Active Network Reviews

Where to begin: -Company went public, and within a year, was being looked at as structurally Insolvent. All the directors and C-levels sold their stock off and only kept a fraction of a % of ownership in the company they ran. So right there, no confidence in itself. -It was purchased by a private equity firm who proceeded to gut the company. Office closures and mass layoffs ensued. Massive talent loss as a result. As of this review, That equity firm still is holding onto the company. Several smaller units within have been sold off. But I believe it is saying something that Active has yet to be sold after this many years. -After the Purchase, departments were consolidated into one central office in Dallas, TX. Those who would not move were let go. Forcing under qualified individuals into positions they had no business being in. Not their fault, but a sign of things to come. Senior managers in all departments were and are leaving this Dallas location after only a year or two, and returning to life where they were before the move. Whether it is living in Dallas, or working downtown, or the atmosphere in the office itself I cannot say. But it is happening. -Employees were told the focus would be on becoming a "Data Company". That "We have all this data and we can leverage this data". Nothing every really came of this proclamation, and Active purchased a stop watch/timing company soon after, getting into the hardware business...as a data company. -CIO who would rather stick it someone personally, even if the effect on the company is negative. Moving functional and competent client teams out of areas to Dallas and people with no understanding of the Active business/infrastructure, then scream and complain when they were failing. -Intentionally tricking customers into enrolling into a membership program online by doing anything from registering for a race, or reserving a campground. A lawsuit was settled with the state of Vermont regarding this. Active paid the state over $160k. You can look it up if you like. When I left, it sounded like the state od California was possibly looking into this as well. -The company is hemorrhaging talent. Managers and skilled employees are overworked, then leaving. And they typically don't backfill, leaving more work for those beleaguered employees left behind. Teams are divided and split and reassigned, with no real thought. And the work suffers as a result. -HUGE revenue streams in the outdoors division are leaving. Two of the biggest clients in the outdoors reservation industry have decided that the product Active puts forth, and the support they receive, are subpar, and with recent RPO's, have given other companies their business. You can look this up and confirm online. In the next year, a lot of money will no longer being coming in, and there will undoubtedly be even more layoffs. -Flagship website (Active.com) is constantly broken and users from all over the country are affected. -Heavy reliance on workers in IT/Dev/telecommunications based out of China. -Little to no training. -No career path. You are hired for a role and there you shall stay until attrition forces other roles upon you. But you will not be compensated for that extra responsibility. -Pointless review/self review process. You will told to assign yourself some goals fo further your career path. then they will never be mentioned again until the next review. where you explain that you did not meet those goals, and your manager has never once followed up on them with you. -Paltry 1%-3% merit increases each year, despite the quality and volume of work you produce. -Claim to not have budget to accommodate new staff/tech. Then send over 60 Employees (and a guest) from the Dallas Office on a week long all expense paid trip to Costa Rica. And tout that to all the employees who were/are not eligible. -Company will not pay market value. And has stated that those market value numbers are a lie. -Has not really developed any new product in over 10 years, merely moves old product to an existing platform, or acquires another company and shows that off. But claims to be innovative. Active is in the game of hanging on, not innovating. -Claims that management working remotely is not something they support. Unless you are close to the C-Level team that is. Overly qualified managers who actually want to stay with the company, are told they cannot work remotely, by people working remotely. So they leave. -Equity firm has no idea about how to effectively manage a call center environment. One merely has to Google "Active Network" and see what is out there.

Since the original CEO of Active, Dave Alberga left and Active was bought by Vista Group, things went bad quickly. A lot of very qualified, dedicated and loyal people have been fired (although they also got rid of some people who weren't doing a good job). All upper management have been relocated to Dallas, which gives nobody any confidence that satellite offices will remain open, and also means that offices basically run unsupervised. Several offices have been shut down across the US. To make matters worse, the relocation of the services and departments from those offices to Dallas has been very poorly executed, and the people working new jobs in Dallas mostly have no clue what they are doing. There was no 'transition period' or chance for people to get up to speed. Despite all the firings, resources still seem to be scarce. Many departments are under-staffed, under-paid and over-worked, and people don't have the knowledge or training to do things the right way. Management seems to always have 'bigger things to worry about' than training their staff or fixing processes that aren't working. Orders from the executive level push the company to take on more and more clients, while leaving no resources to provide good products or services for them or existing clients. The result is an unhappy customer base. A lot of people I know have quit recently because they don't like how things are run, and don't feel they have any job security. I have heard from people working in Dallas that current CIO Greg Ingino wanders the office all day looking for people who aren't working hard enough or at their desks (I guess he has nothing else to do). Lower level employees (even those who aren't working for support or some other department where there are set shifts) are expected to clock themselves in and out even for bathroom breaks. This is not an attitude that breeds happy employees. I am not sure if Darko (current CEO) is doing a good job or not. I have never heard a single person say anything good about him, and he has no CEO experience. As someone else pointed out here in a review, he was one of the people responsible for turning Monster from the leading job site into a total mess. Dave Alberga was very popular in the company, but I think Darko is extremely unpopular. I have been working for Active a long time, and I am extremely good at my job. When I joined it was a good company, and I'm sad that things have got so bad. Ultimately, the CEO must be responsible for sacrificing his employees and destroying the camaraderie of the old Active in order to focus only on the bottom line. Currently I don't feel like I have any job security, or that executives or management are making good decisions. It's possible the company can still be saved, but until they get some competent management and work on all the internal problems, I would not advise anyone to work here at any level. My guess is that if major changes aren't made, Darko will start to sell off more and more of the company in order to try and save the bottom line. Jobs will go and keep going until only a tiny company is left. Then he will move on and leave the survivors to start from nothing.