An Unmitigated Disaster Caused By Incompetent and Delusional Management
Pros
Good colleagues, engaging problems, an industry important for the global economy.
Cons
Search "Flexport" or "Flexport Layoffs" or "Dave Clark Ryan Petersen" or "Flexport Revenue Down" on Google. The company's dirty laundry is aired in public for the world to see almost on an hourly basis now. Often information is available in the press (especially about company financials) before it is available to employees internally. Leadership is unstable and incompetent starting at the CEO level, which includes both Ryan Petersen and Dave Clark. The turnover among executives has been astounding and the company has lost its CFO and heads of HR and legal in the last month all before executing a mass layoff which requires expertise in all of these dimensions. There is no clear strategy and often apparent and inexplicable inconsistencies in strategy and execution. The company lays off 20% of workers in January saying it needs to cut costs while forecasting lower revenues. It then hires an army of highly paid senior Amazon employees, buys a loss-making unit (Shopfiy Logistics), and decides to start a Convoy-like digital trucking brokerage which will take years to have a chance at profitability. Ryan Petersen then returns and decides the company is spending too much money and again lays off 20% of workers. The company is incapable of executing the most basic financial operations on both accounts payable and accounts receivable. It regularly fails to invoice clients the correct amount of money and has minimal governance to audit bills from carriers to verify the company is charged the correct amount of money when most forwarders know carrier bills are often incorrect. The company fails at the most basic HR governance. There was an official hiring freeze but somehow 50+ offers went out which Ryan Petersen publicly rescinded. While the company advertises innovative technology much of the internal operations run on low-tech spreadsheet-based processes which will fail to scale and leadership has been too complacent to aggressively automate the operations with tech. Ryan Petersen should delete his Twitter account now or at least have comms review every tweet before he says something stupid which will further damage the company.
