Caroline Stankus Blog 15- 5/21/13

This is my last blog entry and I am so relieved. SCORE is ending this week too but we all have a lot to do in terms of presentations and the paper. Yesterday was a busy day for me. I immediately met with the sales team and we discussed the next steps for the edu spreadsheet. Since we have labeled who is using and not using our software, we now need to contact the schools that are not. My job was to organize the 30 schools into 6 categories. After I wrote each school down on a peice of paper so I could have that handy. It took me all day to go to the websites and search through it to find the admissions contact numbers. I located all of them thankfully so now my job today was to put them in an online address book for the company called salesforce. I had to put in the school name, the admissions conselour, the number and email etc for the 30 schools. Once I am finished with that, people further up then me are going to call the contacts to try and sell our product to them or at least figure out why they are not using it right now. I also did a starbucks run today for some of the workers here and it was so hot out I did not enjoy that at all. But I guess since I am just an intern here I have to do what they say and want me to do.

Caroline Stankus blog 14- 5/15/13

Today was a very busy day as oppose to my laid back day yesterday, hence why I did not journal. I started off today by going through emails, then I had to do some security activities that every employee has to do here. There are a bunch of scenerios you have to go through then at the end take a test with ten questions and you have to pass it. After that I was basically like a shadow the rest of the day and listened in on some meetings. One was about how to clean up the company to make it more successful. They made tables of pros and cons and discussed what was working and what was not. I then sat in an office and listened to an interview. The guy wanting to work here was from texas and explained his past experience and how he would be a good fit here. The interviewer asked a bunch of questions and you could tell the guy was nervous, but he ended up doing a great job and was someone the company had been looking for. I was then asked to go to a website and do some research on this company that a CEO was going to call later. After lunch I went through a spreadsheet and had to organize each college (150) into four categories. It was pretty time consuming but I organized it well. I listened in to another meeting at the end of the day where this girl discussed how some people needed to step up because the company would ultimately be losing money if they kept them around.

Caroline Stankus blog 13 - 5/13/13

Today is our second to last week of score and I am honestly pretty excited because I have been exhausted working here. There is always so much to do and it can be very stressful at times. I started off the day by eating breakfast here in the office while going through the hundreds of emails I got over the weekend, although most of them were not for me I just read them all anyway because they were mass emails that I thought were interesting. I worked on various projects today, but during lunch I had to be the one to go out and get food for everyone. I was not opposed to it because I was starving too. Luckily the burlington mall is a less then five minute drive away from the office so I took everyones order and went there to pick up food. Starbucks had the longest line so it took me an hour then I had to go into meetings to deliver the food. At about 2:00 I had a meeting with three other sales guys that were going over my college data sheet project that I had finished. We went over the next steps in which to contact these colleges to try and sell our product. I have to go through about 50 more college websites to make sure we found all of the information then the guys are getting contacts to call next week. Hopefully this will help increase sales here because there are a lot of potential customers.

Caroline Stankus blog 12- 5/9/13

Yesterday was one of the best days at score. I got to see how real CEO meetings went. Around 9 in the morning me and two other people from work went to Roger Williams in Rhode Island. They are a customer of Acquia and also happen to be where I am going to college next year. We had a meeting set up in the middle of the day to discuss how they liked our software and if there was anything we could improve on. When we got there we all went into a small room with a table and projector. First we went around the room introducing ourselves and there were two IT workers (information technology) who help create the websites, the CEO of the entire Roger williams college (which is pretty cool) and the directer of IT. My job was to sit back and listen and take notes while the other guys went through a powerpoint and discussed. Acquia wants to make sure that every client of theirs are well taken care of so these meetings are important to touch base and see if there are any problems. There were a few complaints about getting connected to someone for help but the rest was all good and supportive advice. At the end one of the guys had a pitch for Roger Williams basically saying that there was another software update that they could get that would completely revamp their website but it would be a little more expensive. Just watching a real meeting take place was pretty helpful and I learned a lot.

Caroline Stankus Blog 11- 5/7/13

I have noticed that writing these blog posts have gotten a lot easier every time. Today I did not have a desk or an office for the first two hours so I worked in the kitchen which was a little distracting. I finished the project I had been working on for the last three weeks and I sent it off to my advisor who was helping me with it. After I was done with that at about 1, I was sent a powerpoint on our sales techniques that we will be presenting at Roger Williams University tomorrow. I will most likely just be taking notes on it but I had to review each slide so I would be familiar with it tomorrow. I am going with a small group of employees and we are meeting with the university website designer in the middle of the day. After that I was told to pull out some old documents on previous presentations and proposals that would help me while writing our research paper. Mine is how certain companies become successful, and working here shows me just how that happens. I uncovered a lot of material for my paper and made a detailed outline of it so next I just have to type it all out. I talked to one of the girls here about the Rihanna concert last night because we both went and she was just being funny about it. Overall it was a productive day and I am moving onto the event planning group after this.

Caroline Stankus Blog 10- 5/6/13

Today was pretty much a normal day and I continued to do everything that I had started the first day I got here. I came in an hour early because I had to leave an hour early for a concert I am going to tonight. After getting breakfast and talking to the receptionist lady, I learned a little more of what she does. Not only does she answer calls and informs people of meetings etc, she has to set up each computer account for new employees, and at this company there are about 2 new people each day. I also learned that today, most of the executives would be at a meeting all day which meant that I had to fend for myself and finish any projects I had because I would not be getting any new things to do or even help. I finally finished going through 160 college websites and seeing if they use a certain domain host then put it all on an excel spreadsheet. It looks pretty good considering all of the information I found. I am so excited that I finally finished this project because it was ongoing for a couple weeks. I am excited for wednesday because I am going with a group of sales employees here to Roger Williams which is one of Acquias customers and just happens to be the college I am going to next year. We will be going through each department making sure our product is making the college happy and they arent having any problems with it.

Caroline Stankus blog 9- 5/1/13

Today I had to do a lot of general stuff. First the lady at the front desk came over and told me I had to fill out my weekly hours sheet so I could get that signed off and I had yet to fill them all out even though this is my fourth third week. I used google docs for that because that is basically what everyone at this company uses so their work is shared and saved constantly. After I looked through my email and saw that the technician emailed me two presentations that I had to watch. They were about business safety and I guess it is required to watch the videos to be able to work here. They were about an hour each and pretty boring but I learned a lot. As I was watching these videos in the common room, I saw that some employees were wheeling out a big screen tv so I was thinking "great!" but instead they were making a portal. Acquia is spread out through many countries and the owners thought it would be productive if in every office there was a portal (tv with skype) so that an acquian worker from texas could walk up to the tv and talk to another worker in china. I helped set up the portal and watched as some of the employees here discussed information with employees in the UK. It was really interesting to see the inovation here. I also continued my college search and I am almost done!

Caroline Stankus Blog 8- 4/30/13

Today was a little bit of the same thing I have been doing for the past week. I arrived at 9 and left the office at 3. The first thing I did was filled out some back round paperwork that I forgot to do the first week I was here. I went into my office then and started working on my college spreadsheet. Just looking at it gives me a headache because there is so much information. I had a meeting at 11:30 to talk about the next steps with my project. There are several servers Acquia owns that tells us if a certain website is hosted by this company so I had to go through each college website and see if it did. I am learning a lot about computers and excel which will be very helpful in college because I am going to be majoring in marketing. Before lunch I sat in on an interview for a prospecting employee. It was interesting to see their past experiences and how they could add to the community. Lunch was probably the best part about the day because there is a "fun commity" here so they hired this truck to come full with pizza for us to eat, then after that there were free back messages in the lobby. I opted out on both however because I had a lot of work. After lunch I got kicked out of my room because there was a meeting scheduled in there so I worked on this huge couch and got through a bunch of college searches.

Caroline Stankus, Blog 7 4/29/13

Today is either the third or fourth week doing my score project and I am starting to realize how exhausting work is. Since you are apart of a big business and everyone depends on each other for work and research, there really is not much time to knock off. I find this a little difficult because at school we are able to talk to friends and take little breaks but here I am with all adults who do not want to socialize. I got in the office around 10 and had some breakfast at the caf. I usually start off monday by going through all of my work emails because during the weekend I never check gmail. I guess that is a problem because I had 149 emails to read and reply to and some of the workers came up to me asking if I got their email but in reality I just had not checked it yet. After breakfast I sat in the meeting room which has a bunch of comfy couches to sit on and I started my edu data sheet again. Right now is my lunch break and I have gotten through 75 different websites. In between looking at every website I learned how to use gmail a little better. Everyone here uses the calendar and puts their meetings/calls online in a specific color. Anyone can go onto a specific account and schedule a meeting with that person, with a need of an approval of course. When I looked on m calendar I saw that I had a meeting at 3 to wrap up my project right now. The only problem is I am not sure where it is because this office is so big.

Caroline Stankus Blog 6- 4/23/13

Today it took me 30 minutes longer to get to the burlington office because of all of the traffic which made my day start off pretty bad. I continued my long list of colleges I needed to go through to see what software they used. I got through 40 colleges today which is pretty exceptional, however I still have 100 left to look through. In between that time there was a company meeting I got to take place in. There are 300 employees world wide that belong to the company Acquia and today the sales, software, HR, and marketing teams met in one big room while the people from out of the state and country tuned in through skype on their computers. The ceo's and head of the companies talked about what happened the past month. I was told that this meeting happens only once a month and every time the team makes a certain goal of how much money they are going to make and such so they can compare next month. It was a happy meeting because each department exceeded their goals so everyone was really proud of each other. They also gave out employee of the month awards to two people, which I thought was a good way to keep people motivated. This meeting lasted about an hour and they also gave out free food from a mexican restaurant in salem which was a plus because normally we have to buy our food. After I took place in a couple interview meetings where I saw some lucky people get hired.

Caroline Stankus Blog 5- 4/23/13

Yesterday was the first day back from break and I was very tired. The drive was especially long because of all of the traffic. Once I got in, my officer told me that I was going to meet with a person from sales in about an hour. During that time I logged onto my acquia email and had to go through 138 emails which was very overwhelming. The week before I was told that I would be working on an edu (college education) project where I would go through acquia's college customers and see if they were using drupal which is a software that creates website domains and if that software came from acquia. We put together 6 tabs that you would find on a college website which include, athletics, academics, admission, other colleges, learning etc. My job was to go to each website and find what software they are using. I have 170 college websites to go through and it is not as easy as it seems because some of them do not very easy websites to surf through. I am going through a wide variety of colleges, ranging from Harvard to Bridgewater state so it is fun to look at all of the different schools. Our main goal for this project is to target the colleges who are not using our software then to eventually get contacts from then and try and sell our product. It is all about our growing customers here and trying to get as many new people to sell to as possible.

Caroline Stankus Blog 4, 4/23/13

I went to the office once last week during vacation to finish up on a big project I had started the week before. Of course since everyone was off I did not want to work but I sucked it up and went in at 10am. This was a monday, the day when the bombings went off in boston, and I work in burlington so that is very close. Before that happened, I was told to download a powerpoint a man made about how to develop thought leadership, organize references, understand data and strategic communication plans. The office I work in is not very organized so it took me about 30 min to clean off the white board and re write  quotas then after I taped the 13 slides of the powerpoint to the board and left room undreneath for the ceo's to write their plans and thoughts about each slide. After that I continued working on a college search until I got interupted by one of the employees here saying Boston just got bombed twice at the marathon. Immediately the sales, and software team went into emergency mode and started calling their biggest news customers, one being cnn. Because of all of the breaking news and people searching about the bombings, Acquia's team needed to adjust to the increase of servers and make sure the website would not go down because of too many views. This was really cool for me to watch because it showed how this company needs to keep up with all of their customers in order to insure success and for them to keep using Acquia's internet services.

Caroline Stankus Blog 3- 4/9/13

Today I woke up early so I could get to work by 9 and get out at 3 and home by 4 but of course once I hit the highway there was so much traffic so I got in 40 minutes late because the office is all the way in burlington which is a hike from manchester. I forgot what floor the office was on so i spent about 10 minutes going up and down the elevator trying to figure it out. At least the cafeteria was on the first floor so I could stop and get a bagel while freaking out. I met with two guys who told me what the plan was for today and the meeting took about an hour. My job today was to go through a list of 111 websites and put them in a crawler which gives back information and makes it easier to find certain numbers and people. This list of websites were ones using a software that tended to be outdated which is why acquia is pinpointing them to possibly team up so they can use our software. I got to about 95 websites which was a lot and now my eyes hurt. I also found some articles that will help me with my thesis paper which is about how some companies grow quicker then others and how acquia is one of the fastest growing companies in the world. Today was not so bad because I brought my headphones so I listened to music the whole time. Tomorrow I should be continuing the same work.

Caroline Stankus Blog 2- 4/9/13

Second day of Score was a lot different then my first. I had to wake up early and meet with a caterer because we were going to an off sight meeting place. I had to set up breakfast for 10 people. 8 guys and 1 girl then I was there too. Breakfast included eggs bacon toast coffee croissants fruit and much more. Everyone arrived around 830 and I was barely awake. After we ate breakfast we went into another room and discussed future plans for the company. Top secret so I cannot say exactly what was talked about. I felt a little out of place because I was mainly just listening to everyone. At about 1130 the caterer came back and I had to clean off all of the food and restock with the lunch. Yummy sandwiches were served and we took a little break. After lunch we went back to work and the boss discussed this weeks numbers and who was doing a good job. In one week the company made over 65,000. That was a huge shock to me because that is so much. It was a little awkward when they started talking about people they needed to fire because I felt bad but I guess that is what needs to happen when running a big company and for it to be successful. I learned a lot in these meetings and some of the strategies they used were each person wrote down a point they wanted to talk about and everyone contributed to that.

Caroline Stankus Blog 1- 4/8/13

I am just finishing up at my first day working at Acquia. I was overwhelmed when I first pulled up to the enormous building and walked through the big glass doors. There were about 50 or so young employees working hard at their desks and I got put in the way back with my own mac computer and phone, not to mention a name tag. My first job was to log onto Linkedin which is kind of like a professional facebook where people make an account and companies can access it and you can be contacted through the website. After about an hour on that, my next assignment was to research big colleges in New York to see if they are using any Drupal software. This was very time consuming but I learned how to creep hard on websites so that was a plus. I got about 75 contacts in three hours. Lunch time was probably the most entertaining. This office is huge so there are ping pong tables, basketball nets, air hockey, and guitar hero all in the lounge so I spent a little time there on my break. So far I am doing a lot of work but I am learning  even more about how to run a successful company.  I am working in the New York department, so I handle all of the tasks set up in New York. Acquia is a world wide company so there any hundreds of cities that need to be reached. I cannot wait for my next day here.

Caroline's Outline

Score Project Outline

Question: How did Acquia become one of the fastest growing companies in the world?

Thesis: The company Acquia has produced one of the fastest growing companies in the world due to their strategy, internal and external operations and workers which has influenced other companies to grow and compete in such a high growth enterprise.

• Acquia background
• What does Acquia do
• History
• Current state
• Future growth plans
• Business strategy
• Target markets
• Product strategy
• Marketing strategy
• Internal operations – How does Acquia handle such rapid growth
• Sales
• Customer support
• Account management
• Global expansion
• What type of people thrive in a high growth environment?
• Profile
• Hiring / screening process
• New employee on-boarding
• Keeping employees motivated and happy
• What does Acquia need to do to ensure future success?
• Business Strategy
• Internal operations
• People and culture
• How does this relate to other businesses
• Big vs. Small companies

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