www.flyingteegolf.com
Persistence
The whole process of finding an internship for the summer is nothing but an act of persistence. Numerous applications, phone interviews, and in-person interviews, after all these grueling attempts, you find a place, a person who believes in you and gives you the freedom to learn and explore. Throughout the journey, at each step, you learn from your mistakes and be a better self each day.
A memorable chapter in the book of life
I always wanted to work for a cool workplace, where my work would make an impact on the business and made the lives easier. What you believe in is what you get, One fine day I got a call scheduled with an entrepreneur and eventually my mentor, I still remember my manager James Volbrecht (Chief Technology and Strategy Officer at FlyingTee) explain how they broke the monopoly of the golf entertainment business and more importantly his entrepreneurial journey. He didn’t sell me the idea, he told me the story of FlyingTee. I was blown by his vision and the summer projects that were planned for the #TEAMINTERNS.
Chapter: FlyingTee Internship Experience
My internship at FlyingTee started with training, where each intern was rotated through various roles spanning front desk, food runner, server, waiter, IT services, bar-tending etc.
This training process taught me some great insights on the consumer and organizational behavior.
Basically interns experienced all the business processing. James encouraged interns to take notes and place close attention to the processes. This helped me understand the nuances of business and american culture. The training enabled me to closely understand american family spending and behavioral pattern.
Throughout the training we understood the logistics, operations and how employees interact with various information systems at place, right from order placing kiosk to monitoring F&B sales on mobile phones.
Forgot to tell you we got to play free unlimited golf. #InternPerks
Once #TEAMINTERNS got hold of the business processes and operations we dived into building the single source of truth the data-warehouse, automate the entire analytics and reporting process. In the process to finalize the BI tool I had opportunity to speak with various self-service Business Intelligence Tool vendors like Tableau, PowerBI, Qlik, Sisense to name a few and schedule Proof of Concept (POC) sessions. This nature of my internship taught me how to interview the vendors (asking right questions) to understand the product capabilities, to document the interviews and make analysis.
Finally when the BI tool was decided, I took the ownership to implement Microsoft PowerBI from scratch, which was daunting in the beginning but I had great team to support me whenever I hit some roadblock. SQL (PostgreSQL) skills came in handy for data crunching and ETL processing. Eventually we also used this data for Time-Series analysis and forecasting.
We interviewed stakeholders from various departments to gather their insights and to know which KPI’s mattered the most to them. Each time we met a head of the department we would gain invaluable insights not only about the work but also lessons for life.
The best part of the entire internship was the team, each one of us had complementing skills and just like Nick Fury (James) assembled #TEAMINTERNS the mightiest interns on the earth :P, he prefers to be called Iron Man though.
And when we were getting near completion of the project, we had lunch with leaders of the FlyingTee where each shared their life stories and helped us understand what it takes to reach the pinnacle. Among this lunch series, I thoroughly enjoyed listening to Brad Wardlow (Chief Operating Officer), who shared his professional and personal journey.
Perhaps great leaders are great storytellers.
James always made sure interns had complete autonomy on what we did and he would dive in to help whenever we needed help. I met great people at FlyingTee and the work we team of interns did is definitely making a business impact.
To conclude I would like to thank the entire FlyingTee family for making me feel at home and teaching some great lessons of life.
-Sujan
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