Week Eight: Balancing Life

This week was very similar in content as previous weeks, but my days looked much different.  My family was away on a mission trip, which left me as the only caretaker for our dogs.  I worked all week as usual, however I worked from home in the afternoons in order to give the dogs proper care.  This taught me how to work in different environments and fulfill other responsibilities at the same time.

When I got into the office in the morning I tried to work quickly and efficiently to get as much done as possible before I had to leave, and when it came time to go home I made sure I knew what I needed to do for the rest of the afternoon.  I was expecting to be more effective when I was working in the office, but I found that I was surprisingly efficient at home, too.  There were more distractions at home, but I knew that I had work to do and that I had to complete it before the next day, so I buckled down and did it.  I have to do this with schoolwork during the school year all the time, but so far this summer has been different due to my lack of other obligations to handle up until this past week.

This was a taste of what I imagine life beyond school will be, with the combination of work and home responsibilities that I had.  When I'm at school I have my school work and a few extracurriculars to focus on, but my family obligations are fairly limited by the distance between home and school, and my household obligations such as cleaning and cooking are limited by the comparatively smaller size of my dorm room to my house and the ease of eating meals in the dining hall.  Thus far this summer my obligations were also fewer than this past week, because my family shares in household obligations, and, unlike at school, I am focusing on one job at Phoenix rather than several classes at a time.  I imagine that life after college will be similar to life this past week (except that I do not plan on having my own dogs to take care of immediately after graduating).

Week Seven: New Product Development

In my first year of college I took a class entitled Lean Launchpad, in which we worked in groups to practice the lean launch method of starting a business.  This meant that we had to develop a very rough, minimal version of our product and interview numerous amounts of people in different fields surrounding our product.  We had to talk to people who would be potential customers, suppliers, investors, etc. to figure out how to further develop the product and find what would be most successful in the market place.  This seemed like an excellent concept to me when dealing with startups, but I never thought to apply it to developed businesses until now.

I was involved in several conversations and meetings this week to discuss the development of one of our new products.  Rather than simply creating a product that we think the industry could use and then trying to sell it, we are having conversations with several people who could be potential clients to see what they would find useful, as well as other groups within Phoenix to see how we can make a useful product a reality.  This makes for a much more exciting product development, because we know exactly what potential clients are looking for and what we can include in the product to stand out and really fulfill a need.  This has also involved a lot of collaboration with other areas of Phoenix to see how we can make this vision a reality.  It has been really interesting to see what different groups do.

I've also been working on a report of our wearable tech data which will be published on our report store.  This has been an interesting experience in marketing and sales, thus far.  Developing the report is enjoyable, because it simply involves taken the data that we have collected and putting it together to be understandable and visually appearing.  This has been especially enjoyable after working on the infographics earlier this summer, because I am able to imitate some of the design that one of the women in the company created for the infographics.  I've also been a part of several conversations regarding how we will use this report to market our capabilities and information to companies who might use it.

The summer is more than halfway over and I have learned so much.  When the summer began I didn't quite know what to expect, or how much I would really learn or be involved in, since I'm only an intern, but I have had so many great opportunities to learn and practice new skills.

Week Six: Field Trip

Last week we visited one of our suppliers, a call center, as an office.  This was a great experience in many ways. 

More obviously, I learned a lot about this specific call center, the products they offer, what sets them apart, and I saw firsthand how they do what they do.  This was really interesting because it is easy to think that call centers are becoming a thing of the past with the internet revolution, but this trip taught me how call centers can harness the internet to improve their business, instead of eradicate it.  Understanding how to use innovations of others and new technologies to keep your business thriving is important in any industry, it is just incredibly pronounced in technology and communications.  Innovating and pivoting in business can never stop if you want to thrive, because the market that you are serving is constantly changing.  Large companies like Apple are constantly doing this, which is why we're at the iPhone 6S instead of still all the way back at the original iPod.

A second, perhaps less obvious, yet still very important, facet of learning on this trip was my being able to witness business to business client relationships from the side of the client.  I realized that in many B to B relationships it is more beneficial to have a partnership kind of relationship instead of a one-sided supplier/client relationship.  This allows both businesses to grow and it also allows both businesses to better serve their other clients. 

When I first started at Phoenix I wasn't sure how to apply market research to my Christian worldview, but I'm starting to better understand how to do that.  I originally thought that the only way would be to behave in a Christian manner, but I'm beginning to see market research as a way to serve others, as well.  Work is an integral part of life, as ordained by God, and working in market research puts you in a position to help others to better understand their own clients and customers in their own particular field.  This helps our client companies to better serve their own clients/consumers, which then helps those clients/consumers to help others and live a happier, better life.  Another way to apply it to a Christian worldview is when analyzing data that we collect, we are working to better understand the people who God created, which is a way of worshiping and glorifying Him.

Week Five: Survey Launch and New York City

This was an exciting week to be an intern at Phoenix.  To start, we launched our University XP survey in order to collect our panel sample, as well as our convenience sample via social media.  I started to look at some of the data that came in from our convenience sample, and I was very intrigued by the way that the results broke up based on the school and gender of the respondent.  We are going to analyze the data from both samples early this week, and I am very intrigued by what we might discover.

I used the knowledge of Qualtrics that I gained from the University XP survey to program another survey for use at the Cynopsis Sports Business Summit which we attended on Thursday of last week.  This survey was for attendees of the conference to log into to enter into a sweepstakes/competition.  It was a little bit difficult to program at first, because we wanted it to be in a matching format, but that didn't seem to be possible.  Ultimately we ended up using a multiple choice/drop down bar format, because it was the cleanest option.

On Thursday, I attended the Cynopsis Sports Business Summit in New York City with several of my co-workers.  It was a great learning experience.  I was able to observe my dad and other co-workers networking with the numerous other people and companies represented, as well as to hear a lot about how the sports business is run and can be developed.  While I am not incredibly interested in going into the sports business, many of the lessons that I learned can be applied to nearly any business.  My dad was a part of one of the panels at the summit, and it was a great experience to see him speak about Phoenix, market research, and the industry in general.

For lunch on the day of the summit I was invited to lunch with two of the owners and founders of Phoenix.  It was a great experience to converse with these two great people, and I am so grateful to be interning at a company whose owners care so much about each of their employees, even a summer intern. 

Week Four: Practical Lessons

This week I learned two practical lessons in the world of market research: survey programming and dashboard creation.

Once the survey that I was working on with another intern was complete, one of the men from the office taught us how to use Qualtrics to program the survey to be an interactive questionnaire rather than a multiple choice Word document.  It is a fairly straight-forward process, but it forces you to think about how you want your survey to appear to someone who is taking it.  Do you want to force them to answer a question?  Do you want them to choose multiple answers?  How many?  If they aren't a college student do you want to ask them what college they attend?  It's a very logical process, and I enjoyed it.  Once the survey was programmed, we tested it a few times to look for mistakes and make corrections, and it will hopefully be in the field later this week.

As an office we learned from one of our co-workers how to make dashboards for client reports.  Dashboards are interactive Excel spreadsheets that utilize pivot tables to present the data that we find in a visually appealing and easy to use way for clients.  I had never used pivot tables before, but they are a great way to summarize a large data set.  From the pivot tables you then use the VLookUp formula to create graphs and slicers to make the dashboard interactive. 

During the dashboard lessons we discussed the merits of using Microsoft Powerpoint vs. Microsoft Excel in reports.  While Powerpoint used to be the go to program to use (and still is, depending on the kind of report), new formatting options in Excel are making a more viable option due to its interactive potential.

I have learned countless lessons through this internship already, and this week I have learned many practical skills that I can use in school and business in the future.

Week Three: Learning the Process and Adding Value

This week I spent most of my time working on a survey for college students in order to alter our new UniversityXP/Higher Ed XP product to better meet the needs of future clients.  This has entailed working with another intern in the office to develop questions and format the survey so that we can program it this week.  This process has taught me a lot about the process for creating and implementing a survey.  When it goes out in the field, we are going to compare results from a convenience sample we get from social media and personal networking to a panel sample.

The creation of this survey has made me think a lot about what the goal is which each question.  We don't want to waste time and effort on our part or the part of those who will be taking the survey by asking questions that we won't have any use for the results.  This encourages forward thinking and planning ahead, which was also an important aspect of the Sales in the Startup class I was in this past semester.  Each time we write a question we have to then ask ourselves "why?" what purpose does the question serve?  I'm excited to see the results when we're able to get this programmed and out in the field, and I'm especially excited to compare the convenience sample and the panel sample.  I'm finding more and more over the past year that I really enjoy collecting information and thinking about it, even if it doesn't hold much meaning for me in the moment, so it will be interesting to see this data applied to an actual business product.

In marketing different aspects of Phoenix in general the importance of value proposition is being reinforced for me.  It seems like we have talked about value proposition and bringing value to customers in every entrepreneurship and business class that I've taken at Grove City College, and I'm finding it at work in the "real world" too.  In meetings, my coworkers are constantly talking about how to present what sets Phoenix apart and how we bring value to clients that other companies cannot do.  That last part is the important piece.  It seems easier to address what value you are able to create for a customer, but it can become difficult to word why a client would choose you over your competitor.  If you miss this part and do not present what sets you apart, you can lose business simply because your potential client didn't know the full story as to why your company would have been a better match.

Week Two: Let People Do What They Do

My big lesson for this week was to let people play to their strengths, especially when I don't have the same strengths.  In working on the infographics this week I hit a dead end and we sent the document to another woman who works for the company in marketing.  In less than twenty four hours she had taken the same graphics and statistics that I used, but put them together in a way that they fit on the page cohesively, lent themselves to a reading flow, and were visually appealing.  The final product still is not ready, but I am going to attach the different iterations of the infographics up to this point to show the work that I've done.  I started with Apple in order to get a template that could be used for each of the companies, and after receiving the new and improved versions back changed the data to apply to each of the other companies.

This is the initial infographic that I created

This is the second iteration, which I tried to incorporate a call to action.  I struggled to make all of the elements fit cohesively in this version.

This is the version that was done by the woman in marketing.  

This is an iteration of the infographic for which I used the version the other woman created and altered it for Garmin.

I continued to see pieces of my classes at work this week.  One instance that really hit close to home for me was in a progress meeting for one of the projects that the company is currently working on.  One of our partners wanted to charge more than had been previously agreed upon for a project that was to commence the next day.  We discussed ways to do the project without this partner, but ultimately decided that we had to swallow the cost because the client was expecting us to use this partner and we wanted to deliver what we promised we would.  This reminded me of my Sales project this past semester.  My group mates and I were doing a fundraiser in which we partnered with our local ice cream shop and sold our professors ice cream cups to surprise their students with at the end of the semester.  It was a hugely successful project from which we learned a lot, but on the night when we scooped the ice cream to fulfill our orders we realized that we were going to need twice as much ice cream as we thought, and we had to decide whether to deliver very small cups of ice cream or to swallow the additional cost and deliver a satisfactory product to our professors.  We decided to swallow the additional cost and deliver a satisfactory product, but we were ultimately lucky in that we were mistaken about the original cost and ended spending the same amount of money that we initially planned on.

In just the first two weeks of this internship I have already learned so much and seen so much of my schoolwork at play in "the real world."  I'm really enjoying this experience and I'm excited to see what the rest of the summer holds.

Week One: Just the Beginning

The first week of my internship was both completely new and entirely familiar.  I have been working for Phoenix on and off for the past three or four years as needed, but this summer I am officially interning for the company and thus my assignments are different than before.  This past week I was charged with learning about the wearable technology industry and using research that the company has previously done to create infographic scorecards for the top companies in the industry that will be used to show these companies that they need the help of Phoenix Marketing.  I also sat in various meetings with different groups throughout the company and found that while much of the content went over my head, I learned a lot about business in general.

I had never thought about infographics as sales aids before, but after looking at the data that Phoenix had collected and researching the wearable tech industry, I agreed that this was a great way to present companies with information that could help them and potentially move them to find out more about what Phoenix can do.  This process has taught me how to pick out important pieces of data and present them in a visually appealing way, and I am very excited about the potential these infographic scorecards hold.  Hopefully they will be ready for next week's update, and I will be able to share them here.

This project has been different than work I have done for Phoenix previously, because it has been much less rigid as far as what needs to be done.  Previously I have been entering or checking data, which is fairly easy to do and required me to follow a process that was laid out for me.  If I had questions they were usually easily answered.  Creating these scorecards, however, had fewer specifications and barely any process to it at all.  I struggled at first to understand how to begin, but after I worked at it a bit I found myself enjoying the work I was doing.

Sales in the Startup is the most recent Entrepreneurship class that I have taken, and though Phoenix is no longer a startup company, I have found many of the lessons that I learned in class to be at practice within the company.  For instance, Sandler Rule #39, when all else fails, become a consultant.  Though it is not a result of other options failing, we are endeavoring to provide wearable tech industries with valuable consulting information via these scorecards and further documents in order to gain a relationship with their companies and to find out if the our company and their company would make a good match.  I am excited that I am able to see lessons that I've learned in class applied in a real world situation, and I feel validated that the work I have done and am doing in school will help me in the world of entrepreneurship in the future.

At the beginning of the week I attained a small notebook and a nice pen that I brought with me to every meeting that I attended, and took notes the entire way through.  I often found myself writing questions to ask later, as well as bits of wisdom that I wanted to remember.  Right now my notes are disorganized and some pages are more helpful than others, but I will continue to take these notes throughout the summer and I hope to go through them all at the end of my internship and include the lessons that I've learned throughout this experience and the questions that I still have in my final internship post.  I have never approached working for Phoenix as a learning experience before, but with a change in mindset to see it that way I have already learned so much after just one week, and I cannot wait to see what else I'll learn throughout the summer.