The biggest con of CRG/ENs in one sentence: it’s a job, not a career. To be frank, the company itself does not expect people to stay for the long haul. They prefer you to stay, but retention just isn’t really part of the business model. I spent months trying to visualize how working here could fit into the context of a career, but my conclusion is working here in no way prepares me for what I want to do. CRG doesn’t mislead: if you read their website or interview, they stress they want people interested in learning soft skills. I feel like lots of people in the comments have said the job didn’t line up with expectations, but I think this is more job seekers not doing their homework. CRG HK doesn’t ask many career questions in interviews, just ones about your language ability and if your interest in client work. Yes they ask where you see yourself in five years, but this is perfunctory. The learning curve at this job is challenging, but flattens fast. Other than learning how to use our software, learning how to ‘sell’, and being organized, there’s little to absorb; you pick up the fundamentals of the job in 1-2 months, and then work your way to perfecting it over the next half year. Someone else here said it is not intellectually stimulating, which is fax. While this is true at many jobs, at other places you may also gain skills or credentials that help in the long run; big 4 pays a slave wage, but the skills are incredibly sought after. I want to emphasize that I did gain some skills here, but you can master them very fast if you apply yourself. Based on observation, the only role people move to are sales/client related, though the product varies widely. This next point cannot be understated, esp. to my colleagues: I faced immense difficulty trying to find a new role; even if you ignore the fact that this job doesn’t really have any transferable skills, most people don’t know what an EN is and never heard of CRG. My feeling is all else equal, working as a client associate at a bank or CPG would be better than CRG, since it is a known brand. There were plenty of moments I felt like crying due to the lack of success I had in hearing back from other jobs. The only fields that will maybe understand where you are coming from is sales or recruitment.
Stalk LinkedIn to see where former HK employees have ended up, since it’s the most unbiased source of outcomes. BOTTOM LINE: if it’s not your goal to make manager, don’t stay in this industry for more than 1-2 years, similar to what others have said. If you’re CERTAIN you want to be in sales/BD/recruitment, I would maybe cap it at three years. I recommend CRG with this caveat in mind. Some recent departures: Factset, emigration/personal leave, Moody’s, Bloomberg, GLG. Exclusively client relationship or sales roles. Some people who join may assume they’ll be able to lateral to one of our clients at a fund or at MBB. This is not a good plan. For funds, they simply don’t need many operations people, and you won’t develop any relevant investment experience that will be useful. While there are definitely people who have moved from Coleman to the buy side, where people work on behalf of the fund doing BD, relationship management, vendor selection… it’s not common, and these are really not desirable jobs in my opinion. If this is really your plan, I think you’re better off just applying there directly, since nothing you do here will directly benefit you when applying. As for MBB or other consulting firms we work with, I’ve never seen anyone move to a non-consulting role here, but technically I’ve *seen* employees in other ENs in Europe/USA offices do it. Unlike for funds, where the move is rare but extant, it’s almost nonexistent for MBB, and I’ve never seen it in APAC, since both the budgets and the head counts (for ops type work) are smaller. Understand that ENs are siloed in terms of what kind of ‘work’ they do with MBB, you’re a resource for them, a common complaint from EN employees. You may be able to transfer to work at more market research oriented companies in HK which have a small consulting component (like Ipsos, Nielsen), but I don’t recommend it. In short, don’t join as a way to network with our clients, the strategy has been tested and my observation is that it’s not effective, unless you are in the US/UK office. If you’re determined to make the move from EN to client side though, I recommend GLG, since they have a much stronger historical relationship with clients. Disregard all this though if you’re a Korean/ Japanese speaker, since labor markets are different.
The work: one problem is that a chunk of the work you do won’t wind up being revenue generating. Frequently, you’ll do good work for a client request, only for the client to say “priorities have changed”, or something like that. Now, I know this can be true in any business, like finance or consulting for example: it’s common than you’ll do work that the client will never read. Unlike those industries however, where you still get paid a salary regardless of the whims of the client AND a bonus benchmarked against other people in your org, in this job, due to the commission system, you get hurt a lot more. It’s easier to accept when you submit something to a client and they reject it because it doesn’t meet their expectations, but when you do good work and then a client says that they’ve changed their mind, it’s demoralizing. I don’t blame management for this because though it would be great to drop clients who don’t pay, the industry is just too competitive. This ultimately means a lot of time simply goes towards keeping up, rather than creating value. The market is fully saturated. If you really care about your work making an impact or difference, manage your expectations, though I guess is part of most sales jobs.
That brings me to the product. It’s not likely there are any experts/independent consultants reading this, but if there are: you are the product of this company. A lot of businesses sell people as the product for the client (think Facebook), whether it be their knowledge, data… etc. If you have trouble commoditizing people, you’re gonna feel bad while at this job, because at least 80% of the people you solicit for consultation work will not wind up doing so. This ultimately leads to unhappy experts and makes the job more difficult, since they expect to be paid for their insights, but instead just languish in our database.
Work hours: this job fundamentally does NOT require long hours. It does not require face time; 2/3 managers prefer WFH anyway. Never has my manager asked or even suggested working overtime. However, this is a sales company; if you’re hitting your numbers, you get a lot of leeway. I know people who start at 9:30 (WFH, which means they’re waking up at like 9:25) wrap up at 4, and still hit their KPI. If you find yourself regularly working until 9 and weekends, I’m sorry to say it may be a you problem. The truth is not everyone is cut out for a sales job. I certainly am not.
Notes on the merger: new joiners may not know since we still use the Coleman name, but we got acquired by a company called VQ (TYO:4490) a year ago. It’s only been one year yet since the completion, so it’s hard to say whether or not it will result in any major changes (CEO has said the ‘transformative period’ is two years). I don’t know when consolidated financial reporting begins/began, and post merger redundancies are common in order to give the appearance of post merger synergies, but that’s my speculation. For some strange reason the exec team and managers keep referring to this as “partnering with VQ” and pushing this weird cringe family spiel. It’s not a partnership, we are a subsidiary. CRG was reportedly acquired due to its competency in the USA market first, and the EMEA market second; the APAC office is likely not a huge priority. Since VQ has a SG office, some in our office wonder if this is an employment risk. CRG was acquired for $100 mil, and made about 60-70 in revenue for 2021, so my guess is a bit under 10m in NI; the acquisition cost seems high, feels like an overpay for a $60-70 mil business. A bit about VQ: currently the firm is worth about $133mm USD; it’s slumped significantly in the past couple months. At the time of the acquisition, VQ was worth about double, and though there was a rally in the stock price shortly after the acquisition (the Nikkei rallied overall this period), YoY VQ has done way worse than the Nikkei (-5% vs -67%). I just feel bad for VQ because they bought Coleman at the height of the market, just a few months before it crashed.
To prospects: It’s not clear what the work is exactly. This isn’t entirely our fault, since the EN industry can be tough to define. At the same time, the company/industry when pitching itself I feel spends too much time on what a managers role is, hoping this might be appealing, eg. “managing your own book of business”, when in reality most people won’t be here that long. It boils down to being a sales/recruitment job at the year 0-3 level (recruiting is essentially a sales job), so if you are open to a job in sales, this job could be for you; if you hate sales work, don’t apply. I want to be clear that while technically you don’t have to sell anything, you need sales skills.
The HK office does not have a permanent office, and has been using coworking spaces. I am personally not a huge fan of shared office space, but I think it has been the right decision for the firm. One of the things I like is the nice quality of the wework office.
Finally, another con is the turnover. For the 2021 year, we had about 12 people leave the firm in this office, and 2022 is on pace to be similar. When you consider we don’t have many people, it’s significant. Everyone left on good terms, but it goes to show that the company (and industry overall) has difficulty keeping people. The average tenure for anyone who left in 2021 was 2.62 years, while for client management it was 2.25, for example (source: linkedin). When in the office, I frequently hear people talking about what other jobs they’ve applied to/what industry they’re planning to move onto next, which is interesting to say the least. this is a con more for culture than for biz continuity, since most people work independently, so the real burden ultimately falls on managers re. training new hires. I think the salary increases improved things marginally, but the big problem is the lack of transferable skills, and I think the only meaningful way to keep people is to equip them with learning opportunities and chances to grow. This is something the CEO speaks about, but I haven’t seen any evidence of. There are some brainlets in the comments who have said the company “should just increase compensation” to boost retention. This is an incredibly low effort idea; the company is already on par with its competitors, and in some cases pays more.
A way to get people involved is to actually have them understand the product, so maybe we should make some product roles. Most associates are in the dark as to what happens on calls. This is ridiculous in comparison to most sales jobs: how can you sell something without having ever used the product before? In every company that has ‘client associates’, whether this is S&P, Bloomberg, Factset… companies that support ‘investment research’, it’s a must that people are familiar with the product. Now, the company says we don’t sit in on calls because of “compliance”. In some ways this is reasonable because the exchange of info here is most likely non public and material. Still, this is a weak answer, as you shouldn’t be citing compliance as a reason to limit employee growth. The fact that we aren’t even allowed to interact with the product is disrespectful, and is emblematic of how this is a job, not a career. EOTW shoutouts are fine but I don’t think anyone actually reads these; the way to recognize employees effort is to reward them with money or learning opportunities, not tokenism. You must learn or earn.
I think internal positions should be encouraged more for people who may not want to stay in client management; at least you keep the knowledge in house. The company had a hosted events segment, which is more akin to equity or industry research, but the company shut down the division on account of it being unprofitable (market forces). As of right now, the company is really only comprised of client management and back office functions. The survey team exists, but is small.
Management: I don’t have much insight into top level management. I tried to email a VP/GM once with some recommendations for the firm, since he said he had an open door policy, but my email went ignored, which was disappointing. Overall, the company mindset is typical for a smaller firm: revenue growth is the top priority. None of the senior management have impressive backgrounds, with virtually no one having a top MBA degree, F500 experience, or even experience working on the client side (though realistically, who is going to go from working at a hedge fund or MBB to working at Coleman?) The CEO himself seems to be pretty mid, having no impressive credentials, though his performance has not been bad either.
To investors: The long term play of the industry is to make ENs a platform/SaaS, which will cut out client management; in an ideal world clients will be able to log into a database and pick experts. This is a long term con of the industry for employees. It’s analogous to the function of travel agents back then vs. what we have with booking dot com or Airbnb now. The good (or bad, depending on what kind of stakeholder you are) news however is that the industry, or CRG specifically, is NOWHERE close to achieving this. The business is extremely clunky and needs humans. Someday, the EN business will become like a skills register, but it won’t happen in the next ten years. As of today, this is a business services company, not software. When the industry gets there, it probably will not be CRG who gets there first, as the company’s technology is EXTREMELY limited. I can’t speak for VQ, but I think their technology is comparable to ours.
Finally, the firm overstates its capabilities. The number thrown around is 300k experts in network. For anyone who has some understanding of platform businesses, you know that MAU is way more important than top line figures, and that total users is almost irrelevant. While I can’t say exactly how many active users we have (MAU is not the right metric to use), the true active users is a fraction of that top line figure. Is it a problem? IDK. Every EN will go on about their total network size, when in reality active network is much smaller. But I will say that the network is less impressive when you look at it on a more granular level.
Addressing comments on Glassdoor: I’ve read all 274 comments ranging as far back as 2010. I’d recommend you read them since they’re mostly still relevant; it’s surprising how little the business has changed over the past twelve years. Most are accurate; not too many huge exaggerations. Some are unfair or incomplete, but none of them are wholly incorrect. While I don’t think it’s realistic to expect a company to care about your career development, it’s true that if you want to develop some more marketable skills, you have to do it on your own time. Also, I’m sorry but it’s not the company’s fault inflation is up; I can guarantee you the company’s profitability has not matched the pace of inflation, and the expectation that compensation would somehow be linked to inflation is ridiculous; this is a business, and in life, you are responsible for salary negotiation. As with all jobs, remember HR is not your friend; they are the same here as they are at every other company, mildly unengaged and mediocre. If you are an applicant, forget about HR helping you in a meaningful way and just contact an employee directly on LinkedIn. Most employees will be happy to refer you if you’re qualified since the company has a referral bonus.
To the CEO: First off, good job with getting VQ to overpay. Secondly, I don’t think you’re gonna see ‘massive growth’ in the industry. Ignoring the fact that Coleman is already 20 years old and headcount and revenue is flattening, I think instead it’s gonna be another year or two of cutthroat competition between ENs to drive out smaller players. While the industry/market size is probably growing, I don’t think Coleman has any competitive advantage. I think only once a few more of these other players drop out will there be a good chance for Coleman to grow its market share. Still, even during times of intense competition, consolidation is a good idea, which is why the VQ sale was probably smart. GLG, the market leader, was planning on going public this year but withdrew their IPO, probably because they’re getting pummeled.
I wouldn’t be surprised if management has communicated one thing internally and a different thing to investors. At the end of 2021, the company was looking to grow its revenues by something like 25% YoY for 2022, but this was never realistic and hasn’t panned out. Not a projection grounded in reality as the industry is fully saturated (plus the recession.) It’s tempting to assume we truly didn’t realize the strong 2021 was more due to covid bounce than organic growth. However, I think this is unlikely (the concept of the V recovery was a mainstream view.) My feeling is that the aggressive revenue growth targets were more aspirational (and a smokescreen) than true targets, and that they’re more meant to motivate by dangling a carrot, the carrot being the pleasure of working in a “fast growing industry”. I also think that our sales targets necessarily had to be drawn from the pro forma financials that management put forward to VQ when we were pitching ourselves as an acquisition target (worth 100M lmao), so maybe Cannacord Genuity inflated the figures, though perhaps they did this a little too egregiously (all speculation). The company at the end of 22Q1 adjusted the sales goal for Q2 downward, yet didn’t even hit the adjusted target in Q2 (and it’s looking like a bleak Q3), but at least our parent company is performing a bit better (all of this is public info since VQ is publicly listed). When you miss your revenue targets in the first three full quarters post merger, it’s not a good look, though again, recession. Recently, the company laid off a handful of low performers. It’s unfortunate, but the company tries hard to avoid this. In general, layoffs are uncommon, only ever happening during 2Q20 (covid) and last month. There currently is a hiring freeze.
However, things don’t look great for VQ. It’s lost money 4/5 last quarters (3/5 quarters negative EBIT), so they are definitely burning investor cash. The CRG acquisition boosted quarterly revenue by about 1mn, but costs increased at a 1:1 ratio. I think the company is going to realize growth isn’t there, so my guess is investors are going to demand cost cutting, and my gut says an internal restructuring is coming in the next two quarters. That said, if you’re an employee, I wouldn’t worry too much about mass layoffs in the near term. The fact is that people quit at a very high rate, so as long as the company freezes hiring, a push to reduce headcount will just sort itself out. My prediction is CRG HK will be gone/absorbed in 1-3 years, but my review is relatively sanguine because I don’t think anyone intends to stay that long.