Excited to be wrapping my last Internship Post. Tomorrow is my last day of being an intern at Details Flowers Software. I’ll be taking off a few weeks to graduate, go home and visit family, and just overall take some time for myself after such a full semester (we all deserve a break sometimes). Towards the end of May, I will be returning to the company as a full time employee!

This internship has strengthened my overskills in social media, marketing, customer service, design, SEO, and mostly importantly, given my such a huge insight into the workflow of a company.

Today and tomorrow I will just spend some time wrapping up the smaller projects I took on as an intern and organizing my drive, my work space and files to take on the full time role.

In conclusion, I actually wish I had taken on an internship earlier on in college. While I am not saying that experience is necessarily greater than education, I firmly believe they SHOULD go hand in hand!

Last week we had a major update in the software, that unfortunately, altered a few link addresses for several customers. The solution was simple, for users to go into their computer settings and clear their cache. However, as I have learned, many people want these things done FOR them. With that being said, the past week has been OVERFLOWING with support calls and chats, so much so that I feel as though it’s been rather difficult for me to get anything else done! I will, say, although I was never feeling too shabby about my customer service skills, my confidence is through the roof after a week like this. 

I also had about an hour-long conversation with a customer’s CPA yesterday, walking her through the financial side of the software and helping her learn about Stripe, our payment process platform that we partner with. The phone call stood out to me, as it was extremely informational TO ME! I was learning all about the ins and outs of being a CPA, sales taxes, and more! And on top of that, she was such a sweet woman. And I know that seems pointless, however handling customers as a part of any job, is not always an easy thing. Customers can be needy and frustrated and rude, meaning those who show care and grace, really leave an impact. 

This last week wrapping up my internship has been bittersweet. As I prepare to make the transition from intern to full-time staff, the other girls here at the company have shown me so much grace and excitement! Like I have mentioned before, I am starting to pile on more responsibilities and the projects are growing larger (but in all good ways). There have been mentions of trips and travels in my near future, representing the company at events all over the United States.

A few weeks ago, I collaborated with another program called Seed Your Future. This program aims to promote horticulture jobs (and overall awareness) to elementary students, all the way to the university level. They strive to share knowledge about careers working with plants and what all the industry has to offer. 

Before working here at Details, I was far from aware of what opportunities were possible in the horticulture and floriculture industry. From marketing to sales, to social media, and more, there is SO much more to be talked about, that students are so unfamiliar with. 

As I talked about in a previous blog post, I spent that week preparing content, interviewing staff members, creating videos, etc. for their social media takeover. Since that week, I have kept close in contact with the head of their executive director, Jazmin. 

I have now committed to work alongside them and have virtual conversations with Jazmin weekly. We here at Details, are in full support of spreading awareness regarding the horticulture industry and my boss is also in full support of me working on small projects with them. In the fall, Sedd Your Future will be hosting a virtual career fair, and ended up registering me to go to one as a “student” to take notes, log my experiences, and give overall feedback for the career fair they plan on hosting in the future. 

I have enjoyed having more long-term projects and especially making and maintaining connections in the industry with those outside of my current company. Especially with Seed Your Future, I hope to help continue promoting as my role goes on. 

It’s been super busy over here at Details! In the past week or so, I have been slammed with projects and other assignments, and have also been officially offered (and have accepted! yay!) a full-time position with the company after graduation! 

Now that I am on track to being a full-time employee, there are definitely much more things being tossed my way… including projects that will expand over the course of a few months. I have continued with my daily tasks that include answering any calls that come in, creating and sending out marketing emails and graphics, partially running the social media, etc. 

Additionally, I have been doing quite a bit of research into SEMRush and SEO so we can be more keyword focused with our marketing these next few months as the busy season slows down. A major thing I have noticed in the past week, is I am now told something in a brief spur of the moment conversation and expected to make sure it gets done. I feel as though earlier on in the internship, we had lists of tasks, emails asking us to complete assignments, etc – whereas now, one sentence may be directed my way during a meeting with an “oh hey Olivia can you make sure that gets done” and you bet your bottom dollar that better be done ASAP! It took me a bit to get used to, but am making sure to take notes and really double check EVERYTHING!

Overall, I am extremely satisfied with everything! The team here is amazing and three months ago I was not at all expecting a full-time position to come out of this experience and I could not be more excited and grateful! One thing I am especially looking forward to is the travel that comes along with the role (my first work trip hopefully in June to Miami)! The team travels to several conferences/events each month and in Miami, a few of the girls are going to be taking a trip down to visit one of our favorite partners/wholesalers to tour their offices and catch up with their team! 

The past week and a half have been calmer than the previous weeks. Our CEO has been out of the office for nearly two weeks now, visiting top florists in Greece, and now in Washington, DC for the Congressional Actions Days. 

With that being said, a lot of prep work goes into her being out of office. I had to create drive folders for each event/conference she attended. I pre-planned several captions and had outlines of what we would post after each event.  

These past few days have entailed lots of Support calls with new customers that have joined via March conferences, many blog writeups (social media tips and tricks, webinar recaps, masterclass recaps, etc), lots of graphics created for the blogs, meetings with the team, and a few more fun reels than what we usually do! My favorite blog to create this month was from complete scratch and entailed researching all about social media in the floral/horticulture industry. And as someone who also works a lot with different social media platforms – I found it to be extremely useful to be assigned this blog.

Additionally this week, I was asked to design a new banner for our table when we got to Career Expos at Universities. This was a rather daunting task, as it’s the main centerpiece that people will see when approaching the table. I created several drafts, before sending them off for first approvals. My first drafts were highly praised and just critiqued with finding a more gender-neutral color scheme. My final draft was approved today, and will now be sent off to be printed! It’s one thing to create graphics for the website, social media, and even blogs, however, to be able to see physical designs come to life always boosts your confidence a little more than usual!

This week was a busy yet exciting one! Throughout the week, I of course continued working on my daily tasks such as speaking with consumers, updating the client list, and answering any support calls and support chats. 

I finalized multiple email header graphics and created a four page blog post with graphics.  I created and posted several social media outlets and monitored all socials Wednesday, as it was our big Social Media Takeover. The takeover was okay, however, because it was all “pre-submitted” from us – the comapny we were taking over was definitley not following our instructions/schedule as well as we had hoped. However, the experience was still very benefical for both ends.

March is the busiest month here at Details, so we have spent this week preparing for the next 30 days. On my end, this has included: pre-planned posts, creating that schedule, writing out captions for posts when team members are at events, taking responsibility for a few blog posts (I will be writing 3 blog posts this upcoming month!), and so much more! This week was filled with many meetings in preparation for the chaos these next four weeks are going to bring. 

Additionally, I had a discussion with my boss, regarding the potential of a position after graduation (which is beyond wild and partially nerve-wracking to even think about). I couldn’t be more thankful for this opportunity and have immensely expanded my knowledge so far, even just in the two months I have been here. This group of people is very much so a group I could see myself working around for the next few years! Updates to come with this of course!

The past week and a half has been a whirlwind here! I am still working on my everyday tasks in Hubspot (a software that I now feel proficient in), making phone calls to clients, answering any support chats/calls, and attending weekly meetings. 

I have also been consistently pushing out reels and other forms of content that I have been working on and spent a majority of this week preparing for the Instagram takeover that will be taking place mid-next week. This week also brought along a few new experiences – helping create new email footers/graphics for the entire company, working on new email graphics and headers to be sent out to all of our clients, and even working on some marketing content emails. 

And today here in the office, a majority of the full-time employees were out of the office for a Grow FL Entrepreneurial event in Orlando, Florida. With that being said, I had to hold the fort down along with one other team member. While I obviously was not just left to do everything, I think this was a major turning point and a huge opportunity for me to prove that I can handle myself with no guidance or extra assistance. I had to answer several incoming clients calls with a variety of concerns/questions. I monitored the support chat and sent out all of my closing emails – while still completing my creative assignments for that day. 

It’s wild to me how quickly an 8-hour day can go by when you are constantly working on new tasks and/or assignments and really just enjoy working with the people around you.

This past week was a relatively slow week here at the offices. I worked on my daily tasks via Hubspot. Here I work on smaller assignments such as manually updating Hubspot to Sync with our software, setting personas of new clients, looking over churn risks, etc. And I am now connecting with clients, answering any chats that come into the support box, and answering any questions called into the support team. Additionally, I was assigned a new daily task working with the Client List last week. The client list is a massive spreadsheet where we track every client we have ever had, and we track our current clients (deciding if they are high-risk, or low-risk, and updated monthly and annual payments). This is an extremely important project that our CEO oversees daily – as it projects the revenue of the company for up to 5 years. 

Creatively, I created several email header graphics to be sent out to the Marketing email groups this next week. These are all from scratch and often have to incorporate our logo and our partner’s or sponsors’ logos. I was also assigned an Instagram takeover we are collaborating with another company on. At the beginning of March I will be hosting a takeover (meaning lots of pre-made content) of “Seed Your Future”s Instagram. We are creating office tours, hosting interviews with all employees, and even giving a tour of the new Stetson and Details Centurion Sales office space. So this job is rather large, in terms of spreading out the work over this next month to have submitted one week ahead of the takeover. I also am overseeing the more organic content for our social media currently, and am constantly creating in-the-moment ideas!

In the next week, I look forward to learning the new projects I will be assigned, researching trends, working more with SEO, and gaining more knowledge on the marketing workflow of the team!

If I were to choose three words to describe the past week, I would say: overwhelmed, excited, and advancing. In the past four days, I have been thrown random projects, assignments, graphics to design, ads to prepare, blogs to write, and even customers to reach out to.

To say I feel valued would be the least. I am, however, feeling very good about things. I feel incorporated and I feel “In it”.

This week, I definitely dove more into the Marketing department. I was tasked with creating graphics and advertisements that will be displayed on our partner’s landing pages (and even got great feedback from the CEO on this work). I was in charge of creating an entire blog post that recapped a monthly webinar. And I also helped work on email header graphics, a monthly job that I have now been assigned from now until the end of the internship.

One of the main things that have come out of this past week, is that I sometimes need just an extra boost to feel that “confidence” I am yearning for within the company. On Monday I was asked to call and talk to a client for the first time, and my immediate response was: “Oh, well maybe tomorrow… I’m not thinking I’m ready for that yet”. Of course, I was still pushed to make the call. And as you could guess, everything went fine. In fact, it went more than fine. Getting past that nerve allowed me to confidently talk to customers this entire week and explain things about the software I didn’t even know I knew. So my goal for the next few weeks is to stop underestimating myself. I was hired because someone was confident that I would be the best fit for this job. And I know have a role to prove and demonstrate that!

Last week I began my position as a Creative Marketing intern at Details Flowers Software. Eventually, I will focus on social media, graphic design, and social marketing. However, for the first month, I, as well as the other intern (he is a sales intern), will be training with the Details Support and Service department to learn everything there is to know about the software, how it runs, how it benefits our clients, and how the different departments work together for the best possible final result. During this internship, I will be working Monday through Thursday 9 to 5. I was initially a bit skeptical regarding such a heavy workload, however, and confident in the preparation it will provide me with for my future career goals. 

Immediately I felt comfortable and accepted by the team and have been working on tasks since the first hour. As interns, we are treated as a part of the team. We attend all team meetings, and events, and so far, have been valued for our current knowledge and skills. The past two weeks I have learned how to create and transfer spreadsheets, specifically for the AIFD Symposium that will be occurring in July. I also have been consistently shadowing the support team with calls, and tasks, and learning all of the ins and outs of Hubspot. Additionally, I have conducted several calls to clients regarding their subscription plans, and have sat in on multiple tutorial meetings for the software (these are called “Details University Courses). 

This Thursday (today), we had the opportunity to accompany the Details team to the official ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new Details Sales Lab in partnership with the Stetson University Centurion Sales Team. This was my first major event and gave me insight into how respected Corrine Heck (my boss and Details’ CEO) is in the business industry and the floral world. And I am confident that I will be learning so much more from her over the course of these next few months. 

While I am incredibly eager to begin working in the marketing department and more specifically in the social media and graphics area, I feel as though working with the support team has been very beneficial in my understanding of how the marketing approach should go and why it is important to understand the company as a whole before jumping into such a specific team. I could not be more excited about this opportunity and am looking forward to really understanding the workflow of such a successful company.