Poorly managed company - Lessons Lead Guitar Center Employee Review

2.0
16 May 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Employee discount - Good relationships with coworkers - Good relationships with lessons customers

Cons

The company is just so poorly managed from the top down. I lost count of how many new things were promised by corporate in order to streamline the lessons business and make my job significantly easier that simply never happened. The weekly conference calls make the poor management glaringly obvious - "good job you made number go up! everyone look at number and also make number go up! yay big number!" - That is pretty much the intelligence level you can expect from upper management. Aside from my part of the business, which improved dramatically because I was good at it, literally nothing else improved in the 2 years that I worked there. Note that if you have a degree in anything, no one will bat an eye. They do not value intelligence, only your ability to do grunt work, make numbers look good, and sell insurance plans and credit cards. It's just sad, Guitar Center wants to do it all--guitars, drums, keyboards, pro audio, DJ, production, lessons, repairs, rentals, used & vintage--but they will never be able to cover all these areas successfully as long as they keep cutting labor and offloading part time responsibilities to full time managers. Obviously the pay is laughable, this is retail so don't expect anything competitive. I was there for the experience, and I guess it was cool for a while. But whenever I talked to people with regular jobs, they were shocked at my workload and how stressed I was all the time.

Explore other reviews about Guitar Center

5.0
9 Jan 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Got to work with so many people

Cons

Long hours during holidays were rough

1.0
21 Apr 2026
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Plenty of capable individual contributors doing real work. - The brand and the business itself are legitimate — the problems are organizational.

Cons

- Senior leadership is politically driven rather than outcome-driven. Strategic initiatives stall out, and leaders spend more energy assigning or shifting blame than actually diagnosing and fixing problems. - Some parts of the org operate on deference to the top. Honest assessments get softened into whatever narrative leadership wants to hear, which makes real cross-functional work difficult. - Senior leaders do not consistently advocate for their own teams. When things get political, self-preservation takes precedence over backing the people underneath, and capable managers end up exposed.

2
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