Teamwork Makes the Dreamwork (Sometimes)
This past summer, I was lucky enough to participate in an internship with Elliott Davis, an accounting firm that also specializes in multiple consulting fields. My specific field was Digital Business Solutions Consulting, where my job was to help businesses improve their people, processes, and technology, which in turn improves the efficiency of the business.
My role as an intern was nothing close to the stereotypical business intern that would fetch coffee or lunch. I was given real client projects and it made me feel great knowing that the work I did on these projects eventually made their way back to the clients. The work I did was not easy though, it required a lot of teamwork, critical thinking, and effort to complete the projects I was assigned. The level of teamwork shown in the office was on a much different level than what I saw in high school and even college. However, the problems started occurring when we were assigned our intern capstone project.
For some background, the capstone project consisted of a prompt that teams of 6 interns researched and presented on. The prompt for my team was to find a way to market the services of a brand-new department in Elliott Davis. The department was Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) which specializes in helping businesses get the best deal when performing a merger or acquisition. The hard part was, none of us were marketing interns, nor have we had any marketing experience. What made it worse was that 3 members of the team were in the Greenville, SC office and 3 were in the Raleigh, NC office, which made communication difficult.
We knew very little about this new department, so to start, we interviewed a couple of people so we could learn more about it. Being a new department, they did not have all their positions filled, so it was hard to find information for some of the areas. It also seemed like the current M&A staff did not know much about the field either, which made it so much harder to get the information we were looking for. Regardless, I learned plenty about M&A during this process, it just took a lot more digging than we initially expected. After the interviews with the M&A staff, we spoke to the marketing department to see if they had any ideas about how we should go about solving this problem. They were able to give us some great tips and insight on what they were looking for in a final result. Everything was going well, and we were gathering all the information we needed to make our final report, but when it came down creating the final PowerPoint and deciding what was going to be on it, some issues arose.
As I said earlier, being in separate offices made everything harder. My 3-person group had our own ideas going while the other half of the team had their own ideas. So, when we met to give updates and try to figure out what to do, we had conflicting plans. It was difficult to navigate the situation because we did not want to abandon our ideas but also did not want to 100% adopt theirs. To top it all off, my group was trying our best to stick to the prompt as much as possible whereas the other group failed to do so. All of our ideas were very well thought out and related to the question we were asked. In the other group, they seemed to have lost the overall purpose of the project and their ideas had no relation to the question. Their idea was to create a “menu” for the services that M&A provides while our idea was to post case studies on the website so that potential clients can see examples of the work that M&A can provide to them. We eventually came to a compromise and adopted some of each group’s ideas, creating a small menu that supported the example case studies that we created.
Our final presentation was a PowerPoint of the findings and recommendations we had. Before the presentation we had agreed that each group would present their ideas since they knew more about them than the other group, so the Raleigh team presented on their menu, while we pitched our case study idea. The presentation went much better than expected, and all of the viewers loved our ideas and how the two different plans worked together to make one cohesive plan. Management liked it so much that they said they wanted to use some parts of it immediately.
So, after all of the arguing, and disagreements, the final product turned out to be better than I could have imagined. It did not seem like it was going to work out well, but I kept my head down and kept moving, hoping to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I learned so much from this process, and I feel like I became a much better teammate after it was all said and done. Not only did I learn about parts of the company that I had not known about previously, but I also learned how to correctly handle situations where you disagree with the rest of the team. In life, this will happen so much more than you expect, and it is always good to be ready for it and know exactly how to handle those situations. This experience showed me that no matter what the circumstances are, there is always a solution to the problem, but in some cases, it might take more work to get to that final answer.
Mitchell is a Business Administration student with an emphasis in IT Management, from Boiling Springs, SC. He is currently a senior and will graduate in May 2023. Mitchell completed his internship with Elliott Davis, Greenville in the summer of 2022, and plans to join them after graduation as a Business Systems Solutions Consultant.