PTP is operated by a partner-based management class. I emphasise the word ‘class’ because it best illustrates the truthful division between the partners and the employees. PTP is a vehicle for the egos and wallets of a group of guys who rarely contribute a fraction of the time or effort they expect of their staff. Despite the often touted mantra of “we’re a family”, the burden of success is disproportionately upon staff earning far below market rates.
The staff of PTP were not valued for their talent but for their profitability. The career and personal development of staff was barely a tertiary concern behind the incessant delivery demands and the various expectations of consultants that went beyond the job description and were never rewarded. Training, certification, and accreditation that didn’t directly contribute to the bottom line was seen as surplus.
Meanwhile, the myriad aspects of pre-sales were treated simultaneously as obligations for most consultants and as undeserving of remuneration or reward. Many sales consultants refused to accept any responsibility for understanding the service or product lines to a degree sufficient to converse with existing or potential clients beyond the most superficial level. Technical consultants were often left with the responsibility of establishing the viability of a lead, determining the client needs, constructing the statement of work, scope, and proposal, and then usually the delivery of many of those projects too. Quite what many of the sales consultants did beyond logging into Salesforce remains a History Channel-esque mystery to this day.
The partnership model at PTP enables a pervasive culture of shirking responsibility. Concerns ranging from benign to severe, raised by employees to partners, would be “taken seriously” on initial contact, only for those concerns to become pinballs, batted back and forth as each partner involved would avoid taking any substantial responsibility for addressing or rectifying the concern. It’s hard, even with the value of hindsight, to determine whether this was rank incompetence or intentional.
Indeed, the partners obviously recognised the danger of being directly responsible for taking receipt of genuine grievances, since they were so incapable of remediating those concerns. They chose to institute a “managing security consultant” strata to insulate themselves from direct engagement, beyond the performative, with the vast majority of their staff. This move was depicted as beneficial because it would somehow elevate PTP’s ability to address the many issues that their staff would raise. These managing consultants were not given the authority to resolve most issues directly and thus became another buffer in the whacky PTP pinball machine of dodging accountability. This was another in a long line of baffling decisions made by a dozen and change former consultants with no person management ability and the business acumen of an A-Level student.
You may ask yourself whether the negative sentiments mentioned in this review or some of the others for PTP are outdated, referring to some time in past; be it a year, two years, three years, or more. It is a fair concern, as a business can improve, and people can grow. I would suggest instead, that you ask yourself this question: is the business still operated by the same group of partners as it has been for over a decade? And then ask yourself the question (and maybe ask them too, if you’re interviewing with PTP): have those partners endeavoured to get closer to the issues, to align themselves with their employees, and, as a “family” should, tackle those issues together? Or, perhaps, have they instead chosen to distance themselves from those employees by instituting layers of bureaucracy like managing consultants and an HR/People team?
I’ll close with a couple of illustrative examples of the nature of the partners.
Amidst the crippling mental fatigue of the COVID lockdowns of early to mid 2020, the partners saw fit to routinely deliver boxes of beer to staff, stuck at home, across the country. The business as a whole had a deeply unhealthy relationship with alcohol, as was evidenced by numerous incidents at DEFCON in August of the previous year. When this was raised to partners as a poor and potentially damaging choice of gift, given the widespread awareness of high rates of alcoholism in the industry, it was met with a sense of incredulity by partners who thought they were just doing a nice thing. It sure begs the question why the health and wellbeing of staff wasn’t even considered until someone outside of the partners thought to ask.
Halfway through 2020, following many disjointed and sometimes elongated periods of COVID-related furlough, rarely distributed fairly amongst consultants, the partners informed staff of the need for all staff to take a voluntary pay cut to ensure they could keep everyone employed. This was understandably met with some consternation, somehow to the surprise of some partners. To the staff, however, this might as well as been a slap to the face. In the preceding months, still well into the events of early 2020, weekly team calls had often revealed much about the personal lives of folk in the company. Many staff were in particularly tough situations already, and stagnant wage growth at PTP meant that many were not in a position to take a pay cut. To add insult to injury, several partners had become careless when talking about their own wealth, with some revealing the ability to buy exotic sports cars and even sell them at significant loss to buy new ones. Other partners revealed they might have difficulty affording private school fees for their children. These obviously distressing concerns did not do much to soften the blow of telling staff to give up 20% of their monthly income. And when all was said and done, it turned out that the business had such poor ability for financial projection, that they discovered the pay cuts could be reversed shortly after and that there would have been no need for such cuts. The damage to morale and mental health turned out to just be collateral damage of a clear lack of basic business skills.
PTP isn’t operated by bad or cruel people and there’s a lot of good intentions, but when those intentions have negative impacts, there isn’t a moment for self-reflection. Instead, a defensive tack is taken, critique is dismissed, and incompetence is protected.
If you’re interviewing for PTP, when you’re asked if you have any questions, maybe you could ask what concrete actions the partners have taken in making themselves personally responsible for the individual success of their staff. Not the success of the business, mind you, but the success of specific individuals.
And if you’re feeling spicy, maybe ask if they could tell you about employees that have reported specific partners as the reason for leaving the business and what they’ve done specifically to resolve those issues.
