Okay, settle in guys and girls, this is going to be a long one. I mean it, grab a snack and make sure your chair's comfy. I worked at SEOhaus for almost two years and was there during their transition to PRhaus and Brighthaus and the creation of Creativehaus. They were without a doubt, the worst two years of work I have ever endured. It's possible that things have changed since I left but everything I've heard from those who have left since I did leads me to believe that they haven't. If you're looking for a job, let me tell you, it's not worth it, keep looking, you CAN do better.
Now, for some specifics about why working here sucked so hard, read on.
1 - A total lack of infrastructure. - While I worked there our IT department (including all programming, hosting, e-mail and domain support) consisted of three people. Now, don't get me wrong, Nick is an amazing guy and really, really knows his stuff. But you could six Nicks and they still wouldn't be able to keep up with the amount of work. I'm not kidding when I say that at some points the tech support queue was six weeks long. That meant if something broke on a client site it stayed broken for six weeks or until the account manager was able to figure something else out. What's that you say? Client's will have webmasters, we're only an SEO company. Well read on...
2 - Totally unrealistic promises - Clients were promised the world to get them to sign up. We'll not only provide you with SEO, we'll also fix coding errors on your website, help you implement new design features and widgets, heck, if you need it we'll even design you a whole new site to make sure you're SEO friendly (see point 1 to get an idea of how smoothly most of this went). We were encouraged to lie to clients about this process in order to preserve them as clients when they (justifiably) got angry over the fact that implementation was taking weeks or more.
3 - Blame culture - Here's the blame culture, you get blamed. As an account manager an unhappy client was your fault no matter what, why or when and don't think for a moment that blame was doled out privately. I can't count the number of times I saw the management publicly berate someone right in the middle of the open plan office. It's like they were trying to embarrass and make an example of people. This is not something that's rare. It was standard operating procedure while I was there.
4 - Expected to lie - I know I mentioned this earlier but I wanted to bring it up again because it really deserves its own point. If the business practices of the company were not able to match the promises made to clients or the expectations set by sales, we were expected to lie to clients and make up stories in order to calm them down and stop them from quitting. We used link builders in the Phillipines but were instructed to tell clients that all of our staff were based out of our office. When penguin 2.0 came around and started to devalue all of those links we were again instructed to lie to clients about what was causing their rankings to suddenly drop. If a client had completely unreasonable expectations and we knew there was no way they would actually see good results from their campaign, we were expected to lie to keep them on for as long as possible to get as much money as we could before they wised up and quit. A big part of why I left was because I just felt dirty every time I spent a day in the office. I felt like a con-man.
5 - Ridiculous Workloads - While I was an account manager there each of us had almost 80 accounts that we were expected to talk to on a bi-weekly basis. That meant that each week we needed to report to and work on 40 accounts, that's 8 a day. Some of these clients were paying us over 1000 a month and we were given an account load that meant we could spend less than two hours a month on them. It was normal for people to stay 30 minutes to an hour late on normal days and even though they say you can leave at noon on Fridays it was also normal for people to stay until 3 or 4 o'clock simply to try and catch up.
6 - Horrible work-life balance - When you join they'll tell you that they really value work-life balance and make a real effort to maintain a great balance here. And they do, for the management. It was standard practice for the owners to come into the office 30 minutes to an hour and a half later than everyone else and leave an hour or more before the employees. The employees on the other hand would be harangued if they were ten minutes late and forget trying to leave early. Like I mentioned before, the work load means that it's simply not an option. Oh, and I don't know if they still do this but while I was there they gave each account manager a phone. Oh, that's nice we thought. Except we were expected to give that number out to clients and remain available to them on evenings and weekends. Let me repeat that. As an account manager you were expected to remain available to clients and management on evenings and weekends and even on PTO.
Now, honestly, I could go on. I really could. I could keep writing about the problems this place had all day but I've moved on with my life and I suggest you do the same. There's other jobs out there, better ones. Go get one of those instead.
