Thoughts From an Intern: What Makes SocialMadeSimple Such a Unique Company

     As I approach my final days with SocialMadeSimple before I head back to college, I’ve done a lot of reflecting about what I’ve learned and how I’ve developed throughout my time here this summer. Despite the unique circumstances of working from my makeshift home office and meeting my colleagues through Zoom calls, interning for SocialMadeSimple has taught me priceless lessons about not only business and the world of digital marketing, but also what a healthy and productive company culture looks like in the pursuit of business development and customer success.

     As I’m sure most of you reading this know, there is a common stigma regarding intern work as being monotonous and often unimportant to the broader development and success of the company. While I was not necessarily ecstatic about the prospect of creating excel spreadsheets for six hours a day, it was what I was expecting, and I was just grateful for being given the opportunity to work with a company as prominent and knowledgeable as SocialMadeSimple. However, my estimation of the work I’d be doing here couldn’t have been further from the reality of my situation once I was finally on-boarded. One of the very first things I was told in my introductory meeting was that I should do work that I was actually interested in doing. Our CEO, David Black, told me that the way I would add the most value to the company through my experience here would be by gaining the most value out of my experience here, and he was absolutely right.

Not only was I given the courtesy of working on projects that I found to be beneficial for my development in the business world, but I was welcomed with open arms by each and every employee who I interacted with. My ideas were heard, my work was appreciated, and I felt like I was given the same respect as any other employee despite my quick arrival and brief tenure with the company. This open and welcoming environment is clearly a result of the fact that the work that gets done at SocialMadeSimple is nearly unanimously collaborative, and this not only ensures that all outputs are the product of combining different voices and ideas, but it creates a clear sense of cohesion and community throughout the company as well.         

This all may just sound like one big fuzzy tribute to the company that offered me an opportunity to work this summer, but I was never asked or encouraged to say anything positive about SocialMadeSimple in any capacity. In fact, my purpose in sharing this experience is that I believe there’s a broader point to be made about company culture and how it can lead to the success of businesses on a larger scale. By feeling immediately accepted by my colleagues and believing that the work I did here had genuine meaning, I was fueled to work much harder than I otherwise might have if I were just creating spreadsheets and delivering virtual coffees. And that’s the point. From the top down, SocialMadeSimple is a company that’s structured to get the most out of its employees because they feel like they’re more than just a cog in the system, and they are.         

Every Monday, during our sales meetings, I was asked to share my goals for the week and some ways that I believed our processes could improve.  At first, I figured that this was just an exercise to get employees thinking about how they can be more productive, but after a couple of weeks, I realized that David was taking careful notes about the ideas that each of his co-workers were sharing. He genuinely wanted our feedback, and that goes a long way in terms of developing a system and a company culture that breeds production for all of the right reasons.         

I may never work in the digital marketing space again, who knows what the future has in store for me. But one thing I can say for certain is that whether you’re a small startup business just trying to hit the ground running, or an established franchise with deep roots in your industry, these are the right people to get into business with because they genuinely care about the success of their colleagues and clients. Thanks to everybody at SocialMadeSimple for making this such an invaluable experience for me. Intern out.