Grow.com Reviews

In my entire time at Grow, the CS team was bizarrely ignored when we brought up issues with the platform and bugs that were serious pain points for customers. As the face of the company, one would think that CS would be taken a lot more seriously, but that was never the case. The product languished in mediocrity for months with Grow bleeding customers, and by the time anyone decided to do anything about it, it was too late and a large number of incredibly talented and quality people were laid off so that there would be room in the budget to focus on product performance and making essential fixes. The most baffling part throughout all of this? The beefing up of the growth/marketing team who put out campaigns laden with trendy buzzwords in a time where the company should have been focused on fixing what was broken and maintaining their existing customers who were becoming more and more frustrated with the product each day. I think that team is probably one of the biggest at Grow now as they remained oddly untouched by the layoffs while the CS team (again, the face of the company) was cut in half. There was little to no focus on maintaining existing features. It felt like one half baked feature would be released with promises that it would make the customer experience so much better, but would quickly be forgotten as the product team pivoted to yet another new feature with more of the same promises. Whenever concerns about these features were brought up it always addressed with "well, we don't have the bandwidth to work on it right now since our focus is on this new feature that's in development." I eventually grew conditioned to not asking about broken things and either avoided them entirely and advised customers to do the same or used workarounds. This was partly due to the product and development team having nothing in the way of guidance from a CTO, or upper level leader.

Even as a tech-company, Grow is overly focused on a sales driven culture and revenue stream. Salespersons receive large bonuses for grabbing sales, even while many of those leads might be thanks to the Product or Marketing teams, not to mention that the Customer Success team often has to work hard to keep those clients. As a result, it leaves many employees feeling underappreciated. Other teams are given smaller budgets and lower priority. Even though the company is willing to pay for large parties and office amenities, they do not invest in their most loyal employees. Many are paid well below market-average. Even those who have been around since the beginning were not fairly compensated while the company was hitting its goals each year. It is a very “bro”-like culture and few women represent the company. Your respect within the company is often dictated by how well the CEO likes you. While I continued to receive new responsibilities and increase my productivity/value, I did not receive a fair salary adjustment during my entire 2+ years here. Along with that, upper management often makes rash decisions that result in laying off employees with little warning or logic. Leaders are terrible at giving feedback or communicating your worth, so anyone could be on the chopping block without any knowledge about what they did wrong. An employee may had been given promotions, but were not trained or given expectations, setting them up to fail in the company. It’s my belief that a majority of the leadership got their promotions through loyalty/friendship, and not by the merits that they have. Some leaders obviously shouldn’t be in the position they are in, but are allowed to continue to destroy the company and its employees. Even newly hired leaders are selected quickly and rashly while there are strong candidates who have been with the company longer, and have stronger skill sets. I’d like to think that all of these problems stem from a startup culture that’s still developing, but after working 2+ years at Grow, it’s obvious that every single problem with the company starts with the CEO, Rob Nelson. He is a very controlling and unappreciative leader who doesn’t value the lives or experience of his employees. Grow has a lot of potential to be a great company to work for and build a career, but it’s ultimately being dragged down by poor management, misogynistic culture, and non-existent HR.