Busy Bees Babysitting

"I love the convenience of busy bees while I am a freshman in college!!"

"Great if you're a parent or sitter, not great if you're a member of management, unless you want to be overworked, under appreciated, and under compensated. I worked with this company from 7/2019 until 10/2023. I committed over 4 years, starting as a sitter and quickly working my way up through the management team. I had a passion for Busy Bees that very very few people had, and I dedicated a lot of my life to bettering the company, but unfortunately, the loyalty that I displayed and enacted for over 4 years didn't ultimately end up meaning much. Most parents and sitters have wonderful experiences with Busy Bees. But "bee-hind" the scenes, there are very few staff members doing the work of too many people. The team members themselves are very committed in lots of ways, but the processes up until this point have been messy, disorganized, and inefficient. This has caused a lot of frustration both for the staff trying to improve this process, and also for their users. I did my best as an employee to try to prevent this whenever possible, but unfortunately my "reward" was being lied to about the nature of a position that they re-listed to replace me behind my back, and then being terminated with the only feedback being that I "didn't have initiative like [I] used to". Nothing regarding my performance, negative experiences from our users, delayed responses, unprofessionalism, etc was shared with me as a reason behind my termination. Simply that I didn't add tasks like I used to and that they "didn't think it was a fit anymore". Their favorite verbiage, other than bee puns. They did write me a lovely letter of recommendation after my immediate termination from their company to take to future employers, but they also accidentally sent me a message about me after my termination, & tried to "unsend". Unfortunately, I still saw the message. Ultimately, that's business, and I am running a successful business of my own. While I understand that growing a small business does come with growing pains, I do think current and future employees of Busy Bees should be aware of some of the things that this company has done. If you had a company paying you $19 an hour (less than what parents pay a college sitter per hour as a base rate, but hey, at least it was more than the previous $12.50/hr with no lunch break or accrued PTO) to run the face of their business and put out "fires" with app glitches, emails, jobs, and clients all day long, promised you a promotion and "significant raise" for over 6 months, proceeded to hire 3 new salaried executives, and didn't have a signal member of your team remember your 4 year work anniversary (amongst many other things), I think you'd be a little bit burnt out and not "have initiative", too. I tried to continue working with them, and wanted to for years. I had every intention of sticking things out as long as I could with them, and the morning before I was fired, I was ecstatic about an app feature coming to fruition that I had proposed and had a large part in developing. I was excited for the future of the company, just like they were. Everyone is replaceable, and this company is a prime example of that mantra, even if you work incredibly hard to become *almost* irreplaceable by taking on new responsibilities. There were a lot of benefits to working here, like a team ready to help one another, and the position being remote and generally flexible, but there were a lot of negatives as well, such as under compensation, over working, and favoritism, to name a few. I'm happy to elaborate privately if anyone seeing this has any questions. I hope future staff members have better experiences than I did, and feel (and are) more appreciated for their hard work every day. Not many people could manage all of the things simultaneously that I did, and I hope BB is able to appreciate all the work required to do the positions successfully. To the whole Busy Bees team, I wish you all the "BEEst", and hope you are able to fix these things, especially if you are wanting to ideally expand to other markets."

"It was great until it wasn’t. I worked for them for almost two years and stayed very committed. In addition to the company I also built my own personal clientele OUTSIDE of the app. I kept my BusyBees and private families separate. Recently I was trying to find help for a private family as I was very busy with my own schedule and they took my post that I put on a public page and completely went through my previous jobs to try to figure out what family I was talking about. And when they THOUGHT they had that family, they called me at my regular job and interrogated me about the situation. Only they were not completely transparent. And had they been , I would have shown them proof that the post was in fact not a busy bee family. They don’t care about their bees, as the wage they make isn’t even remotely close to a competitive rate. If the communication was better I would give a better rating but due to this recent experience they left a bad taste in my mouth."

"We’ve had mostly positive experiences, but DO NOT use this service on or near a holiday, or important event. The Bees are allowed to cancel last minute, and the company rarely offers credit for the missed time/stress. Again, they can be great, but not if the Bees get a better offer."

"This company obviously does not hire anyone older than college age...but it's not obvious until you apply and get turned down. Just be honest and state on your site that there is an age limit for your "Busy Bees" and it would save others a lot of time."