CADY Reviews

Everything CADY preaches about its vision and core values is a facade. Depending on your role in the company, you are sold a different piece of the vision to hook you in. Your role in the company also determines how long it takes to see through the shiny facade. In my role, I had the unique opportunity to understand how different roles and departments were treated. I interacted with every function across the company. The biggest issue with CADY is the President and his leadership team. The only thing Josh Cady has going for him is an idealistic vision for the company, one he is completely ill-equipped to bring to fruition, and his ability to sell it to anyone who will listen. Josh is the first to tell you he prides himself on his openness, honesty, and desire for healthy debate. Unfortunately, that is only true in theory. In practice, he is quick to anger, narrow-minded, and dishonest. Josh is the kind of leader that lifts up talented and driven employees, tokenizes them to spread his vision, and discards them when he no longer needs or values their voice. When it comes to the leadership team, some departments are run with fear and negativity while others are run with incompetence. The further down the ladder you are, the less support you get. Diversity and Inclusion efforts are performative and the disparity in compensation is astounding. CADY is the definition of a top-heavy organization. Hourly employees consist of photographers, studio sales staff, account representatives, production, and customer service. While leadership would have you believe that they pay hourly employees very well, they do not. A simple search of similar roles with nearby companies shows that. The photographers are enticed to employment by the promise of training and development to help them grow their photography careers. In reality, because of the seasonal aspect of the business, photographers are subject to rapid, mass hiring, leaving little time to properly train before being thrown into a very chaotic and busy season. When the season is over, hours drop drastically and many people are laid off. It is feast or famine in this role and the quality of the work suffers for it. The studio sales staff is subject to the same seasonal shifts but are enticed with commissions. Without the commission, the hourly rate is not a livable wage. The CADY sales team is usually sought out and recruited from schools or other companies in the industry. The sales team can do anything they want with little to no consequence under the excuse that they would lose the school. This puts all other departments at an immediate disadvantage as they have to “just make it work” leading to mistakes and turnover. Photographers and account managers are set up to fail and are punished for it. The sales team is also a perfect example of their performative Diversity and Inclusion policies. The environment at corporate is toxic and favoritism runs rampant. And the favoritism doesn’t just benefit the many members of the Cady family working there. Anyone who buys into the vision 100% without question and with a cult-like following, will do well. A perfect example is the work from home policy. Many corporate employees were hired with the expectation that the role was hybrid. Then out of the blue, Josh decided people working from home couldn’t be trusted to do their work and enforced the back to office policy. The comment from Josh was, if you don’t want to work from the office, you can leave and be easily replaced. People who had been with the company for years were told this. But, there were a handful of employees that were allowed to continue working remote and even some new ones hired on to whom this rule didn’t really apply. At every town hall, someone would ask about the work from office policy, citing the exceptions, and the question was never actually answered. So much smart and experienced talent is brought in thinking they get to be part of something big and make valuable contributions, yet Josh and the rest of leadership is so insecure, they continuously default to their way of doing things and what they think is best. Business decisions are made based on advice from books written by successful CEOs. Recently, there has been some additions to the leadership team with actual, real-world business experience, however, at the end of the day, Josh is the final say. Once people realize the reality of working at Cady, they stick around for a little while because they love their team and don’t want to leave them in a miserable situation. Eventually, it becomes too much, and they leave saying, “such a shame, CADY has great potential.” And CADY does have great potential, and a few people left who are exactly what the company needs, but Josh’s ego is too big for the company to grow around. I can count how many people at corporate have been the for one year. Everyone else has left. And it wont be long before they leave too.

There are just far too many to list, so here's just a few. This company is not loyal to their long time employees, even one's that outshine the rest. Unless you are in a clique with upper management, like going out to party with them, twerking with your boss, that sort of thing. They are quick to hire new people at more money than current employees, but raises are hard to come by unless you practically beg. Yet there's plenty of money to "build employee morale" so they remodel, paint, and spend unspeakable amounts of money on new furiture that no one cares about. If you want to be promoted, and you're a guy, then you're in good shape, even if you have no experience. If you're not a guy, and you want to be promoted, brown nosing, and having an overall Barbie appearance does the trick. There are so many potential lawsuits going on within the company, it's laughable.