Dodgy, unethical CEO who can't own up to mistakes - Anonymous employee Selesti Employee Review

Hi Thanks for your review. As always, we welcome all feedback and appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts. Great to hear you enjoyed working with the team! I’m sorry to hear about your other concerns. Apologies if this is a lengthy reply, but I wanted to cover a fair bit for you. I can assure you that nobody has had their holiday taken away from them. It’s simply something we wouldn’t do. As you will expect, we are baffled by this claim. To ensure we hadn’t missed something, I double-checked our HR system PeopleHR, which we’ve used for the last 10 years. There is an audit trail of all activities, and no holidays have been removed. It does look like you are mistaken. Please do give me a call so I can look into it further and clear the matter up for you. We take the completely opposite approach to holidays than you’re suggesting. We actively encourage the team to take time off for their well-being to ensure they look after themselves and take a well-deserved break from working. As you’ll know, not only do we have an extremely generous holiday allowance which increases with long service, we have extra days off on top of this and actively try to finish early every Friday so we can start the weekend early. You’ll also know that beyond the generous holiday allowance, we support the team with a free counselling service and have recently extended this with a ‘Friend in Need’ 24/7 access to the team’s friends and family. Claims of being unethical are sad to hear, and I don’t understand why you feel this to be the case. We are proud to be a B Corp Certified business and worked incredibly hard to become so. It doesn’t come easy to become a B Corp. It is one of, if not the most rigorous, accreditation processes in the world. It’s impossible to become a B Corp without being authentic and providing evidence of a company’s performance against five key categories: governance, workers, customers, community and the environment. We are in the process of recertifying right now and making more improvements to how we can become a better business for people and the planet. We are by no means perfect and look to become inspired and learn from other businesses and leaders. It’s an incredible journey to be on. Big changes start small, and we aim to increase our score this time around. The other company did, unfortunately, go into administration, which could have been avoided if several factors outside of our control hadn’t forced us into that position. I would happily share documentation about this with you, as I have done with the current team. It’s sadly not uncommon to read about so many companies struggling and going out of business these days. Rather than cease trading entirely and putting the whole team out of work, the best option was to protect them from this and restructure the business to keep trading. Nothing unethical about that. It’s something that we spent a lot of time getting legal and business advice on, and it made total sense to do. The company which bought the assets has been operating since 2019. The process is called a pre-pack administration. This has been the most stressful and mentally challenging period I have ever had to go through. I personally have put everything on the line to make it happen, to keep the business going and keep people in jobs and to enable future growth. Yes, absolutely, mistakes were made. I’m not perfect. What's important is learning from them, and one thing which we are much better at is recruiting the right people. Luckily I have a brilliant team and family around me to support me, share and contribute to my ambition and ideas and are excited about our future prospects. I hope this goes some way to address your points, and I am open to meeting with you to cover things in more detail over a coffee or beer, resolving any concerns you may have. I wish you the best of luck in your current and future roles. Ollie