The company is growing exponentially and this translates to what is typically labelled as a "fast paced environment". I warn you, this isn't your typical 'fast paced environment' there is far too much going on at any given time.
From an IT MSP perspective, the company is still in stone ages. When I joined, there was 100 tickets outstanding and the helpdesk were unable to churn through the quantity coming in, now the helpdesk has 600 tickets outstanding; with only around 6 members on the helpdesk, this number is impossible. These are not "monitoring" tickets, they are 600 tickets awaiting a reply or resolution. The team is often asked to get numbers down, and thus none of these tickets by now are the easy closes; such as password resets or mailbox permissions, these are 600 tickets of genuine issues.
The delays to customers are far longer than national size MSP's. As we know, big MSP's take longer respond or resolve because of their sheer size. JFC is at that level while being a small business supporting mostly Herefordshire businesses and schools. Every other day there is drama with a customer being unhappy and now must receive priority; rinse and repeat - due to this nothing can progress with the rest of the business and things can't improve.
The owner refuses to implement anything that resembles ITIL because he doesn't believe in it or believe in paying more money for 2nd line support engineers; so everyone is treated and paid as a 1st line despite often doing 3rd line work. There are very few senior engineers at JFC, the reputation in Herefordshire has fallen so significantly that most potential employees in Hereford are avoiding it.
Aside from bad helpdesk management, there is also a significant lack of tools used to assist engineers, the RMM has not been set up and no one has taken ownership. The helpdesk system is also the RMM, with no real structure or management. There are no monitoring agents. Everything is for show rather than for functionality. The owner is huge on AI, and believes AI will resolve the issues with the helpdesk.
HR--
The owner is HR, so everything comes down to how much work you do for him, if you do overtime or generally just if he likes you. With the owner, everything is personal; such as.. you want to use your annual leave? That's not very dedicated of you. You want to earn more money? That's very selfish. You don't like how things are going with the company? That's a very negative attitude. You decided to work for a different company? That's your loss and you were never good enough anyway.
The owner on multiple occasions said and I quote: "Negativity is a disease, and it spreads." So if you start sounding negative, you will get literally quarantined. That means the owner will send you on callouts or just outright look to push you out of the company.
The owner has on multiple occasions admitted that he doesn't believe in mental health issues.
The meeting room has all glass walls, so there is no privacy at JFC, so it's very common for the entire company to see 1 individual in the meeting room with 3 members of management on the other side. This has been designed to be as toxic as possible on purpose, so that you don't step out of line.
I have multiple screenshots of the owner messaging and calling me out of hours with incredibly toxic messages. I can't upload them with this review unfortunately.
As a new starter in this business, generally in your first 6 months you have this belief that you can change the company; and if you make enough significant and positive change, This is exactly what the owner wants you to believe and I saw that cycle repeat about 4 times during my time at JFC. The issue of course is that this doesn't work, and you realise in the end that actually the owner is always right and that will not change, and you begin to give up at which point you are discarded.
Most people at JFC are scared and uncomfortable. The reason why there are positive reviews on Glassdoor is because people were asked to leave a review after the owner found the negative posts. Most people at JFC refused to write one. I wonder why? The few that did, naturally left fake positive reviews to gain better standing with the owner.
I left the business 6 months ago, as of writing this review. Why am I only writing this now? I asked the office manager for a impersonal reference, merely to confirm the dates of my employment and job title and the request was declined by the owner.
