A corporation in sheep’s clothing pretending to be a small business - Anonymous employee Group Two Employee Review

This is a company that sells itself as a supportive, “ever-evolving” small business but operates like a careless corporation. The best marketing they do is to their hiring pool by saying they are the employer that "gets it." Coverage and PTO are not competitive, maternity leave is weak compared to industry standards. The company promotes flexible PTO, but in reality, it’s much more limited than it appears. Requests are often difficult to make use of, leaving employees feeling like time off isn’t truly supported. Leadership has been vocal in the past about supporting women and promoting mental health, but in practice those commitments fall flat. True support for women means more than just words, it requires meaningful policies around mental health, medical needs, child care, maternity leave, and ensuring women are represented in leadership positions. As is often the case here, there’s plenty of polished messaging, but little meaningful follow-through. Despite hiring mostly junior designers, there is zero mentorship or sustainability. Workload is relentless, timelines are unrealistic, and there’s no time to actually grow as a designer. The faster you complete tasks, the more leadership inflates the expected output, then acts surprised when things look rushed. The agency frequently hires junior or entry level designers and expects them to perform at a high level with little to no support or mentorship. Meanwhile, senior designers are burdened with excessive responsibilities that leadership disregards, leaving them without the bandwidth to properly guide or support less experienced team members. Promotions are unclear, feedback is vague, and expectations constantly shift. The bar is always moving. You will hear the word "elevate" every day, but there is no actual visual example or direction, nor an actual creative director, to give any guidance to what is expected. Owners are absent, leadership is stretched thin, and the creative team who responsible for the majority of the agency’s output, receives the least respect or support. When projects perform well, individual contributions from the creative team are rarely acknowledged. Credit is either generalized or absorbed by other departments. This lack of recognition, combined with frequent criticism, makes it extremely difficult to feel valued or motivated to produce great work. Designers live in constant anxiety about deadlines and job security. “Ever-evolving” here really means “we fire people often.” Burnout happens around the two year mark, if not sooner. The company wants Prada level creative work but on factory line timelines and with broken tools. Timers may help project management, but they push designers to exhaustion and destroy quality. Especially when year after year goes by. Once you have performed well at a certain time efficiency, they increase the pace and want you to finish jobs faster and better. So the bar continues to move. I guess you could also call that “ever-evolving”. Nepotism and poor leadership choices exist here. The CEO is a relative of a client, and the Creative Director is the owner’s friend. Neither fit the role in relation to the creative team. A humiliating “design competition” that resulted in someone being fired was one of the most degrading experiences I’ve witnessed in a workplace. The current Creative Director lacks meaningful leadership experience and seems to serve more as a figurehead to promote the agency based on a brief stint at a well known company. He is frequently unavailable, dismissive when present, and provides little to no visual or creative direction. While this type of disconnect might be expected in a large corporation with other avenues for collaboration, in a small business environment with limited structure, it leaves the creative team without the support they need to succeed. Despite positioning itself as a homebuilding focused company, a few highly political projects from the owners were pushed through the design pipeline. This left the entire creative team deeply uncomfortable and forced to choose between keeping their jobs or producing what was essentially propaganda. This situation could have been easily avoided if leadership had simply declined the projects and responded with a professional “no,” but instead they were taken on at the expense of the team’s morale. If you’re not an extrovert, don’t expect to advance here no matter the quality of your work. Leadership doesn’t value diversity in the true sense: it’s not just about race, but also about different personalities, lived experiences, and ways of working. Instead of fostering growth for a variety of people, the culture rewards loudness over talent, which leaves many strong contributors overlooked and unsupported. During project gaps, instead of addressing it as a management or pipeline issue, leadership shifted the blame onto the creative team leaving employees responsible for problems that were never in their control. These gaps could have been used as opportunities for connection, innovation, or developing new ideas that the agency so desperately needs, but leadership has zero interest in the creative team outside of their own needs. Empty values: Leadership loves to say they care about diversity, mental health, and giving back, but there’s no substance. No continuing education, inadequate PTO, and expensive benefits (if you can even afford them on a creative salary). The company positions itself as a marketing agency, but creative work makes up the majority of what it delivers, yet you’d hardly know it. Leadership rarely highlights or advocates for the creative team, focusing instead on networking and connections that do little to bring in new or meaningful creative projects. There’s more emphasis on being recognized as “women in construction” than on building credibility as “women in advertising or design,” which leaves the creative side overlooked and undervalued. Like many others, I genuinely enjoyed my first year here. While the agency had some of the usual challenges common in the creative industry, the environment felt supportive under a strong Creative Director and Associate Creative Director. Their leadership created a sense of community and made the company feel like the small business I believed I could grow with. However, once they left, a new CEO was brought in, and no Creative Director was appointed for an extended period. The new leadership decisions that followed felt cold and calculated, lacking the experience, professionalism, and vision that should be expected from those in senior roles.