Awful Leadership and Shady Sales Practices, Managed Marketing Mess
Pros
ES99, or Impact Managed Marketing, offers vast learning opportunities surrounded by smart, collaborative, and kind low to mid-level employees who are all eager to learn and support their colleagues and clients. You will have lots of autonomy over your work and projects, mostly due to lack of management and leadership, but it will give you the opportunity to wear many hats and quickly learn about many marketing services.
Cons
From its inception, ES99 was a well-intentioned concept. As an extension of Impact Networking, ES99 was designed to offer managed marketing services for small to mid-size businesses. In reality, this “managed marketing” department of Impact is a flawed, unorganized, unstructured mess deceiving clients and employees. In less than two years the current ES99 CEO has pushed out nearly 90 employees… which is the size of the agency. Due to a lack of growth opportunities, leadership, and management, turn-over has been at an all-time high since starting over a year ago. Leadership at ES99 starts from the top, the CEO is unwilling to listen to diverse opinions, effectively answer questions regarding company performance, and mitigate concerns about company direction. Employees who speak up with professional recommendations, concerns, and ideas are immediately shut down or outright fired with no cause. Impact Networking cares about 2 things - their bottom line and nepotism. Two things employees became very familiar with recently with the lack of suitable pay raises and a recent nepotism-based promotion. Leadership titles are given out to people who are undeserving with no hands-on leadership or marketing experience. Management will tell you about their great work life balance when in reality, the majority of my department is billing 60-70 hour weeks. These hours are due to lack of resources and proper staffing, ridiculous expectations, and a constant drive for new business… even if there are no resources to work on new clients. Impact is a sales-first organization, constantly undervaluing any non-sales-focused employees and doing anything they can to close a deal. With shady practices and unrealistic 5-year contracts, the reason Impact still has any marketing clients at all is because they are locked into these non-cancelable long-term contracts. These business practices create very unhappy clients, and employees who are even unhappier. Do your research when considering working for or with this company. Nearly all positive reviews are from leadership trying to cover up reality.