Creating Possibilities - Ashutosh Bhushan's Internship Experience At Lava International - IMT Ghaziabad

Why FMCD? - One of the questions that was part of the interview for a long but enriching experience of summer internship with “Lava International”. The answer - Marketing a product which has a high shelf value and cost, will be a bigger challenge and will invite greater customer scrutiny. After a GD and grilling interview, I along with five others was given the opportunity to work with Lava in the summer of 2017.

Working in a growing company comes with its own set of challenges and learnings. The project that I was assigned to, was to formulate a low-cost engagement model to increase sales on counter where the on-role promoter was not present. A promoter is a representative of the company that facilitates the sale of products in a retail store. The impact of the project was immense and given the time span, a successful delivery was equivalent to scaling the Everest for me. The complete experience broke some myths which I carried with me before going for the internship.

You will be taught tricks of the business just like college

On the third day of our internship we had the privilege of meeting the COO of the company. During our fruitful interaction, we all discussed the current and future strategies of the company. But in the end the line that caught my attention was “You all are not here to learn from us, we are not that great to teach you anything. We want all of you to teach us something new”. The amount of confidence and belief shown in our abilities boosted us to achieve greater heights.

Role is fixed and the domain of your work is defined

When selected for internship everyone gets a job description and domain in which they will be working. But for me limiting yourself to a domain restricts the scope of learning. To explore one’s full potential, one needs to be adaptable and be ready to don any hat. During my internship, I was like a spy collecting information from competition. I felt like an HR personnel while trying to understand the lifecycle of promoters, an operations executive trying to unravel the proposed processes for calculating turnaround time and finally a finance executive to perform the financial modelling of the proposed processes. Because in the end it is all about the money.

Two months - Too small a time to make an impact

Intern is often regarded as the one who carries coffee and perform menial jobs. Some term them as a liability for any company to have. In Lava things were different if you talked sense and had enough reasons to back your strategies, they will not just hear you, but make sure it gets implemented. Implementation of a model suggested by a fellow intern from IMT is proof enough that an impact can be made even in two months.

On the very first day of the internship we were asked to create possibilities. And my project was synonymous to the intent. In the two months of my internship I was successful in devising an end to end strategy to drive sales from counters where on role promoters were absent. To test the validity of the strategy I did a subsequent cost benefit analysis for the same. In the coming two to three months they are planning to roll out the strategy with a few changes. The feeling of adding value to the company you intern with is magical. Though the ride was filled with its share of ups and downs I was certainly able to create possibilities.