Pros
I worked for Verts for 2.5 years in their corporate office as an accountant. To begin, I will address each of the following areas: Company environment, quality of product, compensation, and work/life balance. It’s hard to assign an overall score, but I would give them 2 stars personally based on the fact that I would not consider working for them again. Company environment: 2/5. From the first day that I started, it was obvious that there would be long hours. In fact, contracts stipulated that each employee must work 50 hours a week, with a 30 minute lunch break, which came out to daily hours of 9-7. I will admit that it was difficult to finish all my work even during these long hours, and often came in on the weekend to work on month end closings because it simply was not possible to complete all my tasks. Reviews were done quarterly, and were well documented by management. The general attitude was: “If you don’t look stressed, you must not have enough on your plate.” At one point, I tracked my overtime so that I could bring it up in my next quarterly meeting. After providing a daily tracking spreadsheet I was told that it was “extremely unprofessional” by one of the owners of the company. I thought I was being pro-active by showing that our department was growing at an incredibly fast pace and we needed to hire another person, my boss told me to stop tracking my overtime immediately. I can’t speak for the other departments (facilities, marketing and administrative) but I can say for the accounting department that the workloads are brutal and under-appreciated by ownership. The company is made up of the corporate office with 20 or so employees, and the restaurant teams with about 300 employees. I worked directly with the restaurant assistant managers, managers, area managers and regional managers. I believe that their experiences were very similar to mine: average pay, very long hours, not a lot of respect from ownership, very little job growth or opportunity. My reasoning behind this is the extremely high turnover at the management level, including the highest operational level in the company which was area managers and regional managers. It is expected that staff working at $9/hour will come and go, it is not expected that management will have equally high turnover. In the final year of my employment, the following people left Verts for better opportunities: 2 Office managers, the entire marketing department, Director of HR, Regional manager (the highest operational position in the company), Facilities Assistant, Internal Financial Accountant, Director of Accounting, and Director of Training. I would be frightened if this was my company. Quality of Product: 2/5. When I first started working at Verts, the kebaps were fantastic. I ate them everyday, and even on weekends. After about a year though, something changed in the recipe and it was never the same. I would guess that the quality of the meat was downgraded, this was echoed by many managers who worked with the meat cones daily and shared their input with me. I found this very unfortunate as the kebap meat is the signature item on their menu. After two complete company rebrands, from Verts to VertsKebap, and VertsKebap to Verts Mediterranean Grill, many more items were added to the menu such as garbonzo beans, mixed grilled veggies, hummus and rice bowls. These items diversified the menu significantly. I don’t believe the “quality” of any of these particular offerings are high, the rice for example is yellow but has almost no flavor at all. Overall, I saw many people that I worked with go from “hey this is great!” to “my stomach feels pretty weird”, so I can’t highly recommend the product. Compensation: 2/5 Pay is completely average at Verts. After seeing the massive workload that I was expected to complete, I asked for a raise and was told that I “should have done a better job negotiating my salary”. Sounds pretty corporate for a startup right? My question is this: Verts is trying to put a restaurant on every corner in every city, right next to Chipotle, so their growth is massive. If the number of restaurants increases by 40% every year, and my workload increases correspondingly, why wouldn’t I ask for a raise every year? The company is literally being built brick by brick by the people in the corporate office, yet they are not highly valued by ownership. There is also no 401k, and the standard 10 days of vacation. Work/life balance: 2/5: A couple of things go into this consideration: how much work is there, how many hours do I have to complete the work, and how much time off do I get? After the first year, contracts were re-negotiated from 50 hours per week to 45 hours per week. A standard work day was 9-6. This was not due to ownership trying to be kind to it’s employees, the corporate office employees literally got together and decided that 50 hours a week was not sustainable and made it very obvious that we were all unhappy. In January of 2016, the corporate office moved from a tiny office in the Dobie Mall to a fairly large suite in the W hotel in downtown Austin. This was a MASSIVE improvement for all the corporate employees. I would personally say that this was done out of necessity, our marketing department quadrupled in size alone. The new office was pretty swanky, with a keg-erator and foosball and plenty of free snacks. Parking was also provided which was very nice. I applaud ownership’s recent changes in this regard. As already discussed, the workload was very large, and with only the standard two weeks of vacation a year you start feeling a bit squeezed. An extra week is available for sick time, although no one ever took sick time because there was…. Too much work to do! Both of the owners are German, which begs the question even more of why they don’t offer more vacation to their employees? It is widely known that more vacation leads to higher employee satisfaction, less stress, and lower turnover. Europe is notorious for offering large amount of vacation to it’s workers, I was very surprised that they aren’t continuing that philosophy in America. To sum up, I can’t currently recommend working for Verts. I believe that they are “trying” to retain top talent and foster a better working environment, but that since these initiatives are ultimately tied to cost that it is a losing game. They claim they are currently the “fastest growing fast casual” restaurant in the United States, so there isn’t a lot of time or money left over for employee growth, reduced workload, or additional pay / vacation.
Cons
Please see above for a complete description.
