Pinkston Reviews

Despite the pros listed above, I would like to share a bit more about the culture at Pinkston, and in the Digital department in particular. When I started, we would attend monthly company-wide meetings where the financial officer would present our company revenue goals and show how we were performing against them. They would boast about how transparent they were about the company's finances. Months later, they stopped sharing this information and instead had the owner, Christian Pinkston, talk/preach to all employees about how "things were going", but it was truly to avoid talking about the financial situation of the company. Also, when I started, I found out that I was hired by a contractor and did not have a direct manager. The Director of the department (a "partner") along with the only other Digital Marketing Strategist (DMS) were my acting managers. I soon learned that my counterpart DMS only had about 1 year of previous DM experience because I had to train her on many aspects of digital marketing including conversion tracking and Google ad management as well as reporting. This person was then promoted at the end of the year to Senior Digital Marketing Strategist, but our roles were not differentiated or defined. I worked with the Senior DMS and our Director to clearly define our roles as well as begin the process of promoting me to Senior DMS within 6 months due to my experience far exceeding that of my counterpart (I had 5 years of experience). There was no reason that they should have promoted this inexperienced individual over me other than them having possible connections to the partners/owners. Regardless, I was promised a mid-year promotion and worked with the Director and the Senior DMS to ensure a smooth transition and clearly defined roles so that we could work efficiently with the large number of clients we had on our plates. When June came and my promotion was due, I was told that the company decided not to give out mid-year promotions - and that was that. I was extremely frustrated at the lack of communication, but also the lies and manipulation to keep me working hard for the promotion. On top of these items, the company employs many family members of the "partners" (owners in the company) and they offer no pay transparency to show that they give fair raises and bonuses to those with connections versus those who are not directly connected to the "partners" in the company. In this same vein, there is an extreme lack of diversity in the workplace across all departments. There are also large pay discrepancies when it comes to people of color and women; company-wide. When 3 interns were brought into the Digital department, I learned that they had higher wages than one particular female employee who had been working in the department for over a year. This should not be possible, but it was the unfortunate truth. When I started asking other employees about their wages, I was disappointed to see large gaps in pay between those who have connections and those who do not. The partners are also very religious and that spreads into the company values, day-to-day operations, and client work. More than half of the clients I worked with had a religious focus which we were expected to be agreeable with, including when the client wanted to start each meeting with a prayer. This was extremely uncomfortable and inappropriate in the workplace. They had many Christian-centered events in the office as well as inviting employees who went on company-paid Christian mission trips to formally share about their paid "volunteer" time off in company-wide meetings. Lastly, the "HR" department consists of 1 individual, who is the brother of the CEO, and has no previous HR experience. This does not allow for open, honest communication because employees feel that if they express HR-related concerns, those concerns have the potential to make their way up to the owner, which is extremely unfair to all employees and does not allow for confidential conversations. To conclude, I left my position at the company due to all the concerns above and I do not recommend this workplace to anyone.