At Driven Brands, my tenure could best be described as a rollercoaster ride through a funhouse of baffling business decisions and perpetual corporate reshuffling. The processes, if you could call them that, seemed to be designed by someone who had never seen a functioning organization before. Reorganization of the corporate structure was a regular event, almost like a seasonal tradition, ensuring that just as you started to understand your role, it would change entirely.
Selecting vendors was a particularly special form of madness. The concept of an RFP was as foreign as a Martian language. Instead, decisions were made in what seemed to be the executive version of Russian roulette, leading to contracts with vendors who delivered more headaches than solutions and were often chosen based on immediate cost and personal connection rather than ROI and ability to deliver. It was a miracle if a project got off the ground, let alone succeeded. Driven Brands’ motto for vendor selection and project management should be “we can’t afford to do it right, but we can afford to do it twice.”
The C Suite, in their infinite wisdom, loved to refer to employees as “working from their pajamas in their basement.” This would have been amusing if it weren’t so tragically out of touch. Those basement-dwellers were the backbone of the company, often logging 14-hour days, skipping meals, and sacrificing their personal lives. Relationships crumbled, and health deteriorated. One colleague suffered a heart attack, another had a nervous breakdown, and yet another was hospitalized for kidney failure – all because they worked without food or rest.
If tone deaf was a company, it would be Driven Brands. While virtually no one saw a bonus for 2023, the CFO (Driven’s second in less than 2 years) waltzed away with a 100% bonus and his sign-on bonus, despite arguably leaving the company in worse shape than he found it after 10 months on the job. Who needs the lottery when you can help yourself to the largesse of corporate monies on the backs of employees you insult on a near constant basis?
Meritocracy was the buzzword of the year, mentioned so often you’d think it was a mantra. In practice, though, it was as mythical as a unicorn. Promotions were handed out based on personal relationships or to project a facade of “girl power,” while genuinely deserving candidates were overlooked - or worse- laid off as being unnecessary. On other occasions, the company would pull a complete stranger off the street for a key role, bypassing qualified internal candidates, or vice versa, with no discernible logic.
Driven Brands wasn’t just a workplace; it was a masterclass in how not to run a company. The chaos was ceaseless, the decisions baffling, and the toll on hard working employees was immense. If there’s a silver lining, it’s that the experience left me well-prepared for anything – after all, if you can survive Driven Brands, you can survive anything.
