Pros
Lots of business travel Decent restaurants near HQ (Hattiesburg area) They feed you well when you travel to corporate meetings
Cons
Incompetent, non-visionary upper management, and nepotism; there is no meritocracy in place here. If any division of this company (incl. Howard Industries, Howard Enterprise, Howard Education, etc.) offers you a position, do yourself a favor and hold out for something better. Upper management is completely clueless, and has no vision; they will ask for feedback from their reps, but will give your input/ideas no backing (instead they will make excuses for why it can't be done, typically because it's not the "Howard way”), or your immediate supervisors will take your idea (or customer) and make it their own and give you no credit. You will also be told that there is a team of people ready to help you penetrate your territory's target verticals, but there isn't; there is also NO mass-marketing or campaigns, so it's just you trying to knock on as many doors as you can. You will get no support from the majority of the inside reps, and you will get no incentives/spiffs from vendor partners, even though reps in other divisions do. The nepotism is appalling; you will only be promoted if your last name is Howard, or you are married to a Howard. You will get questioned and micro-managed about everything you do (even though you'll be told that they don't micro-manage), to the point of compiling endless reports with the same information on them, or spur-of-the-moment phone meetings that relay no useful information. Furthermore, because there is an automatic "Howard tax" on every quote of 1.5-2.0 points, your pricing will most likely not be competitive; to make sales, you'll have to do things at cost in the larger markets, which means that you'll make next to nothing in commissions. And the pre-sales engineers (or "solutions architects") are pitiful when it comes to timeliness and competence; only one, the AV specialist, takes pride in his work and follows up with customers. The others will lose their notes, then take 6-8 weeks to draw up a plan. Lastly, the main piece of proprietary equipment, the Howard-built payment kiosks, don't even work most of the time after implementation; they can’t even hire, nor keep, a programmer. Meanwhile, they're still offering these solutions to municipals and utility providers as cutting-edge self-service customer solutions...and if you sell one, you'll get $500 on a $20K+ sale.