The Summer in Review

It is safe to say that my summer internship was not the typical experience which most of my colleagues may have embarked on in the corporate world, but I would not have it any other way. My internship at Miramar Traffic and Parking Signs, LLC was also not at all what I had been envisioning when I first wrote my Personal Plan paper, as I had expected to work at some sort of corporation that most likely was in the field of finance or wealth and asset management, but instead I went down the entrepreneurial path to help my father establish his new company. So, what difference did that make? Well, I had the luxury of working from home and I could wear whatever clothes I liked, but it also meant that I would have much less of a social work environment as it was just my father and I. To me this was not a bad thing at all and instead a different sort of blessing as I would almost have a full time mentor at my disposal compared to at a larger company, and the internship still hit multiple goals that I had set for myself in my Personal Plan paper.

In my Personal Plan paper, I discussed my desire to increase my researching capabilities because I did not want to be ineffective at finding key or important information at my future jobs, and I was certainly able to increase my aptitude towards researching. Early on I was tasked with creating a contact list and building up our list of potential customers, so I went online to many different local municipality websites located in Florida, Alabama, Georgia and more. I first found specific municipalities and then had to navigate my way through many odd and often ill-organized websites in order to find a directory or a potential lead to someone who may be involved with traffic and parking for their respective municipality. More often than you may expect, there was a lack of a directory or a lack of breakdown between departments and I often had to refer to the public works department or call the general phone number for the municipality and inquire about which department or who I should contact for my specific needs. So due to the nature of these local government websites, I learned more about how to navigate and research online to find a goal, but I also had the added benefit of learning more about cold-calling and addressing potential customers.

Another project that I addressed in my blogs that pertained heavily on research was finding out if Quickbooks was right for the company and if so how to set it up and implement our business into its system. For this sort of project, I figured that reading would not be enough to learn about the processes and features of this product, so I decided to do more research through watching online guides and tutorials for Quickbooks. This allowed me to see the products capabilities and how to use it much more easily than to just read about what it claims to be able to do, because through visual research I could see the quality and ease the product provided rather than just what was promoted by their website. I found that this tool would significantly improve how we would record transaction data and provide quotes and invoices for our customers, compared to how my father had currently been using Excel with many different spread sheets that had cumbersome edits that needed to be made for each individual quote depending on their specific needs. The contact list and Quickbooks projects both allowed me to practice my researching skills whilst benefitting the company’s internal systems and sales.

Before I began researching Quickbooks for the company, my father walked me through his various spreadsheets in Excel that listed the previous transactions and the relevant information regarding each sale and each customer he had already gathered, which was another aspect I was hoping to hit with my internship, as I wanted to increase my Excel competencies. When making the contact list and transactions we made while I was at the company, I was able to practice with Excel and learned some valuable information about shortcuts, formatting, and organization. I questioned my father multiple times about why he formatted things in certain ways and why he organized information, so I could learn the reasoning behind how he set up these various spreadsheets that covered items such as sales, customer information, and accounting for the business. Taking what I learned from my IT and Data Analytics class, I was able to create some new spreadsheets and implement some new tables to add some new information to what my father had already collected. And even after the implementation of Quickbooks into the business, there were still items that were more easily accessible and had a place in Excel. Overall, I was able to hit some of my main goals for my summer internship even though it ended up being much more entrepreneurially focused instead of finance.

On top of being able to bolster some of the skills I had originally intended; I also had the opportunity to work on my people skills in a much different fashion than I was used too. First of all, I was constantly working with my father and by his side at almost all times of the workday, which is much more time to spend working with someone than one may think, even if he is a parent. This was a unique opportunity to utilize what I learned in my leadership courses, but in a more individualized way. Obviously, some of the theories of leadership did not apply very well in a two-person organization, but there were certainly tools and tactics that could be used for decision making and work management. In one of my blogs, I discussed how what I had learned about persuasion in Goethals class had prepared me well to try and implement change to how my father went through some of the processes of the company and how he structured some of his spreadsheets. I turned this knowledge into practice by utilizing both the peripheral and central routes of persuasion dependent on what I was trying to accomplish. An example was when I had to convince my father that Quickbooks was worth the money and the time spent to transition, so I used the central route of persuasion because he was motivated to listen and comprehend the message due to its pertinence to the business. Using these methods helped me work through problems and difficulties with more ease and allowed my father and I to implement some new structure to the business.

The time spent with my father as an intern was also a rewarding experience for me because of the focused mentoring and transformational leadership of my father. I was taught the inner workings of the business and its processes, but I was also made much more aware of the bigger picture of how building something great takes an enormous amount of hard work, vision, and critical thinking. I had always had the desire to want to start my own business and as a kid I joked about being an entrepreneur when I grew up, but I did not know if I had what it took. My father’s transformational leadership really made me want to achieve success in my own business venture one day and not simply have it be some pipe dream that I would simply muse about. Whether he knew it or not, my father hit the “four I’s” surprising well, as he truly did inspire, intellectually stimulate, and gave me plenty of individual consideration.

In addition to working with my father, I did not fully realize how much my leadership studies would aid me in dealing with potential customers when trying to make sales for the company. I had the difficult task of trying to convince potential customers to look to our new start up company for their signage and traffic products. I believe the most related part of the theories of leadership that pertained to this other than persuasion was French and Raven’s types of power in leadership. Using this thinking, I tried my best to first off use legitimate power by explaining how we were a Florida based LLC that had already sold to customers in multiple states and I framed my explanation to lead to the assumption that we were a larger operation than we truly were. I also made it sound like I had more of a final decision-making role when it came to sales, so I seemed to me more legitimate within the company and much less of an intern. I also used reward power by explaining how they could save money by purchasing from us and that we could provide a quote to prove it on whatever products they needed. This way of thinking and my leadership studies helped me secure more customers than I probably would have otherwise.

Overall, I really enjoyed and learned a lot from my entrepreneurial summer internship experience. Working for my father was both stressful and not at the same time, as I wanted to do well and prove to him that I was smart and capable, but I knew I could do a lot for internal functioning of the business and help him expand his customer base. It was a completely new experience working with someone so closely for such a long and extended period of time, which is something that college classes cannot really provide, so it was a useful learning experience and worked well when the two people want the best for one another and the business. I was able to work on some of my personal goals that I had originally outlined before I had an internship lined up, and I was pleasantly surprised able to work on some new skills that I did not originally intend on augmenting. I hope to take what I learned from my unique summer internship experience to my future career.