Pros
- A lot of valuable client-facing experience for entry level people, which does not happen often in bigger agencies. - Close knit company culture. The higher ups are always taking suggestions and trying to innovate on how to foster community in a remote setting. Sure, they could do better, but this is true of every company still operating in a remote setting. - The agency is still establishing its unique position in an over-saturated agency environment, and so there is a whole lot of potential for an employee to find opportunities to flex under-utilized skills, propose new talent offerings, and take a lot of ownership over their clients and projects. - Occasionally, there are periods of a lot of downtime, which Thunderfoot allows employees to spend on personal professional development in the form of taking classes, reading books pertinent to your role, etc. - (both pro and con but leaning pro) You can often find yourself doing tasks and taking on responsibilities that were not outlined in the job description you applied for, which enables great experience and growth opportunities - so long as you advocate for yourself and establish healthy boundaries re: time, work-life balance, and compensation. As a young person who was fresh out of college when joining Thunderfoot, it was a great place re: culture and experience to get one's feet wet in the marketing agency world. In a rag tag setting, you touch upon a diverse array of skills and opportunities that can be spun very positively in future job interviews.
Cons
- Compensation is lacking and not competitive in the industry - Morale isn't high at the moment. Management is certainly trying to rectify this, and it's a difficult problem to solve remotely, but burnout and feeling distant from the community is certainly being felt. - Clientele not the most exciting for people starting out their careers and those seeking to amass a design or writing portfolio of big name clients. - Clientele skew far heavily B2B > B2C and often don't have much experience with using agencies, so working with difficult/demanding personalities isn't uncommon in this company. - "Figure it out as you go" mentality works and makes sense for startups. Thunderfoot is a little too old as a company to have as many non-defined bureaucratic processes or kinks in its machine as it currently does. Don't be put off by the intensely negative reviews. Thunderfoot is a company that is growing and, by nature of figuring out what it wants to be as an agency, does indeed have A LOT of growing pains that is certainly felt in different forms of burnout on the bottom line. All the people who were fired "out of the blue" in reality shouldn't have been so shocked that they were fired (for example, one employee lied about relocating out of the country, another proved to not be as skilled as they led on in their interviews, etc). I mentioned in the pros that Thunderfoot is a great place to get your career started (whether you're fresh out of college or currently undergoing a career pivot). This is very true, but only so long as you don't stay at Thunderfoot for too long, as the new business opportunities that come in year by year are too varied and unreliable to stake consistent personal professional growth on.