Undergraduate Blog / Career Development

There’s No “I” in Team

I know that there is a “me” but there’s also a “met,” which is basically just as irrelevant.

My office consists of only seven people, including myself. There’s our finance lead, our operations and customer services guy, our customer service representative, our sales and retail manager, our public relations and brand manager, myself, and Addy. This means that while we work in completely different sectors of the company, we all have a good idea of what we are each working on.

When I interviewed with Kapten, I asked about the company culture and was immediately interested when I learned that it was a small company. I wanted to get to know people and form relationships that could last past the internship and I can definitely say that I have had that at Kapten & Son. The team is like a family and I can feel totally comfortable telling them about my weekend or asking for personal career advice. We frequently eat lunch together and I could tell that from the beginning that this was the environment that I felt most comfortable in.

In addition to team lunches, there is also a “hands-on” meeting every Wednesday where everyone comes together to discuss major KPIs from week to week. These KPIs tell stories of how each department is doing and each area leader can discuss the decision process and how that affected the company. It’s very interesting to me because I get to know exactly what is going on and it makes me feel less of an intern and more of a team member. I learn more about how the industry is doing as well as look for trends to explain why there was a significant increase or decrease in some KPIs. As I want to learn more about analytics, I really benefited from these meetings because it got me to use more analytical tools that I learned at Babson and put them to use.

The most important resources you have are yourself and the people around you. I could not have finished my project this summer without the help of each and everyone one of my team members, whether it be helping me design a website or pick a picture for the cover. Kapten’s success is all due to its team and I cannot wait to see what progress occurs in the next few years.