My experience with organizations

This blogpost is about my own experience with organizations. I worked at four companies and one of them is actually really interesting to talk about. This company was continuously changing and I got to see a part of that process. The company was a startup and a first in the Dutch market, so they could not duplicate the process of a competitor.

So, before I came to America, I worked at the startup company for about eight months. The company gathers information about pension funds, files them into a database and sells the database in parts. The company is almost four years old now and is in a joint venture with another company that sells databases about banks, insurances, etc.

Since the company was a startup, the company was constantly figuring out its position in the market and how to present itself to the potential market. We had a meeting every Monday and there we talked about what everyone will be doing the coming week and what deadlines should be made. After those meetings, the bosses of both companies came together to discuss about the positioning and how to improve the workflow.

The company had only a few employees when I started, namely two bosses, two full-time employees and two students (included me). Sometimes, people from the other company helped out to make sure the deadlines could be achieved. Only one boss worked a lot at the time I worked. He was mostly working on the development of the company and which way to go with the products and message to the market. One of the full-time employees was in charge of the process of the annual reports and the other full-time employee tried to set up meetings with potential clients and went to events to represent the company. The students (included me) did the ‘simple’ work with gathering the information.

As said, my first job at the company was to gather information from annual reports from pension funds and to fit this information into an Excel sheet that was designed for this information. This was my task for only two months, because after two months the information was all gathered and we had to wait until next year. Instead of releasing me, they found other small tasks for me to do. First they gave me some simple tasks, but further in the process the tasks got more interesting. For example, my boss asked me to come up with an idea about presenting some important ratings. It was really interesting how I saw my boss tried me to challenge myself. I developed my Excel skills rapidly and learned a lot about the process of developing products.

During the two following months, I got really involved in the developing process of the company. I was allowed to design a new product and was involved in the thinking process of the information we wanted to conduct in the product. Besides the change of my job tasks, the company changed as well. In the eight months, the company hired more people and developed the strategy. The weekly meetings made it possible to reflect regularly on the process of the company. Instead of selling the database only (the first strategy), the company now sees that there is more market for products that are translating the ‘boring’ data from the database. The company now tries to develop a product that is specific for a client. Its goal is to inform the pension funds with the right and relevant information to improve their conduct. The company developed its own dynamic benchmark which makes comparing pension funds more easy.