Pros
A Small business that affords you the ability to build relationships quickly
Kontras
Small business that couldn’t survive the pandemic - financially, emotionally, morally, structurally. Pre-Covid leadership/recruiters touted the firm was built to be resilient, to be adaptive and was employee/people centric. The founder, Bruce, preaches starting in October 2003, he established the firm with his own money "during the worst IT recession in history" and continued proclaiming "he created a company based on the idea that talent can be differentiating". Anyone that has been a consultant knows that this unexceptional proclamation is what every consulting firm says and tries to believe/live. So the idea was far from novel or differentiated in any way. Bruce goes on to explain that his firm was built upon "a unique but sustainable business model based on talent development". Being a former recruit that was broken by prior firms travel intense, large scale operations - I was gullibly drawn to the decentralized, local consulting model and the hope that Bruce’s vision was more novel than the obligatory, obvious consulting mission of talent focus. Similar to a cult, Pariveda leadership will quickly assess how much you believe in their culture, their mission and if you don’t conform and quickly become a conformist believer, you will find yourself in the outside looking in - given one more chance to confirm to the firms belief system before being forced out. That begins with conforming to become vulnerable, humble, servant leader - focused on talent development. Sounds great! It turns out, that vulnerability will be used against you to tear you down, eventually break you into doubting yourself and in turn only trust the firm for self-worth and acceptance. This engineered lust for self-worth and acceptance is the secrete sauce of Pariveda and is why the firm is built on the same principles of a cult. No more differentiated than Scientology - in fact very similar in form and substance. Get out while you can and if you are thinking of joining - I hope you read this and reconsider. Believe that you can do better. Believe in yourself. The "sustainable business model" Bruce built crumbled almost instantly during the pandemic of 2020. In April, Bruce delayed leaderships paychecks by two weeks to help offset a pre-pandemic balance sheet that was in the red, running on a revolving credit line. Weeks later slashed everyone’s salary by 20% and sr. leaderships salary by even more. The firm "built on talent development" broke its people by slashing their salaries and breaking an already broken workforce struggling to cope with the personal impact the virus had on all Americans and decided to work their employees to the ground - exclaiming we had to work harder and sell more work in order to save our jobs and our teams jobs. Everyday you heard "what are you doing to save jobs". This went on for months and then they started cutting jobs, despite all our hard work (our supposed higher calling to ‘save jobs’) creating a strong sales pipeline in the middle of the economy showing signs of recovery (October 2020). After cutting jobs (arbitrarily kicking a significant percentage of its ‘talent’ to the curb) Bruce proclaimed that they would restore salaries (maybe) early 2021 and would partially repay wages. What a disaster - many who were not broken conformist, manipulated into believing the firm was acting based on the greater good; those that even somewhat believed in themselves - exited the firm in masses. Including me. Now they are supposedly, aggressively hiring - makes sense. Sounds sustainable and resilient - ha.