Avantages
You can make decent money there if you're a good salesman and willing to work hard There are a lot of good people from very diverse backgrounds There is room for advancement if you share the companies goals It's a big name company that gets a lot of calls Excellent safety education program
Inconvénients
Until recently there was no monetary reimbursement for the use of your vehicle, this has since changed due to legal action taken by former employees To compensate for the .55 a mile they're now giving they cut down their already low tech commission 10-12%, they have installed GPS units in every truck owned by a tech to track their milage after they get to their first job (which could be 50 miles from home) and after their last job; I've heard stories of a tech being logged off by dispatch while still working because he had to drive a lot that day, once logged off the GPS is shut down and they stop paying the tech for milage. Basically, since they started paying for milage they have been going out of their way to avoid paying for it and paying techs at a lower rate. I worked for Roto Rooter for 10 months, 8 of those driving my own truck and, I drove over 40k miles in that 10 months with minimal compensation; I spent more than $7500 on gas and repairs in that 10 months, my truck wasn't old or beat up when I started, it wasn't worth crap when I left. The pay structure always favors the office, no matter what. I did a job that was sold for $7500, total parts/equipment costs were $800-900, I was paid commission for $2800 worth of labor. They sell themselves well to potential employees and rarely deliver; this is heartbreaking to see especially when that new employee has to own or purchase a truck within 12 weeks of them starting there. A lot of the techs have no idea on what they are doing, even with the company mandated plumbing school. A new employee can walk into Roto Rooter without any plumbing knowledge at all and will be on their own in 12 weeks; you can't learn 1/20th of what you need to know in 12 weeks, this shows in some of the work that is performed. There is plenty of incentive for a tech to rip off an unknowing customer, it happens often and, the tech is rarely called out on it by the office because there is a good chance that tech is in the top 25% of sales. While I was at Roto Rooter a customer discovered through another company that the work she paid more than $12k for wasn't completed, in fact only about 25% of the piping that was supposed to be replaced had been replaced; all but one of the techs on the job had already left the company, the one remaining tech (the guy that actually sold and ran the job) is one of the branches top sellers, he received no real punishment. The company will set strict standards on things they don't understand and won't yield; my (State Farm) insurance agent had to argue back and forth with corporate on whether my insurance policy was to par because to didn't say "commercial", it said "artisan"; I'm willing to believe the largest auto insurer on the planet should know whether a policy meets the standards set before them by a plumbing company. Very high turnover rate for people new to the industry, very high stress level for techs that have experience due to the messes created by the office and green techs. You don't get paid for meetings, period. There is a good chance that your boss will have absolutely no plumbing experience at all, RotoRooter sees a manager as a paper pusher; you can't expect them to understand what you really do for a living.