Business Consulting Internship at The Business Route: 34th and Market
Hello, I once submitted my request for points before and I got an email asking to explain the position a little more. I emailed the department back but I believe I was supposed to make those changes through community. I’m going to paste the original post below with the expansion explanation afterwards in a separate paragraph. Thank you for the review!
This summer, I interned for a start-up consulting group called The Business Route. The Business Route aims to assist its clients in any form of consulting needed; they do not wish to stick to only one focus. Since the group is a start-up, I was not paid for the internship but I did get some good experience in the real business world. Over the Summer, I had the opportunity to work with many different clients, all working with different problems. In the beginning, I conducted a couple of feasibility studies, alone. One project involved selecting the best location to start up a business incubator in either the city of Philadelphia or it’s surrounding neighborhoods. With this study, I had to gather information about the number of start-up businesses in each possible area, demographics of each area, and summarize these statistics to help the client choose the best location for their incubating business. After the initial round, we had to give a cost-analysis for all the permits, licences, building costs, equipment costs, and staff costs and let the client know how much it was going to be and what it was going to take to start this business. After the second round of bidding for the client, we were eliminated and did not get the offer from the client. Currently, I am doing a similar project for a client who is trying to open up a community center in the town of Norris Square, just west of Temple’s campus. This is an attempt to better the neighborhood by giving the community the option to do better things with their time. The client wants this center to have four different sectors: one being a public gymnasium, another being a community kitchen for local food entrepreneurs to produce their products, another being an arts and crafts center, and the last being job training for the community. Currently, this building is sitting in Norris Square, gutted out, and emptied. A partner that I was paired with, and myself needed to conduct another feasibility study and let the client know if this business was going to work in this location. We came up with core questions for a survey, went on site, and conducted our surveys multiple days and compiled responses in excel files to target patterns and information we may be overlooking or gather new information we hadn’t thought about. On September 14th, we are presenting our proposal for the client and if the client likes our efforts, they will select us for the rest of the consulting job which again involves more cost-benefit analysis. To sum up my experience, I was thrown into a start up where I had a strong voice in the company and helped my boss consult the clients in areas I was not even accustomed to. This job required intensive market research and hard analyzing skills in order to summarize the prevalent information and filter out the unnecessary information. This experience has immensely helped me understand the ins and outs of business, especially the difficulty of getting a business up and running from the ground up. The job has also helped me with getting comfortable in a business setting, since we were to compile information weekly and present it to our boss and then brainstorm towards our next steps in the process. We also had to present our findings in front of clients, which started off rough but gradually became easier.
During the internship program, I worked with Microsoft Project and Tableau. I used Project to establish Work Breakdown Structures for our clients, detailing the steps needed in starting their business from the ground up. This made it easy to present to the clients and made it easy for them to understand what they had to do. One specific example was a WBS I created for our the client opening up a community center in Norris Square. We detailed all the licences and permits needed and how to go about getting them and listed them in a specific order. Using Tableau, we were able to visualize data for our clients that helped them understand the feasibility of the business. Specifically, for the community center client again, we were able to represent population demographics in the area to show how many and what type of people were going to use the facility, between what times they were going to use it, and where a majority of the participants using this facility lived in relation to the actual building. We were able to pull this information from census data and our own conducted survey. This helped our client know exactly what kind of customers their business was going to attract and where they were coming from. This was a big part of their decision to give the green light to the project and begin with the permit process and renovation. When it came to presenting our findings to the client, these visualizations and neat, organized, WBSs helped the client understand what was needed to get their business off the ground. Excel was also used greatly to consolidate raw, gathered data into some kind of understandable platform where we could work with it easier.