she was guilty without first talking to her in depth and understanding her perspective. The was another instance where a “star performer” kept being aggressive and borderline abusive to people, and when multiple people complained, the manager simply made excuses and brushed off the accusations. I truly felt like I could not be honest to (some) managers, senior leaders or HR out of fear that I would be persecuted unfairly. - Pay is very low for the work being performed. Raises for promotions are also very low, capped at 7%. And yearly raises are very low too, usually in the 1-2% range. The chance to move up and get better experience sort of makes up for this, but I guarantee you that you will make A LOT more money somewhere else. The funny thing is that despite all these efforts to keep costs down, the company is still doing layoffs every year, so I have serious doubts about the financial future of the company.