When you are looking for an internship, do you immediately glance over the job description and quietly in your head read, “grunt work?” Well, I did. I knew that if I applied for my first internship, I should just anticipate going on plenty of coffee runs and doing things that had little to nothing to do with the field I was interested in. Once I walked into UPshow, seeing that it was a laid-back start-up company with a social media mural on disply right when you walk into the office and white picnic tables instead of real tables, I realized that I might be wrong about my assumption.

The day I was hired, I was given the title, “Client Success Manager.” Such a prestigious label for a freshly hired intern! With only 25 people working for UPshow, I just assumed they didn’t already have that position filled so I gladly took the fancy title. The first few weeks at UPshow, I was given the tasks of creating spotlights and surveys for our clients. The spotlights are for their televisions in their bars that highlight certain events they host, such as Trivia Night or Happy Hour. I would go and creep around on the specific bar or restaurants’ social media pages to find out what events they are not utilizing for our spotlight feature. Then I would create the spotlight and apply it to their televisions right from my laptop in the office.

After a short while, I was told to “scrap that” and start doing something else. I showed a slight interest in learning data analytics, so my boss wanted me to get started right away! I was given all the tools to figure out the data for each client and how they are doing each day, week, month, and year with our product. I now create leaderboards and case studies for certain clients that we want to, “tell the best story” to in order to keep them as a regular client. These are clients that want to see how UPshow is benefitting them. A leaderboard is for a client that has multiple locations or branches, and I create a presentation with each of their data analytics. A case study is for singular clients that want to see their data in terms of the past 3 months and 6 months, as well as overall data. Basically, all this data is showing our clients that we can get them more customers into their venues, and this will lend itself to increasing their sales.

What I have taken from this internship is that a start-up is a lot of work. Each individual working for UPshow wears multiple hats. Everyone needs to be skilled in how to manage roughly each aspect of the company. Each of us should know how to create social media content, create accounts, package and ship boxes, data analytics, customer service, and of course, knowing how to use the product. I have learned about the more creative side to marketing, where I had to create spotlights on Canva. I also had to learn the more numbers focused portion of marketing with all the data analytics. I have even learned about some tools that businesses use in order to keep their company running, such as, Sales Force. This internship has helped me understand marketing a little better, and how it encompasses many different aspects of sales.