Adventure Me

Hello All-

Well, I have officially ended my first international business trip! I stayed at 10 different hotels, 10 different cities, and spent about 20 hours travelling in trains, but it was a good trip and I gained some invaluable insights into the German market, but damn, I’m glad to be home. The trip brought me to some of Germany’s best cities, like Frankfurt, Cologne, Berlin, and Munich. There are now 3 weeks to write my research report, which I think will be plenty of time, but we’ll see.

Now also begins probably the most important part of the internship, a reflection of my time at the Company, the people I met, and my views on my future with them. If I receive an offer, it will be a tough decision, because it will really mark a turning point in my life. Sure I am already living here in Italy, but my future remains undefined. Defining it and taking that plunge will be the real challenge.

Speaking of challenge, I recently stumbled upon a great website called www.adventures4charity.com . The basic premise is that people are rewarded through experiential adventures for raising money. One of the ones that I want to sign up for is the first lesson of the AFF – accelerated free fall – certificate program. This is something that I have been wanting to do for a long time, and if I can help charity at the same time, why the heck not!

So once I get to taking the plunge for it, I will let you all know!

On the finer things in travel...

Being back in the workforce has taught be a valuable lesson, staying in-shape is not easy. This lesson has been amplified in my past two weeks in Germany where I have lived on a diet of beer, beer, and meat (and trust me, nothing was consumed in moderation). I am sitting on a train heading to Berlin for two days of ride-a-longs with sales agents and two days of persona

l weekend schenanagans. First the work.

The people in the Germany office are great. They have been helping me out every step of the way, and have gone above and beyond their job descriptions to ensure my time here is pleasurable. Infact, the Company in general has been very supportive and caring when planning my schedule. This is a company that I can confidently say truly cares about their employees!

The past two weeks have been really interesting. I am finding the German market a much more complex place than I thought. The market is mature and fragmented, and like everything in life, branding and image is key. Germany is tough, because the quality for all products is high, so pricing strategy is very interesting. When you factor in that production for most players here is done in Germany and we have to transport from another country, pricing becomes very tricky. While I am not specifically looking at pricing strategy, it is something I am keen to keep in mind.

Normally, if you have a strong brand, you can get away with pricing your products a little too high. Take Apple for example. They have the most valuable brand in the world, so they get away with charging WAY to much for their products. But if you have an unknown product in a market that is mature, fragmented, and traditional, you better believe you have the right price.

I have also been starting to think about working full time for this Company, if I get the offer. It is enticing. It solves a lot of the original goals that I set when I thought about getting my MBA; live and work in Italy (check), move to industry (check), and get the hell out of finance and accounting (check), but it is still not a clear yes. I think I am a little worried about the role and the opportunities I will have to come back to the US. The role is interesting, Area Manager for a region in Italy, but involves constant domestic travel, and a lot of problem solving (read bitching clients). I am just worried there is less strategy and actual shaping of the company then I desire out of a future role.
As for the US thing, they have mentioned a move to the US in a couple years but that requires a lot of cards to fall into the right place. There is currently no US office, so I would build that from scratch and if they decide the east coast is the best location, I have no desire to live there (except maybe boston). But this was mentioned in passing and is not certain. This is something I would probably want stipulated in my contract if I signed. Maybe if we don’t go to the US, I get some sort of bonus as a consolation. I don’t know.

I am also looking elsewhere for full-time work, just so I don’t get stuck with one option. I starting the discussion with a couple companies, one very interesting to me, and I think this is a valuable step in making a decision. One option is not a choice, but if I can juxtapose a couple roles and companies, it might be very valuable to me in the long run. Anyway, that part was more for me to look back and reflect on…

NOW FOR THE FUN!

Well, I went to Munich this past weekend to visit the Germans. Woah, Munich, as always, is incredible. The Architecture there is some of my favorite in Europe and the whole city just seems clean, hospitable, and uber-fun (oh and the girls aren’t too bad to look at either ☺).

Visiting cities for the sake of seeing a city is something that I don’t really enjoy so much at this point in my life. I am more about experiences. I enjoy adventures and/or good times with friends. So this weekend was a perfect balance. I got to go to Munich University’s Sommer Party. It was held at the campus and they opened up all the buildings for the party. There were more bands than I can remember and all the classrooms held different alternative musicians.

One of the classrooms was particularly cool because there was a women singing some kind of Teegan and Sarah type thing while playing a harp. Never realized that harp was such a cool instrument, but damn, that was a good show.

The party was great and I got to share it with the Keiser, Paul, and the Wolf, so all in all it was a great experience. The next day I got to walk around the city with Keiser and visit some of the cooler places. The highlight of the day was sitting in front of the opera with a beer and people watching. It was here that I discovered the munichbeerbike.com (don’t fret, it apparently is in many cities as I just saw one here in Cologne!).

Anyway, the Saturday was spent doing that, eating breakfast with the Keisers family (which was fantastic by the way, so thank you for introducing me to the fam!), and then spending Sunday driving around the country side and visiting a lake. Munich was a blast, but it was time to go back to Aschaffenburg for work, too bad my Kia couldn’t take me any faster than 160km/h (yeah I got to drive the autobahn, but no story is necessary as my Kia C got a top speed of about 184 km/h downhill).

Until next time,

Justin

1/3 down, 2/3 to go

Week three concluded and that means 1/3 of the internship is officially over. It was an exciting three weeks that included my first ever international business trip! I got to see and meet people from the Germany office. I realized that there the Company has a similar vibe, which is good because it means that there is a strong Company culture that carries over, but the market is completely differrnt. In Italy, we are a large player and a market leader in many senses, but there, we are struggeling for survival. I cannot wait to really delve in deep to figure out what we can do better.

Next week I will spend some time with a sales manager before going back to Germany for three weeks. Thursday and Friday I have a chance to go to the world's largest resilient fair in Germany, so I am excited to get a chance to see the competitors in action and talk to some end users.

until then,

cheers.

In it to win it!

The weather has gone through hurricane force winds, heavy rain, and finally beautiful sunshine, so it makes it hard to believe that it has only been two weeks since the start of the internship. As mentioned before, these past two weeks have been a whirlwind of practical and theoretical training, company introductions, and eating (lots of eating). Tomorrow I leave for Germany on what will be my first international business trip. I am pretty excited for it. While there for the next three days, I will be introduced to the German office and meet the rest of the people that I will be working for this summer.

The trip should be nice and will give me an opportunity to understand what the Company's international operations look like. It is important for me to understand as much of the company as I can so that way, if I get an offer, I will be well prepared and informed on any decisions I have to make.

Currently on my mind I have some of the pros and cons: PROS: I think the Company is in a very interesting market that will continue to grow in the future. They Company has also done an excellent job with staffing. The CEO attends every interview and only hires those who believes has strong character (in addition to intelligence). The Company is young and flexible and is able to quickly adapt to any changes in the market place. Further, it seems that they treat their employees well! There are quite a few benefits that come with working here, and the Company truly believes that its employees are the number one assets. CONS: there are not many cons but one is that the busiest time of year is the summer, which means vacationing in summer may be difficult. Secondly, it is a family business. This means that the family takes many of the high positions in the Company which may limit potential to grow and may cause some politically interesting work scenarios.

Anyway, enjoying my time here now and can't wait to experience my first international b trip!

one is done.

The first week has come and gone, and now it is time to look back a bit and reflect back on my first week re-gainfully employed. The first week on the job was basically the theoretical training portion of the internship. I learned a lot about the Company's strategy, products, and philosophy. I mentioned in my first post that I was impressed with their strategy and philosophy, but I would like to reiterate it now. I really enjoyed their outlook on the business that they run and the industry they operate in.

The theory was required knowledge necessary to perform any market research, but at the same time, I found it fascinating and I could picture myself staying excited about the products (or really, the manner in which they produce and market) for a long time to come. Along with the theory we got to meet several area managers for the Company as well as several other functional positions within the Company. I think everyone was really smart and they all seemed to get a long quite well. I enjoyed talking to everyone and cannot wait to further some of these discussions in the future.

One of the things I currently like is that I am able to speak Italian for about 40% of the day. I think as time goes on that this number will increase to nearly 100%. There are two interns that don't speak a lick of Italian now, so they would have some problems if we did the training in Italian. The cool thing is though, that when we do hold a conversation in Italian, I find myself understanding nearly 100% of what is being said. This is a huge improvement over 9 months ago.

Anyway, as the training comes to an end and I start to really define my role here at work, I will post more reflectful pieces.

cheers.

Work or Bust? The Internship Begins

Hey All -

I guess I want to keep an updated account of my internship so everyone knows how my life outside Auditing is going. I am going to try and write it as unbiased as possible, so that way when I reread this in a couple months, I will have an honest account of my feelings throughout the internship so in case I get a full-time offer, I can have something to help make a decision on.

So I arrived here in Modena on Friday. I have to admit, I loved the city at first sight, so I was pretty bummed when I discovered that I will be living 15 km outside Modena in a tiny city called Fiorano. It is most well know (read only known for) the Ferrari race track here. The apartment itself is an interesting building. There are four of us interns here, and we were all a little disappointed about it. The apartment is recently restored, however, the furniture dates from, what I would guess, the turn of the century. Currently there is no hot water, but that should come tomorrow. Besides that the town is *charming*.

The internship started today at 10:00am. Today we mostly learned about the company's product offerings. XXXXX is tagged as the XXXXXX. Most of their products are green certified, and they go out of their way to source organic raw materials. When I first accepted the offer, I thought that this would be right up my alley. I will be doing a market development project in Germany this summer, and that too was very interesting to me, but I was worried about working in an Italian company. It is said that Italian companies are inefficient, formal, and way too political. I can tell you that my first impression of work was anything but that!!!!! The culture is very informal, and it appears to be run on German efficiency, well, ok maybe not German, but certainly pretty efficient. I will discover the political situation as time goes on.

Needless to say, that this was a giant relief. The production facilities and warehousing are nearly 100% automated and efficiency ratings are very high. This was most certainly unexpected, but reassuring to me. We got to see the two plants here surrounding Modena and then see their state of the art learning lab. Work has a pretty cool business model and positions themselves as a high quality (high cost) producer of building supplies ranging from paint to pvc to adhesives. I won't go into too much more details about the detail of the Company, but rather on a broad scope they seem like a top notch and high savvy company.

The people there all seem really friendly. This was not a surprise, but merely a bonus. Everyone we spoke to was extremely knowledgeable about the industry, company, and products they offer. I was impressed by the business savvy that every employee has; from the R&D and Quality Control departments, to area managers, to the engineers, all of them were top notch people.

I will cut this a bit short as I am exhausted from my first day, but before I leave, I discovered today that I will be leaving to Germany sometime next week, so that is something to look forward to!

cheers,

getaround