Clear strategy and inspiring evolution - Anonymous employee GAIN Employee Review

Some of the long-tenured employees are genuinely talented and a pleasure to work with. They're the only reason morale hasn't completely collapsed. Hard to overstate how much knowledge and skill they carry.

Management has lost the plot. There's no clear vision for where this company is going anymore, just reactive decisions made on the fly. People who built this place from the ground up (back when it was TRGT, and it really was a great place to work then) are now sidelined and not trusted, despite years of loyalty and results. Micromanagement has crept in hard. Things that were never tracked or questioned before are now scrutinized constantly, which kills autonomy and trust. Workloads are unsustainable. Way too many accounts dumped on individual people with no regard for capacity. Team structures get reshuffled so often it's hard to keep up, and the constant churn makes it impossible to build any continuity. Watching colleagues you respected slowly turn into corporate yes-men to survive here is genuinely sad. Perks are handled unfairly across regions. Unlimited PTO got quietly cut for some while leadership still markets the benefits package as generous. Doesn't sit right. Also heard from people working as contractors that they're treated poorly, like an afterthought rather than part of the team. Whole place feels like it's at a boiling point. People are exhausted and burnt out, and it shows.

The same CEO has been in place for nearly 2 years, so at least there's some consistency.

This is a tragic situation where a number of really strong independent agencies have been completely ripped apart and replaced with corporate, money-grabbing, non-agency folk who don't understand what made the individual businesses so successful. The problem predates these people, and to some effect, they are only picking up the pieces of years of failure. Each agency was sold into what was then known as Sideshow and greeted by a chairman who promised that nothing would change, that the agencies would continue running in the same way they always had, and that it was all about accelerating growth across the services and work of each individual business. This may have been the initial hope and dream, but it very quickly became a living nightmare. The chairman disappeared into the ether, never to be seen again. He was replaced by what can only be described as a revolving door of CEOs who had their own minor levels of success but mostly failure, leading us to our current situation. The merger a couple of years ago of 10+ agencies into GAIN couldn't have been more traumatic or handled in a worse fashion. Everyone was completely out of the loop, nothing was ready on time, the website didn't even work, and deadline after deadline kept getting pushed back. We have now arrived at a point where: • Individual agency benefits have been stripped. • Teams have been ripped apart. • The previous agency owners and key people who made those businesses what they were-strong, competent people-have exited, some by choice and some pushed out the back door. • These leaders have been replaced by what can only be described as puppets. People are regularly told to "get on the train or get off of it" and to remain positive about everything happening, despite mass burnout and colleagues disappearing overnight. There is a clear lack of accountability at all levels. A clear-cut example of this incompetence is in the Performance Business Unit, where the weakest of all the agencies within the group was suddenly put in control of a significant portion of the group's revenue. Unsurprisingly, a huge amount of nepotism followed, promoting people from within that specific agency despite their complete lack of the required skillset, expertise, or knowledge of what they are actually doing. It is no surprise that within these business units, there is a complete and utter level of abject failure: no communication, no accountability, and a business sliding dramatically downhill. All the while, every single employee is sitting and waiting for the exit of the private equity group. And they will exit, because financially the business is on its knees: it is continuing to make rounds of redundancies and cannot hold on to clients. There is no light at the end of the tunnel. There is no longer any remaining residue of the previously successful agencies that worked so well and were individually acquired because of their success. People are only staying here because the agency world is struggling at the moment and jobs are being cut everywhere. If that wasn't the case, this place would be a ghost town.