Experience in Fresh Nails Holding - Essay Example

Internship Report: Table of Contents: Internship Report 1 Acknowledgment: 4 5 Introduction 5 Overview 5 History: 6 Company Introduction: 8 Overview of Internship at Fresh nails: 10 Market performance and international comparison: 11 Fresh nails. Expnasion Strategy: 11 Types of Advertising by Fresh nails: 13 1. Corporate advertising 13 2. Product advertising: 13 3. Umbrella advertising: 14 Analysis of the company structure and job development in relation to the job undertaken: 15 Analysis of the job undertaken and performance. 15 Supervisor Style of Management: 16 Aspirations of the labour force: 19 Conclusion: 19 Appendix 20 Acknowledgment: First I would like to thank Mr. [Your Supervisors name], my supervisor for providing me the opportunity to work under his excellent management to learn and perform my duty. He helped me all the way and answer's all my questions, even the most elementary questions, with great pleasure and understanding. Secondly I would like to than all the employees of Fresh Nails who were so helpful to me and support me at every stage during my internship. Surely it is a wonderful and a memorable experience and the friends and memories that I have gathered from here will surely go a long way. Abstract My internship was carried out at Fresh Nails Holding GmbH & Co. KG Cologne, Germany, during September 2005- October 2005. The purpose of this internship was to experience work, and reflect on and analyze the management structure. This was intended at gaining the ability to integrate and work in teams and to develop interpersonal skills. My job at Fresh Nails Holding was related to product design and development, implementing marketing strategies, improving the corporate website and supporting business expansion. This program was a great learning experience for me. I gained first hand experience of manual work, and learned to comply with organizational rules and regulations. Also, I had an understanding of the requirements of work discipline. Introduction Overview This report shall discuss my understanding of the work and management structure as well as the experiences and key learning outcomes during my internship at Fresh Nails Holdings GmbH & Co. KG, Cologne, Germany. Starting with a history of Fresh Nails Holdings, I shall give an account of the jobs within the company as well as my job, and the company's market performance. The report is an analysis of the company structure and job deployment in relation to my job, and my job performance. It will also deal with the behavioural patterns and an understanding of the aspirations of the labour force. Furthermore, I shall present an analysis of the management style, structure and culture, including identification of positive features that contribute towards the success of the company. History: Eager "Sex and the town center" - spectators do not pass "Fresh nails" in Cologne, without looking once by the large disks in the business. The three screens are too enticing, on which Fashion TV runs all day (www.freshnails.de). Fresh nails was founded by two brothers Heinrich and Cornelius Becker, one 24 years and the other 27 years old in 2004. Their first studio was the Nagel Studio. The brothers discovered a market gap and to fit well into the chain trend, which fulfill the Germany's textile sector with Zara, Mango and H&M. They supply the suitable nails to fashionable dresses. Their Studios are capable of handling the demands of textile giants. Fresh nails claims that: "The atmosphere is modern and freshly, the mechanism standardized, the prices are not high. A manicure does not cost any more than 18 euro."(Fresh Nails Marketing Plan) They have high-flying plans, dream about a Fresh nails chain and are on the best way to install it. They are planning to open another store some where in the middle of 2006, their fourth address in a side street of the K in Duesseldorf. Heinrich and Cornelius discovered that this so called US trend of nail care has a strong influence on the England and France customer. In France the chain "L'onglerie" opened its last eleven branches out of its 180 branches just last year within the year 180 branches, whereas in Germany this market is splintered into small One Woman Studios. Company Introduction: Fresh nails offers its customers unique experience in hand and foot beauty treatment. It guarantees its customers a very high degree of time flexibility by giving its customers the choice between simple and spontaneous walk in treatment by arranging individual appointments. In order to allow its customers to couple the fresh nails experience with shopping or business appointments, fresh nails stores can be found in the central city areas. Currently fresh nails stores are present in every major German city as well as Luxemburg and Athens. Fresh nails offers its services in a modern and appealing environment on a very high design level. Their store designers pay special attention to a clear and yet comforting ambience. Fresh nails employees have long lasting experience in the field of hand and foot beauty treatments. Moreover they are being subjected to continuous special training programmes. Consequently fresh nails customers are able to enjoy the same exceptional high end service, no matter at which store they visit and whenever they visit. Another point in which fresh nails differentiate itself from regular nail studios is the flexible ands transparent pricing structure. The customers can choose from various categories and then complete the treatment with a choice of extra services. As a consequence the customers can determine the exact type and price treatment. Fresh nails has a strong competence in the development of special hand, foot, and nail care products as well. Fresh nails claims: "For our customer we make no compromises and constantly offer the best products available in the market. A great amount of the products being sold at fresh nails stores are exclusive for fresh nails and can only be found there." Overview of Internship at Fresh nails: Fresh nails although at its starting period of its business life cycle has a very healthy and lucid management hierarchy. I found the environment of the company to be highly professional, practical, and friendly. Everyone being helpful and co-operative helped made me to be a motivated internee of the first batch of 'Internship Program Summer 2005' at Fresh nails. My internship was based on activities performed by Design and marketing department at Fresh nails, with the supervisor. My responsibilities included: Supported franchise acquisitions and negotiations Improvement of corpotate website Cosmetic product design and development Conceptual design and implementation of marketing strategies Supervision of store construction My supervisor's contribution towards my learning is acknowledgeable knowing my internship started at the time when he was busy with his month-end closing. Even with his tight schedule he made sure that I learned what he was doing, and the practical aspect of every activity/ department that Accounts Payable interacts with. During my brief stay at Fresh nails for six weeks, with the help of my supervisor and other employees of Fresh nails I performed tasks that were highly related my educational background. Market performance and international comparison: Freshnails is a newly formed company and is striving to gain its market share. As they have introduced a rather new concept in Germany, they are first trying to make themselves known to their potential customers of what services they provide and how they are diffrent from single branch salons. Freshnails have developed a nail care institute concept which they are franchising in Germany and starting in international countries. As thier market performance is concerned they have progressed at a very rapid pace. Starting from their first store in Cologn 2 years back now freshnails have 9 stores altogether in Germany and 1 store which will be opening in Athen, Greece this year in the last quarter. According to Freshnails its has a distinctive style of service, it makes its customers busy by providing them magazines, games, and even giving them a chance to shop while their services are done. Fresh nails. Expnasion Strategy: It is the strategic top objective of Fresh Nails to build one national chain of beauty service salons with the help of a brand expressed clearly and Corporate Identity. An optimal geographical connection to the target group and one should to the situations of the Fresh Nails branch offices offer a good combination from run and direct customers. To approach the demand and to establish the brand Fresh Nails, it is necessary therefore to extend the enterprise fast relatively. The already generated knowledge from the opening of the first Fresh Nails branch offices is very helpful at the planned multiplication of the concept. The construction and drain process of the spreading can be realized by it also more cost-effectively. It is the short-term strategy cities to place themselves in 1 A and 1 B locations. Fresh Nails plans the opening of 30 for branches until end of the year 2007. Types of Advertising by Fresh nails: According to them there are three types of advertising. They are: 1. Corporate Advertising 2. Product Advertising 3. Umbrella Advertising 1. Corporate advertising In this type of advertising, also called non product advertising or corporate advertising, Fresh nails main emphasis is to try to polish its image and influence people opinion about the brand as a whole and not to the product itself. Their main aim is to get the people to think about who is sponsoring the advertisement and not about buying the advertiser's product. As Fresh nails is a new brand it wants to get itself recognized as a brand rather than through its product because products are a mere part of their entire business process. 2. Product advertising: The other type of advertisement done by Fresh nails is the product advertising. In this type of product retail advertising, Fresh nails presents specific merchandise for sale and urges customers to come to the store immediately to buy it. This form of advertising helps create and maintain Fresh nails store's reputation through its merchandise. 3. Umbrella advertising: In this third type of advertising Fresh nails focus on an advertising strategy that is a mixture of both, Corporate and Product advertising .In this all the benefits related to the Fresh nails products are advertised. As they have multiple products, main advertisement is done for the top of the line products which are generating relatively greater revenue. Basically the fashion products are sold by the help of emotional ad works. In order to involve the customer and to gain his/her attention for products such as these fashion products an emotional touch to persuade the customers. The benefit of emotional advertising is that the message touches human feelings and has a greater affect on the choices made by the consumers in buying the products. Customer participation is also very important in this way relationship is formed between seller and the customer. Analysis of the company structure and job development in relation to the job undertaken: Analysis of the job undertaken and performance. During my internship at Fresh Nails I was able to experience a lot of new things. The type of office work and responsibility of the job are some of the few major things. I started my internship with a frame of mind that working in an organization which main business is fashion related will have a very lax attitude toward work; but after all this internship experience I realized that it not the case. Keeping track of the customers changing preferences, identify their needs, looking which other related business are doing, marketing are only a few task that this company analyzes daily and make decisions based upon them. I chose this company because it is a growing company and the work environment is very dynamic and challenging. Initially it was hard for me to integrate myself within the company, with the company's processes, getting familiar with the employees and working 8 hrs consecutively. The employees themselves were reluctant the share companies information with me as they knew I was here for only a brief period of time as a part of my degree requirements. My supervisor himself initially assigned me simple work like formatting reports and correcting mistakes. It was hard for me as well to probe the employees and my supervisor for information as I didn't know them very well and also because they were extremely busy with their own work. But as time passed I was able to build up good relationships with the employees and my supervisor and it became all that more easy for me to work in the company and integrate myself among the other employees. When I became the part of the website designing team, the experience was awesome. While working with my team I was able to observe my seniors as to how they get around a problem and discuss their way out of it, how they manage to be calm under stress, how they persistently stick to their tasks and follow their deadline etc. I also learned how to be a team player and resolve any conflicts whatsoever with in the team. Soon after my induction I was shifted to coordinate the construction of a new store. There I gained valuable experience of how to negotiate with the labour and how to get your work done which satisfies you. The labour always wanted to complete the work by adapting a short cut technique and justifying it as the only way to do it. My supervisor constantly had to negotiate with them get the work done in his way. After a week or two is was able to understand how the whole process of negotiation and getting your work done your self is done. Supervisor Style of Management: Leadership can come from an individual, a collective group of leaders, or even from the dispersonified characteristics of figurehead, while some other usages have a "leadership" which is more inspirational that it is "active leading" and to which faction show great respect. The ability to influence others is an integral part of the leadership. My supervisor's style of management was more participative than autocratic. He believed that by taking decision with the help of team involvement gives out more effective results. A Participative Leader, rather than taking autocratic decisions, seeks to involve other people in the process, possibly including subordinates, peers, superiors and other stakeholders. Often, however, as it is within the managers' whim to give or deny control to his or her subordinates, most participative activity is within the immediate team. There are many varieties on this spectrum, including stages where the leader sells the idea to the team. Another variant is for the leader to describe the 'what' of objectives or goals and let the team or individuals decide the 'how' of the process by which the 'how' will be achieved (this is often called 'Management by Objectives') (http://changingminds.org/disciplines/leadership/styles/participative_leadership.htm). The level of participation may also depend on the type of decision being made. Decisions on how to implement goals may be highly participative, whilst decisions during subordinate performance evaluations are more likely to be taken by the manager (http://changingminds.org/disciplines/leadership/styles/participative_leadership.htm). Another article describes four processes influence participation. These processes create employee involvement as they are pushed down to the lowest levels in an organization. The farther down these processes move, the higher the level of involvement by employees. The four processes include: 1. Information sharing, which is concerned with keeping employees informed about the economic status of the company. 2. Training, which involves raising the skill levels of employees and offering development opportunities that allow them to apply new skills to make effective decisions regarding the organization as a whole 3. Employee decision making, which can take many forms, from determining work schedules to deciding on budgets or processes. 4. Rewards, which should be tied to suggestions and ideas as well as performance. For example when an employee first proposed the idea to launch the whole Fresh nails website on flash my supervisor refused my idea completely saying that we can't afford to waste money on improving our resources. We are emphasizing more on acquiring new resources. But after this refusal he called a meeting with his IT team to discuss the employee's idea. I also attended that meeting, and the end result of that meeting was that the supervisors said that he would forward this request to the higher management for approval. The general consensus on the case was to give a new look to the website. If there would have be autocratic management style then this idea would have been rejected, but due to the supervisors participative style this idea was implemented and now the whole Fresh nails website (www.freshnail.de) is on macromedia flash. Aspirations of the labour force: The general enviornment of the company is very helpful. The employees are also very motivated as a result of the performance based evaluation process that the company has adopted. The supervisors and the top level managment has a very open culture. The company promotes an open door policy. Any employee can present an idea and can have his say in the overall desicions of the organization. The performance evaluation is done by the Department Head and the Advisor on the basis of the result, KPI met, presentaion, team work and general behaviour. Conclusion: Internship at freshnails was a wonderful experience for me in gaining the ability to integrate and work in teams and to develop required inter-personal skills It helped me to interact with the labour force and gained useful knowledge of to manage them and understand the behavioural patterns. I also gained some useful knowledge about different management styles practiced in the organisation, and what my supervisor followed and why. The total experience was trumendous and help me gained immense knowledge about differentent managment styles and techinques. Appendix FINANCIAL ANALYSIS: Fresh Nails's turnover cost calculation is based on several factors. These contain the number of employees, the average expected turnover per hour per employee, working day per month, man-hours per day and the exploitation of the employees. Fresh Nails's turnover is dependent on the individual business days. The strong Fridays and Saturdays are striking. The turnover trend is rising and is approx. 700,-euros (depending on size and situation of the branch office) per day. 90% of the turnover is still gained by services. In principle you can assume that the concept is accepted positively of the customers and is related to business management useful very well per branch office. Since the exploitation of the individual employees is approx. 65% on weekdays and 70% on Saturdays, a considerable growth potential still offers itself here. The sale shall in addition be promoted by an extended product range and special offers more and more of products. References: http://changingminds.org/disciplines/leadership/styles/participative_leadership.htm http://www.sba.gov/library/pubs/mt-11.pdf. Marketing Plan, Fresh Nails Marketing Department, 2005. www.freshnails.de The Impact of Organizational Culture and Reshaping Capabilities on Change Implementation Success: The Mediating Role of Readiness for Change Renae A. Jones, Nerina L. Jimmieson, Andrew Griffiths Read More