I wanted desperately to like it, to stay, and to grow. But the upper management and the people they continued to bring in (apart from a select few who were amazing) weren't willing to learn the business or learn what the legacy employees' skills were.
They began building a team with roles that were redundant (causing those who realized this to leave) or just didn't fit with the team needs. They rolled out strategies without having spent time in the industry or consulting with those of us who have. Given this the expectations were more than unreasonable, they were incomprehensible. We were told, for example, that our upper-funnel awareness advertising in paid social and display achieve a 1:1 LTV to CAC (spend a dollar, make a dollar). After a month of trying to educate the leadership on why that didn't make any sense, they just told us to flub the numbers to make it 1:1 and that we'd be held accountable for the outcome despite having no control over the creative or targeting.
As tons of people left (we continually had upwards of 25 open roles at any given time on the marketing team alone for almost a year) there was zero recognition of the situation, zero course correction, and very little communication. I didn't have a direct manager for over 5 months and was left to just figure things out while getting more and more responsibilities piled onto my plate.
The worst of it, in my opinion, was when leadership replaced an entire team who could tie their performance to real dollars and had exceeded their goals year after year. They were replaced by an agency without even being consulted. They weren't fired either. Their jobs were just given away and they atrophied. Leadership would later keep bringing up that they had left under their own accord and they didn't want to be part of the team.
The people running the SMBC unit have taken a really great thing and are dismantling it piece by piece, knowingly or not. It's very sad.
I've seen person after person leave in their first few months after they understand what's happening. Do yourself a favor and just don't work there.
