If you’re straight out of college and need some real world experience, this is a good place to start. Get 18 months of experience then find another company where they have a clear vision for the future and a plan to get there.
If you have more than 3 years of marketplace or e-commerce experience I don’t recommend working here. You’ll be sold on the idea that you can influence change but it isn’t true. Even the few experienced people in leadership left the company when they saw the reality of the situation.
A few things to note:
Revenue targets are created out of thin air. Aggressive plans are nothing new but an aggressive sales plan without a strategy is really concerning and traditionally if you’re going with a top-down approach to strategy then you would create individual team goals that somehow tied to the greater company goals. That doesn’t exist at Spreetail. I saw individual goals that had no relation to wider company goals. Now you have 600 people with competing priorities.
Senior leadership is completely unqualified. Before you accept a role at this company I highly recommend you research everyone in senior leadership on LinkedIn. You’re going to find all but maybe one person has had very limited experience in their fields and in some cases they had to be taught the basics of e-commerce industry and how a website is laid out. Spreetail has traditionally been a marketplace seller and this is their first attempt at building an e-commerce site. The ceo hasn’t surrounded himself with the best industry experts to advise him, not that it would matter because he regularly disregards advice and spends a lot of time micromanaging small details that have zero impact on overall revenue.
Unrealistic revenue targets + the sudden realization that they were hiring more people than they could manage/afford meant I had to overwork my existing team. Everyone in this company already works really hard but we continued to push existing staff to the edge of the workload they could handle. People regularly complained about it and it led to high turnover.
Finally, I shouldn’t have to repeat some of the recent feedback but it’s true that Brett is open about the fact that “Spreetail isn’t for everyone” which is his excuse every time someone leaves the company so he doesn’t have to look himself in the mirror and realize he’s part of the problem.
