Very Poor Work Life Balance. Special kind of person needed to stay here long term. - District Representative Ecolab Employee Review

Pay is not competitive if you live in a more expensive area. In the interview the job will be described as a "sales job" or "account manager" job but you will spend 85% of your time carrying pails around, throwing chemicals into cooling towers, and acting as a plumber. You "Make you own schedule" BUT have to work 14 hours per day, on the weekends, and on vacation to "stay caught up" or as management would say "To handle your business" Nalco has a customer first mentality. This results in high turnover of employees and abuse of employees time to meet unrealistic demands of customers. Salary + commission sounds nice but corporate will keep adding additional tasks to your plate to the point where you can barely find the time to sell and get that over target commission. Most of you time that you could be selling will be spent writing reports, responding to emergencies that aren't actually emergencies, and doing difficult to manage spreadsheets. They "Train" you but they don't. You will have to cram about 10,000 pages of material in 6 months then when you actually have a territory assigned to you none of the information you learned will be useful so you pretty much have to learn by trial and error. Company culture is atrocious- You are expected to eat, breath, and crap Ecolab. Anything less and you are viewed as a lazy and disgusting worker, even if your sales territory is up in revenue and profits constantly. Terrible work life balance. Taking work home. Anxiety thinking about work before bed. They will not directly say it but it is implied that furthering your education and having a life outside of work is frowned upon. Chemical exposure- since the "sales" job is actually 85% service technician you will need to be careful to long term exposure to chemicals. I have noticed a lot of the older people in the industry get "sick". You will get up to 50-100+ emails per day and will be expected to respond to all of them within a rolling 24 hours in addition to the multiple hours of driving you will be doing, hands on service, meetings, and reports you will need to complete. Every process you do is extremely tedious and overly complicated. It will take you an hour to produce a quote for a $500 piece of equipment for example.