Young Innovations reviews

The greed of private equity company owning YI is astronomical!!! Their strategy is to reduce head count and cut cost while keep acquisitions pedal to the metal. While this is good and works until certain level is reached, it does not work in a long run. Overall environment is hostile, caused by huge workload, underpayment, and aggressive unachievable goals. The turnover in finance and accounting is extreme. The company changed 8 controllers in last the 10 years and the 3 CFOs in last 5 years. It is highly unlikely all these people to be bad performers!!! The situations and sales, operations, and marketing is not much better. The rest of the team except few individuals usually quit or get fired within a year. There is a fear culture created by the management. No one is valuable and everyone can be replaced by cheaper resource. This fear-based culture irritates people and make them act in strange way. Almost everyone is unhappy in this organization. Benefits are cheap representing the company culture. 401K company match is a joke, it has much lower company match and match longer vesting period (this ensures that only few people get anything). Medical insurance is awful with much higher deductions compared to many companies. PTO is laughable unless you negotiate it. Bonus is only in your offer letter because you never get anything (make sure you negotiate higher salary including bonus and salary before you start). In the same time HR department runs the false narrative of their great benefits and pay package while they only care how to cut costs. Getting it all together. Overall management strategy is to create paper financial tiger and sell the company at higher EBITDA multiple and collect their exit bonuses. While this is achievable in a short term it leads to deteriorating organic growth and increase unprofitable M&A activity. If you run M&A activity, make sure that you have the talent to manage the business after it is acquired. With exit strategy in next 2-3 years management and PE firm do not care for long term success, morale, and culture. Consider opportunity in Young Innovations only if you are desperate for income.

As expressed in other reviews, there is nothing "innovative" about Young Innovations. Young is only one of many companies owned by the Jordan Company, an equity firm which goes around the country buying up already successful businesses. If you are an existing employee of one of these businesses or are someone considering working for Young, I'm hoping my experience will help you in your decision: 1)Young/Jordan will buy your smooth running, profitable company and will immediately proceed to fire half of the employees to cut expenses. In my case, this was done before they even took control of the company and knew what was required to run the business. This behavior places those few remaining employees to become so stressed out and concerned for their own jobs, that they will do anything. So Young takes those few remaining employees (most of whom are already underpaid) and then has them perform both their original jobs as well as the jobs of the fired employees. 2)After the mass firings, there is now a lack of qualified, experienced help. But have no fear, because Young will (at great expense), fly in their management teams and specialists to come to your rescue. Unfortunately, their management turnover rate is so high, that you'd be lucky to ever see the same people twice. My first thought after Young acquired the company was "too many chiefs, not enough Indians". 3)Were you a salaried employee? Well, not anymore. Young states that only "managers" are salaried now. So after building a nice career for yourself, you have now been reduced to a McDonalds/Home Depot type hourly worker who must punch a time clock (up to 6 times a day) like a 15 year old. Now that's respect! 3)It took Young less than 2 years to reverse the positive growth we had made, and instead of "innovating" new products to help expand the business (as our previous owner had done) actually went the opposite route and discontinued products in an effort to cut expenses even further. 4)Young acquired our company just before employee reviews were due. Instead of honoring our reviews, Young made us wait almost 2 ADDITIONAL years (making it almost 3 years since our last raises). So after getting what I was told by management was a good review, I received a $26/week (before taxes!) insult. 5)Young will offer health insurance, dental and vision. But here is what they don't tell you: YOU, the employee pay for it! Young makes me pay almost $5,000/year for these "benefits". How can any company who cares about their employees in even the slightest sense take almost $5,000/year from an employee who brings home $35k/year? 6)No Christmas bonus. Young eliminated that. In closing I would like to state that I worked for my company for 7 years. For 5 years, it was a dream job (even with the substandard salary). I actually looked forward to retiring there someday. After Young took over, that dream turned into a dead end nightmare.