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White House Custom Colour

Is this your company?

Broken Management - Anonymous employee White House Custom Colour Employee Review

1.0
16 Mar 2022
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Fellow workers were nice, but do yourselves a favor and find that elsewhere.

Cons

Management is truly broken. That's probably always going to be an issue to some extent when company mgmt becomes a family affair (WHCC had at least 2 family members doing little to no work pulling salaries presumably for tax purposes), WHCC takes poor management to the next level. The only owner with vision was Mike, the person who built the business. Unfortunately, I heard multiple stories of him harassing and abusing his staff. Very credible stories from people I knew well and trusted. Yelling at people, putting them down, berating people publicly, saying inappropriate comments, and treating women on the team with less respect than the men. Then you have the more responsible son who takes micromanaging to a new level. He genuinely seems to be a hard worker, but he is the bottleneck to end all bottlenecks. It's one thing to have a CEO who can and will step into jobs beneath theirs when needed or in crisis mode, it's another entirely when they insist that some simple IT, engineering, marketing, or customer service tasks are done by them when there is a whole team for that and there are a million higher level tasks waiting to be done. Hire good people and guide them, not hire good people and do things they could do while you ignore important company-wide issues. One of the biggest management issues is a pervasive culture of passive management. Entry level workers aren't given consistent, fair feedback to help them improve. The company doesn't do cost of living increases (or at least they didn't when I was there, but I haven't heard differently from my contacts still there) and the yearly merit increases are very, very small and not enough to make a dent in inflation. I believe the highest merit increase most workers receive is 3%. Most got 1-2%. Middle management isn't any better. I knew managers who went YEARS between raises and "yearly" reviews. I guess that's what happens when one CEO is half retired and the other has a plate full of micromanaging. People who don't know the first thing about managing are promoted to run fairly large teams and given no training or guidance. Over half the middle managers are encouraged to play favorites or allowed to treat their teams abusively with no repercussions. People who suck up to their manager but are bad at their jobs get promoted while hard working employees doing great work quietly often get berated or ignored. I know this happens in every company, but there is a clique-y bias towards people who have a certain conventionally attractive look or make friends with the "right" people. The way this company hires, fires, and promotes people is deeply problematic. You have inept people being promoted like I mentioned above, but it's bigger than that. You have managers promising promotions and raises that never come, just stringing people along who think their promotion will be finalized in a few weeks. It's considered best practice in good companies to interview all internal applicants for new positions. Of course you can't hire them all, but you acknowledge the work they put into the application and give them an opportunity to impress. If they fall short, it's customary to give guidance about how to be better next time. WHCC does NONE of that. They regularly ghost workers who submit resumes, including high performance workers. And that's if they even accept applications at all. Lately they've started to promote without giving other workers even a sliver of opportunity. Like I mentioned before, this company doesn't give productive feedback consistently to any level of worker. Instead they just hope someone will get better and let it fester for a few years before rage firing them. Multiple people were fired abruptly and noisily during my time at WHCC over things that normal companies would have tried to change first with coaching. Instead, they let the person think they're doing well and then fire them out of nowhere. Meanwhile, there are several people who are the definition of incompetence who get to keep their jobs for years because they are friends with a VP or well-connected manager, or the unreliable Hanline son, etc. It's somewhat of a red flag that the company has been through so many HR managers. Good ones, bad ones, they never seem to stick around for long. And while the company does employ seasonal workers who are usually let go en masse right before Christmas, I've witnessed several managers gloating over getting to get rid of them. It sickened me. I've only scratched the surface on the problems in this company. If you're thinking about working for this company, maybe think again. If you're determined, go in with your eyes wide open and ask them for a lot of cash because you're not going to get good raises later on.

Explore other reviews about White House Custom Colour

5.0
27 Apr 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- good hours - free snacks - nice coworkers

Cons

- Work was tedious and repetitive. Caused some pain after long hours

2.0
15 Jan 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Got to see some cool photos and work with clients from all over the world

Cons

Stressful job in trying to remember so many details about each product, how to complete each task for a multitude of scenarios of things that could go wrong or clients are calling/emailing in to complain about or ask questions. Management made it difficult in needing to approve many things and sometimes would take a long time to give answers so you can communicate/respond to the client while they are upset. I've worked in a restaurant for years and the way they handle situations at WHCC in customer service is so complex when it could just be very simplified. You get different answers from the CEO, supervisor and management and are held to a standard to do the exact about of work as your coworkers when competing tasks just don't make sense in the complexity of "doing things right" just trying to even message someone in the office correctly on slack. Dealing with all of this and being underpaid was very stressful.

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