Vehicle life cycle management software provider Solera Holdings Inc. is going viral for all the wrong reasons.
Solera conducted a round of layoffs via Teams on Monday. Unbeknownst to company officials, the cutback announcement was filmed by one of its employees and later posted on TikTok.
Employees were evidently upset and quick to voice their opinions of the layoffs and the way they were executed in the video.
“This is bull—-,” said one woman in the video.
“You guys don’t care, that’s the problem with this company,” said another upset employee. “You guys have not cared about your employees at all. Automate [acquired by Solera in 2019] used to be an awesome company. You guys bought us and f—– us royally. I’m so disgusted and I’m the only one on this team who has tried to f—— fix everything. Good luck with the billing, you guys are screwed.”
FreightWaves reached out to both Solera Holdings and the TikTok account to clarify details of the layoffs but had not received comment by the time of publication.
According to a Tuesday update on Layoff.com, West Lake, Texas-based Solera released 44 members of its U.S.-based billing team and “now all of their billing is done in Mexico.”
A LinkedIn post suggested layoffs were also carried out at Dealersocket, an automotive dealership management system acquired by Solera in May 2021. That deal also included fleet management software Omnitracs. All three companies are portfolio companies of Vista Equity Partners.
Past layoff problems
This is not Solera’s first time executing mass layoffs to ship jobs out of the country.
Five months after acquiring Omnitracs and Dealersocket in 2021, Solera laid off 30% of its total employee count, moving many of those jobs to Mexico and India.
Related: Omnitracs’ layoffs and product concerns are nothing new, source says
According to an Omnitracs human resources employee at the time, layoffs were a regular occurrence, taking place two to three times a year since 2019 as part of Vista Equity Partners’ overall strategy to sell the company.
“They have been trying to sell Omnitracs and have been very focused on profits. At one point there were talks with Goldman Sachs that didn’t go through because they just wanted more money than Goldman was willing to pay. … Continuously being in talks with someone to try to sell has been a trend,” the HR employee said.
Those talks would represent the fifth time Vista Equity has attempted to exit its Omnitracs investment.
In March 2021, there were talks to combine the three companies — Omnitracs, Solera Holdings and Dealersocket — to go public under blank-check firm Apollo Strategic Growth Capital (NYSE:APSG) for a potential $15 billion. Unfortunately for Vista Equity, the special purpose acquisition company strategy had cooled off on Wall Street as technology valuations fell 3.5% that month.
This is a developing story.
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Updated: Massive layoffs hit Omnitracs and DealerSocket
SoleraSurvivor
As a former employee of Solera…. Omnitracs was one of Vista’s assets that they rolled under Solera Holdings to try to boost the value after Vista severely overpaid for Solera (couldn’t happen to a better company!). Vista have already held Solera for too long, so they’re desperate to put enough lipstick on the pig to sell it on. The Vista implants that arrived have all worked together before, are all just evil people (from the CEO down), and have one job, to strip out cost and leverage whoever’s left to the absolute maximum until they can sell and get their payout. So many people have left Solera in the years since (either by choice or otherwise); really good, smart people, but ones with a brain who won’t just say yes to every dumb request.
It’s a sinking ship; for the people involved in this layoff, just know that you’ll almost certainly be better off in the long term, both financially and mentally.
Dray Guy
It is shocking how at companies there are high up people who never reply to an email, offer anything but criticism, and you have solid ground level employees that can call out exactly where the issues are and sometimes offer solutions yet the companies don’t act.
Freight Moo
After all this bad press who the f–k will buy any of these Vista companies? They are literally dying before our eyes due to Vista not being able to flip them fast enough onto other unsuspecting buyers.
Private equity are just flippers. They buy an asset, strip costs, and flip it ASAP before the service goes to hell.
In this case, it went to hell, and there’s no coming back from this without putting some big money back in and then several years of hard work to right the mess.
Vista missed the window to pass off this cluster on to another unsuspecting PE firm or to a strategic buyer.
Now they have no options left to keep the patient alive except to keep laying off people in a desperate attempt to make the numbers look artificially good.
SAD SAD SAD for these good folks getting laid off.
Mel
Controversial opinion but as soon as a company with “Equity” in their name buys another company I know they’ll go tits up within a year. Makes you wonder if all these “technology” companies that can’t describe their business model in 5 words or less are just high on the smell of their own farts and don’t actually know how to run a viable business.
Safety Lady
As a Customer of Solera (using Omnitracs), I am disappointed but not surprised. Since Solera purchased Omnitracs in 2021 we have seen a DRAMATIC decrease in customer support due to massive layoffs.
Solera is an absolute junk company, we were heavily invested in Omnitracs through hardware and integrations and we’d rather have more manual work with a better company than continue with Omni under Solera’s management.
I feel bad for the employees who were working for other companies that were acquired but this will be a blessing in disguise, there are better companies out there who DO care about their employees