Pros
K&N manufactures great products. Another big positive has been the people that work at K&N. There have been a lot of knowledgeable people with 5-20 years of experience at K&N to learn from but many of them have left in the last few years as new executives were hired from the food and clothing industries. The new executives put little value on long term employees and made it clear they could be easily replaced. The loss of experienced supervisors and staff is costing the company a lot of money in inefficiency. Rewards are few and management by fear is common.
Cons
Poor leadership and communication from the owners and executives. K&N was purchased by Goldman Sachs Merchant Banking Division (GS) from Gryphon Investors (GI) in late 2016. GI hired the current K&N CEO. He seemed to be a perfect choice for helping GI to sell the company. The problem is GS kept him on when they bought the company. He commutes from out of state to Riverside 3-4 days a month. He brought in quite a few executives he worked with in past clothing businesses. Running a manufacturing company has not been the CEO's strength especially over the last year. He seems to be really good at keeping GS content and in the dark. GI had people on site often and they spoke with supervisors and managers to understand the environment. You would think GS would be much better at managing the company than GI but that doesn't seem to be the case. The point to all of this is the employee environment at K&N is not good right now. There are quite a few new executives that come from outside the industry. They don't seek input from those that have experience and as a result many bad decisions have been made that are causing inefficiencies that are keeping the company from being as successful as it could be. Lots of money is being spent on contractors in an effort to grow the company but the efforts seem to be more to do with buying time. The company's past acquisitions have been declining as a result of poor marketing and vision. There's not much confidence the current management can get the company back on track. "Cost cutting" measures could be coming.