Management Consulting and Sales Intern
Internship Introduction
Hello classmates, my name I am currently a Senior pursuing a degree in Sports, Art & Entertainment Management here at Point Park University. I am interested in pursuing a career in the field of business and I have been involved in many professional, educational and athletic activities which have helped me develop skills in customer service, management, and entrepreneurship. I have now realized that I thrive a fast pace working environment and the opportunity to advance within a large organization since my involvement as a Management Consulting & Sales Intern with Finish Line.
Week #1 : May 13th-20th
For my first week as a Management Consulting & Sales intern at Finish Line, I completed a total of four days and was able to gain a lot of knowledge that I did not previously have in regards to management and sales. My first day was Wednesday followed by Thursday, Friday and Saturday. On Wednesday, I was taken on a tour of the store that I will be managing and studied all of the company’s policies and procedures that I am to enforce while interning. Overall, I was very impressed with the organization and professionalism of my coworkers and the guidelines that Finish Line enforces to ensure the best customer service (sales). On Thursday, I was provided with my locker and store keys which were very exciting for me because I have never withheld a managerial position before. During the second half of my shift, I was required to do some company paperwork, practice developing employee schedule and navigating through our company interactive website. On Friday, I was able to focus on my sales skills and how to properly close and build sales to meet our personal and group daily, weekly and yearly store (2620) goals. Lastly, on Saturday I had a mandatory meeting that was held for all managers within my district to discuss the current goals, progress and upcoming summer sales/conversions that we should expect and prepare to see in our stores. I had a very successful first week!
Week #2 : May 20th-27th
For the second consecutive week of my internship, I was there for three out of the seven workdays starting on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Since this was my second week and I was familiarized with some of the management skills that my supervisor had introduced me to, I began to work on more independent tasks to become more comfortable for the following weeks ahead of me. I began my first project for the week on Tuesday morning which included overseeing the stores statistical inventory and what is daily distribution would be and was coached on how I would enter this data into our system, record the products that were being sent in and organizing the new inventory into its proper location both on the sales floor and in the back stock room. The following Wednesday, was a very productive day for me personally because I was able to get a feel for the back stock room a little more. Since my store has a large amount of inventory our stockroom is very large and my managerial duties require me to maintain a safe, clean and organized environment for both me and my associates. I spent the majority of the day stocking shelves, labeling new inventory, down stacking old inventory to properly record all of our available products in our handheld devices which makes it easy for us to tell customers what products we have available in store. On Thursday, I ended my second week with learning how to stage the sales floor when this new inventory comes in primarily to appeal to our customers. This took a lot of precision and guidance from our district manager that sends us weekly organization charts that we must follow to keep our store looking coordinated. This was a great second week for me learning how to accomplish some of these managerial tasks on my one future success.
Week #3 : May 27th – June 3rd
Week three here at my store was very fun and informative since I got to interact more directly with my fellow employees. I was able to meet a great bunch of associates and get to know their feedback on their current supervisor and some of the areas where I could help impact improvement, employee/customer satisfaction, and productivity into our store. I was scheduled to work on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday of this week and decided that I would make this week productive in relevance to the store’s organization and consumer appeal. On Monday, since I am a very organized person I spent the majority of the day cleaning the entire store from dusting, sweeping, disinfecting, and making sure that our customers can enjoy an overall clean environment to attract more sales. During the end of the day, I prepped our store for the upcoming shipment that was to be delivered on Tuesday. On Tuesday, I had a lot of tasks ahead of me to accomplish by the end of the day. I began my day with learning how to compose a schedule for the upcoming next three weeks in our WorkDay interactive associate system and learned how to properly balance the available hours to the associates accommodating schedules that also worked for the productivity of our store (depending on the daily tasks). On Thursday, since I had spent the beginning of the week preparing the store for success in reference to my management position, I focused this day more on the sales aspect of my internship and spend the entire day interacting with customers, selling shoes, returning items, ordering products online, formulating online store fulfillment orders and even making sure to meet my own personal sales goal of the day which was $758.00. This was a great week for me in both managerial and sales education!
Week #4 : June 3rd – June 10th
To begin my fourth week with Finish Line, I was coached alongside my supervisor on how to properly stage our shoes in our store and fulfill our daily online fulfillment and BOPIS (Buy Online Pickup In-Store) orders since it is a very difficult aspect of the job. My supervisor was sure to schedule us the same days for this week to clear up some confusion I had in the prior week on how to properly navigate and fulfill these orders that are prepared from my store and sent out to customers. On Monday, we spent my entire shift working on these fulfillment order since we had over 69 which was almost a store record! Although this was an extremely difficult task, this was the best experience I could get because it helped me learn how to coach my other associates on our new system and do proper fulfillment. The purpose of our fulfillment is to build our daily, weekly, and yearly sales goals through our online available products that we have in our store that are then shipped throughout the United States. On Tuesday, I understand the crucial part of our advanced fulfillment projects as a managerial role because I was the person responsible for fixing any errors, completing any unfilled products and making sure my employee fulfillment rates are higher than 32% of completion. Friday, this was one of the most important days during my internship week because I got to meet our DM (district manager) and go over our current statistical progress bot individually and as a team. This day not only consisted of going over all the analytical progress of our store but also appearance-wise and how well my management and sales growth has impacted our store (2620). I thought that our DM was very intimidating but also provided great constructive criticism of how well the company was rated in comparison to all of the other stores in our district. I enjoyed the great challenges that this week brought because not only was I able to get more insight of the managerial business processes of Finish Line but how to manage a business to consumer, employee and consumer success.
Week #5 : June 10th – June 17th
Prior to my very productive week four, this week was a lot calmer for me since I was only scheduled on Tuesday and Thursday. On Tuesday I did a lot more work on my computer skills by learning how to formulate and close our store’s payroll which took a lot of time which was very surprising to me. I had no idea previous to this internship how much computer work was required as a store/business manager about computer and new technology skills that were crucial to the businesses success. Since I was able to learn more about employee payroll processes, it was also my responsibility to keep track of every daily email and relay the information updates to my team. This week helped me build better relationships with my current employees and show them the progress that I have made so far in taking initiative as their store manager. On Thursday, we were extremely busy which left me with no choice but to spend my entire shift working on the sales floor. I was able to interact directly with a variety of customers and with the help of my other three employees we were able to accumulated a total of $4,3578.00 in sales which was nearly $1,522.00 over our anticipated sales goals based off of last years to date sales. This made me very proud of my team and myself by being able to learn how to up-sell products to build the overall values of each sale, nearly doubling each transaction. I had a very rewarding week and feel that my store has been improving ever since I have to step into the managerial position and continue to thrive in the sales community. P.S. I also had two customer satisfaction survey mentioning my name and how convent and friendly their experience with me was during their visit to my store, which is a huge personal accomplishment!
Week #6 : June 17th – June 24th
For the sixth consecutive week of my management consulting and sales internship, I enjoyed this consistently challenging week. This week I was fortunate enough to work three days out of this week is Monday, Wednesday and Friday. To begin my week on Monday, I had the opportunity to prepare our store for a mandatory employee team meeting for our annual store (2620) audit. My entire day consisted of participating in my daily management routine (inventory check, fulfillment and merchandise checking). Since I would be leading our team meeting on the following Friday, I was sure to accurately collect all of our current store statistics and goals that we have met to go over at our meeting. On Wednesday, we began our day going over everything I prepared for our team meeting before the long and important day ahead of us. This was was one of the most crucial days for our store’s success because I had to double-check all products on our sales floor to ensure that they were properly tagged with the correct price and staged on the display shelves. This ensures that when our audit takes place on Friday all of my fellow employees will be able to easily scan each piece of merchandise that we have in our store and examine our financial statements, the credibility of these financial statements produced by management (myself) to maximize our overall sales and assure consumer availability. When Friday approached, this was a very long day for me and my team because we spent our entire shifts counting every individual product on our hand-held device to participate in our audit. Luckily, when we got our results back we had an overall of 97% which means that we not only passed with flying colors but I succeeded in my part as management authority. This was a great week!
Week #7 : June 24th – July 1st
For this week of my internship, I spent a lot of time doing computer work and focusing on pushing our weekly exclusive store sales available for our reward customers. On Wednesday, I spent my day in the back office doing a large amount of company private paperwork that helped me become more familiar with the filing and sorting important backlog, stockpile, store (2620) statistics, sale changes, and e-commerce business. The following Thursday I was very consumed with completing all of our new sales changes that we received every two weeks that we must continue to keep up with. By doing all of these sale changes it requires a lot of precision and time to ensure that all our products are properly priced for customers with new sales, reductions, reward deals, labeling and knowing how to effectively display the shoes to increase our overall store sells. Being able to learn these effective selling techniques and advertising, it enabled me to be able to relay this information to my teammates and show them how to increase their sales by having the proper shoes displayed on the sales floor. The last part of my shift to finish off my seventh week consisted of being constructed on closing our payroll for our employee payout by making sure none of my employees went above hours compared to the ones that I was given that I was able to distribute between everyone. This is a crucial step in the sales management industry because you can not make any mistakes and every amount of capital that is distributed to Finish Line employees must be accurately accounted for, sustained and systematized.
Week #8 : July 1st – July 8th
Since my last few weeks as an intern were approaching, there were a few more managerial aspects that my supervisor wanted to sharpen my skills on and learn a few more new things. Since I spent the last week on in-store advertising techniques which I could further sharpen since there are always improvements that could be made from my behalf. On Monday, I was able to sharpen my skills in our store’s weekly manifest reports. I was coached how to compose these weekly reports which consisted of printing out the numerical statements that reveled our collective store units (all merchandise) we would be revving within the next few upcoming weeks. By analyzing the future releases that I would be receiving in my inventory, it helped me prep the store in advance for recording the new inventory and how I would be able to incorporate it into my store. On Thursday, since I spent a long time doing managerial computer work, I had to continue to sharpen my sales skills and customer service engagement and satisfaction since it was a holiday and customers were ready to buy. I was able to work alongside my fellow employees and teach them a lot of great tips that I had learned from my training supervisor on how to follow Finish Line’s pick three selection, something similar and something else. This three-step process includes bringing the customer three different pairs of shoes out every time they are waited on in hopes to boost each sale and profit more off of each sale which impacts our overall store gain and volume. I educated my staff, just like I was taught to begin with the customer’s original selection of product, something similar that they may also be interested in a and a third pair that is something else that they may have no realized they would like. By using this approach it has enabled me to nearly double our daily sales both individually for me and my employees and our store as a whole! This was a great technique of customer service and management skills that I will be able to incorporate into my future management opportunities.
Week #9 : July 8th-July 15th
I had a very energetic yet beneficial week during my three days of work on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Since I had a long week ahead of me on Monday, began with another mandatory team meeting with a visit from our district manager to discuss the upcoming new shoe releases that were anticipated to attract a lot of revenue, our current store conversations, customer satisfaction feedback, store rankings and current and future store (2620) goal expectations to succeed. On Tuesday, we had three new releases that attracted a lot of new customers and helped our sales skyrocket over $2,116.00 higher than our anticipated sales goal for that day. I loved one of the releases so much I bought a new pair of my own. After our extremely busy day selling on Tuesday, Thursday was just as profitable because we were able to move from number eight in our district to number five with the drastic amount of capital that pushing our new inventory brought us. Not only did we have new shoe releases for this week but we also received special complimentary gift items such as sponsored headphones, personal nail files and customizable key chains that we gave out to each customer that made a purchase. Not only did this tactic help satisfy our customers but it was a great method that showed our consumers how much their business meant to us. As a manager of this business, I was able to help demonstrate the importance of customer satisfaction that assists in business longevity.
Final Week and Internship Recap #10 : July 15th – July 19th
For the last and final week of my management consulting and sales internship, I felt mixed emotions because I have developed great relationships and made a ton of new friends and this would be the last week I would be able to work alongside them. For my last remaining days being Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Monday began with my daily store email reviewal. By developing these fulfilled relationships with our customers it helped increase our positive customer feedback surveys which were recognized in our districts store email and my district manager specifically shouted out myself and my supervisor for our great work. Wednesday, was a very busy day since we had a flash sale going on and all of our shoes were all on sale and being reduced while our socks and shoe cleaning/care products were all buy one getting one half off. On my last day of interning which was Friday, I spent the day with a few of my team members and they surprised me with cupcakes and a thank you letter which was very thoughtful and made me cry because I knew I was going to miss everyone. Overall, I was able to learn and experience a lot before participating in the management and sales internship and I am very grateful that I was able to have this experience. I began this internship feeling a bit apprehensive since I was nervous about taking on such a large role. Thankfully, I was lucky enough to have a great team of employees and a very passionate and determined supervised that was able to guide me through the whole process and teach me things that will be so valuable to my future success. Learning how to manage my time, sleep, work, and education has helped me grow as an individual more than I could have ever imagined.
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