Clean Energy Collective Reviews

Leadership at Clean Energy Collective, aside from the CEO, is essentially powerless due to how the CEO runs the company. The CEO has extremely rigid ideas of what is best for the company and is not open to listening to employee ideas. There is a very negative culture and, even though many employees have great ideas to improve it, the CEO is not open to listening to employees or ideas. Because the company is rapidly growing, we are at a vital crossroads whereby much of the negativity can be eliminated instead of just ignored. The CEO is very conservative with spending. Be prepared to bring your own office supplies. While benefits are decent, other companies in the Boulder/Interlocken/Louisville area are very competitive with benefits so it becomes very apparent what you are not getting if you take a job with Clean Energy Collective. The dental and vision plans are terrible and there is no 401(k) match. Providing free snacks for employees has become a trendy, nice perk at many companies. At Clean Energy Collective, they do provide snacks but there is a charge for them. While not a big deal (bring your own from home), it's just one more thing that reinforces the feelings most employees have - employees are secondary to the operation instead of being the most important part of the operation.

CEC hired an awesome sales manager/sales trainer in January '14 who hired 10 inside sales reps on March 10th for his team. He trained us for 6 days. All 10 of us hit the 1st month sales quota of $60,000 within 2 weeks. Rather than congratulate our team for our record breaking effort, CEC asked our awesome trainer/sales manager in May to pick 5 of us to fire because CEC "hired too many sales people" ...when his team was out performing the existing team! Our awesome trainer/sales manager refused, and resigned-even with a wife and 3 kids depending on him. It was THAT despicable. 5 of the 10 of us were fired that day and since then, CEC has hired countless new employees yet the sales team is slowly being picked off because few if any are consistently hitting the $140,000 quota. CEC sales people are required to sell solar panels in arrays (gardens) that do not even exist yet and may never actually be constructed! On top of that, the solar panels are over priced and hard to sell. ($800-$1,300 each) and the lack of actual sales support is appalling. With most companies, sales is respected and honored for bringing in money that sustains the rest of the company. At CEC this is NOT the case.