Crown Equipment reviews

3.9

74% would recommend to a friend

(940 total reviews)

James F. Dicke II

88% approve of CEO

76% positive business outlook

Crown Equipment has an employee rating of 3.9 out of 5 stars, based on 940 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Crown Equipment employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Manufacturing industry (3.5 stars).

Reviews by job title

940 reviews
1.0
Jun 24, 2015

Horrible place to work!

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The only positive aspect of this Company is the customers that you get an opportunity to meet. The problem is that once you meet them and they trust you, Crown will ensure that your customer base will grow to not trust anything that you say due to Crown's unethical business practices.

Cons

Crown looks like a great company and they will preach how much "opportunity" you will have by working here. The reality is that Crown's employees are treated very unfairly and some Managers cross the line daily by creating a hostile work environment and constantly ask their Sales Staff to work on their time off with no additional compensation. If you are lucky enough to sell a forklift, you will not get paid until the unit is delivered and the customer pays for it. This seems typical but the problem is that the lead times for some units are over 6 months! This is a conservative figure as it is not uncommon for a forklift to take almost a year for it to get to your customer from the manufacturer. In the meantime you are left with a lack luster salary of about $850 per week and a car allowance that barely allows you to break even after all the excessive wear and tear and gas that you have to spend. crown employees are extremely micro managed. If you are unfortunate to work here you will be given a cell phone that tracks your every move. You must "ping" every location that you are at and you will have constant calls from your Sales Manager asking where you are at, even at 7am and 8pm and an occasional call on Sunday afternoon. If the constant nagging from management won't get to you, the excessive amount of repetitive paperwork will. Expect to have at least 3-4 hours a week of nothing but activity reporting paperwork. Crown is still stuck in the dark ages and does not know what a CRM is, so due to their lack of resources, you the salesman must pay the price. You just find your own way of tracking your 50 plus accounts and heaven forbid that you do not know every single detail of your customers business. So if you get through all this and sell a unit expect about another hour or so to complete your manual OIS and then you must meet with your manager and "sell" him on why your customer is buying this unit. If you sell used equipment you the salesperson should be weary and so should the customer. It is not uncommon for the shop to paint over payers covers to give them a nice appearance, or even worse deliver a used Crown with multiple defects that the branch already know about without disclosure. After you send the unit out, expect a call from an angry customer. When you first start they will push you to promote the rental line, well guess what ... Rentals are rarely available. Some managers only allow for you to sell new units so that the branch can raise its EDA numbers. So after a few miserable months of working for this company you will see that they do not care about you, you are just a number and at the end of the day Crown and the Dickies (owner) will make their millions while you try to survive on a lack luster salary. Perhaps this is why a lot of Crowns customers are leaving. This is also the reason why there are always a lot of job openings because a majority of the staff is unhappy. If you ever walk into a branch take a look around, you an literally years a pin drop. Crowns management is about the worst that I have ever seen. They take pride in making employees feel inferior to them and they like to publicly bring people down. This is especially true of the Ontario branch where constant complaints have gone ignored and management still treats their employees unfairly.

1.0
Dec 26, 2015

Double-Edged Sword

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Crown is in a good market with enough inertia to sustain itself with moderate growth potential. Growth potential could be more significant with key changes in management team.

Cons

Owner and family disconnected from true company situation as it relates to morale, technical direction, and project management and implementation. Some facilities are in dire straights quality and product wise but this is buried in how things report up. Jim III is a good man best i can tell but the company is so big he has to trust others to steer the company. Some of those people he trusts have real ethical problems and have very unethical directors and managers. It's 50-50 chance if you get a good or bad manager or director to work for. At Crown it is as much about WHO you know as it is WHAT you know. Poor quality issues plague certain products and that is embarrassing.

1.0
Jul 30, 2015

Don't work here!

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

As a company, they are one of the few in the lift truck industry that will provide training. Unfortunately many companies will be weary to hire you after this because they Crown employees are known to "drink the Kool-aid" and they'll wonder if you did the same.

Cons

Sadly, besides the training they provide in fork lifts, the company was completely worthless for everything else. Their benefits are subpar--with employee sponsored health care being over priced (which is surprising for such a large company), you will be underpaid for the industry by 15%-20%, you will be forced to use an archaic system to track mileage to gain any type of automotive reimbursement (you will still lose money on it), they discontinued their current CRM tool in 2013 and still have yet to replace it instead enlisting "tickler files" and hand written notes, they will have you fill out multiple overlapping reports on your time, you will hear "nights and weekends" used frequently to denote when you should be working on anything other than cold calling, management at all levels of the company will lie to your face, cheat you out of pay, manipulate orders in order to maximize profit at the cost of your commission, and the only hope of ever moving up in the company is to be from New Bremen, OH where the entire management team seems to have been born.

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Glassdoor has 1,129 Crown Equipment reviews submitted anonymously by Crown Equipment employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Crown Equipment is right for you.