Pros
Depending on the account you work on, there low pressure and you're left alone. Pay as an experienced professional as an outside hire was good compared to the work load. Good benefits and a solid car allowance and an ok company car program. Good SCMs shield their people when declines and performance aren't their fault.
Cons
Mixed company messaging on goals and executable items, leading to hard to reach targets. Company focuses on Power Of One accounts with resources but than expect regional customers to hit similar goals. Biggest competitor is ourselves, customers constantly battle us on price based on what Walmart is doing. This creates a race to the bottom that doesn't benefit anyone. GMI allows customers to dictate too much, you'd think we're a million dollar company and not a multi billion dollar company the way we bend over to follow customer policies that don't align with GMI policies. Many regional customers could move to brokers (like competitors have done) and you'd see a minimal impact. This creates stress for employees that read the writing on the wall. Huge amount of promotion from within. While I normally wouldn't say it's a bad thing, it constantly puts people in positions they're not prepared for, following a linear promotion program. Many accounts get very green CALs who've never worked with small customers before. They've worked as support on teams calling on the bigger more advanced customers. This sets people up for failure or being moved through based on experience vs results. Being a home grown company means everyone drinks the Kool aid vs having objective opinions on things that don't make sense. As an outside hire, many GMI processes aren't efficient, yet, it's the GMI way. Culture is weak and Teams are spread across the US without consideration to geography and accounts have representation in places that make no sense. Top it off, for two years we've been told to minimize travel to save money... A big company in 2025 shouldn't be doing that. Meeting in person with customers is important and Teams isn't always best. We haven't had an in person team meeting in over a year. How do you build a culture over Teams meetings? Last 3 meetings we have been pushed to start using GMI specific AI tools, hard to trust a company that's saying we need to be more productive and use more AI. All it's saying to me is they want to replace us with AI in any role they can. Horrible bonus last year and this year isn't looking much better. Many regional customers have no chance of getting a good bonus based if they're metric based since small customers need spend to be productive. Wholesalers by nature are at a disadvantage in this model because they have to apply a markup to their customers. There needs to be separate wholesale and retail customers best plans.