PT blog

I did my internship in medium-sized company called KrossPlus the main office and distribution center of which is located in Saint-Petersburg, Russia. It is a sports inventory seller and a producer that holds leading positions on the domestic market and will expand to Europe soon. The customer base is sport inventory shops, both online and physical, plus it gets a significant part of its revenue from Russian Amazon-type online markets.

The position of an assistant manager was my first «real» working experience so far and it was very fruitful. My main responsibilities can be divided into two parts: Sales Manager and Supervisor of shipments to a particular online market. During my work as a Sales Manager, I improved communication skills with clients who are companies (face-to-face, phone calls, via email), managed to get the trust of costumers which were fully delegated to me and developed my multitasking. Working under pressure of small time frames was a daily routine because the amount of orders that we had because of Corona (sports inventory becomes very popular when gyms are closed and, considering good quality, our price is a real bargain) was seriously surpassing our ability to assemble and start delivery in less than 24 hours as we didn’t have enough manpower in warehouses.

Preparing online and paperwork and supervising assembly is much calmer but at the same time much more responsible work to do. One shipment includes nearly 600 units of different product positions that must have the right sticker (which are vary from one position to another), must be put in boxes in same amounts as it was earlier mentioned on the website, boxes must have stickers to, plus some other website peculiarities. Now imagine if anything goes wrong during receiver’s supervises check and he finds one unit without a sticker or with wrong, or a mistake on box’s sticker, or what box’s sticker says mismatch with what inside – the whole shipment goes back resulting in big expenses with the addition of lost time of deliverers and warehouse workers. Fortunately, it never happened with shipments I was responsible for.

So it happened that my first working experience was in the company that had a phase of the positive crisis, thus it was pretty demanding and nothing but hard and pressuring for first couple weeks considering that my supervisors were always busy. But it all came naturally when I settled and kept to some rules: prioritize, multitask, but never go to the next step before you completed the previous, think twice before disturbing others with your question, and ask for help only if you sure you can’t answer or solve something without it, if you do something monotone and responsible you don’t want to spend time fixing the mistake after you found it, better develop the most perfect system possible of how you can do it before you start. These realizations will help me in future for sure.

Even though I couldn’t implement a lot of theoretical knowledge that I acquired during my studies in JAMK, at least because it wasn’t the right time for serious managerial or strategic marketing changes, I learned all stages/operations of such a business concept, learned it’s structure. I developed myself as a professional, as a part of an actual working team, sharpened my problem-solving skills. I am confident that from now on when I’ll study on BBA I won’t have such a misty understanding of what it actually means to be an employee.

Author: Aleksandr Levin