I do believe there is an endpoint to learning in my industry. Yes, there might be things you pick up every day, but soon enough there is not much more I could learn. There are different aspects of being a professional that I can learn more about, but there is a point that I will reach where I will not need to learn more. I feel like my industry’s work can definitely get repetitive.
I feel like for my internship it is fine to have an extent to what I learn, but if I was an actual employee in this industry I would want to be able to always have the chance to learn. What is unique about my industry is that there is not one profession. Since the facility is split between two different businesses that somehow find a way to work together very well, you can always be learning. Champion Physical Therapy and Performance gives the chance for The Farm employees to always have a chance to learn. You could sit down with either owner, Mike Reinold and Lenny Macrina, and have a lengthy conversation about anything that deals with the body. They are two very knowledgeable people that know everything about the body. I do not know if they actually know everything, but in my experience here it seems like they pretty much do. It is interesting that there are two businesses in one facility, but they find a way to work together and give each other opportunity to build off each other. I have talked with Lenny and Mike both and it is a great thing for them to give an alternate place to learn in the facility. There is always something to learn in my facility, but not my internship specifically. I am working with The Farm side of the business and there seems to be a limit to what I can learn. I am starting to see that work gets repetitive. It is not a bad thing, because there is a cycle in The Farm. The cycle works from spring to summer to fall to winter. With each season comes different things that repeat. In the spring it is all about getting umpires, finalizing schedules, getting equipment out, and praying that there is no cancelled games. The summer is all about having colleges look at the players and seeing if there is potential for them to be on their college roster. The summer is also for traveling from game to game and from tournament to tournament. The fall is about tryouts and putting the fall ball teams together to see where the kids can play. The winter is all about getting the team practices in and the offseason training. The winter time is probably the most chaotic and best time to learn more about the industry. There is a limit to what you learn, but what you learn is a cycle and that cycle changes, so it is not just a boring job of repetitiveness. It is a job that is repetitive and that repetitiveness helps the business run smoother, because people know what they need done for each season. This week was a pretty calm week until we had to distribute the bags to the teams that were going to play the weekend.
Getting the bags out was very stressful. We were waiting on the jerseys, shirts, and shorts to come over from Three Twins and had to keep pushing the time of players and parents to come and get the bags. I am not 100% sure why the apparel was taking so long, but parents were not happy. These two parents came in at three different times, because the apparel kept getting pushed back and pushed back. They thought it was our faults and kept getting mad at us, but it was not us at all. Then when the apparel came in we had to distribute in ten minutes and get them out the door, which was very stressful. The importance of dependency on other businesses really came to my mind this week. We were really depending on Three Twins to get the apparel done, but they were a week late and they did not get it all out until the very last day we had to get the gear out. Getting the gear out late does not look bad on them, but looks very bad on us. We were also delayed on belts. Baseball Express did not tell us they were on back order when we ordered them. We did not find this out until a week before we had to hand the gear out. We then had to then go and buy belts from a separate place. Dealing with this dependency issue made me realize there is a lot more to do with your business then just your business. It definitely intrigued me and definitely makes me want to dig deeper into the industry. To be an employee at any job is more than just showing up to do your work. I mean if you are doing your job as a profession, it is completely different than having a job as a high-schooler.
If you are at a job that is your profession than you have to treat it like something completely different. To be an employee in your profession, I think it has to be part of your life and treat it as if it was your kid. As an employee you should be willing to do anything that your employer asks of you. An employee should be the most reliable person in a business. Here at The Farm there is a strong set of employees. Jon Morse and Malcolm Goodridge are two of the best employees here at The Farm. These two are the exact definition of employees. They show up seven days a week and work their hardest. Even when they are away from the facility if they get called in then they come in immediately. Between the both of them without taking a day or two off for a trip, they have missed a week total. If they are given a task, they do it. They do not put the task off for later and they put all they have into it. If they do a bad job and receive criticism then they take it and put it into their work. They do not mope about the criticism and disagree with what our boss says. To be an employee, you have to be fully invested and do everything that is asked of you without complaint. This week was more of a laid back week before the madness of getting the equipment and gear out to all the players. With this being a laid back week, I got to observe more closely of what was going on. A big thing I noticed was the “customer is always right” motto.
Jon Morse, the General Manager of The Farm, did very well with dealing with this motto. Sitting next to him and hearing all of the calls he answered to schedule lessons or telling parents the games were cancelled for the weekend, I heard how wrong some of the parents were with the information that we specifically wrote down incase this was to ever happen. Even though I was not dealing with them specifically I still was getting aggravated these people, but Jon held it together and did very well. Jon kept his cool and dealt with everyone in a very good way. Then when Jon did something wrong or forgot to do something my boss, Mike Freire, would get on him for it and give him criticism. Jon did not back away from the criticism, but took it straight on. He took the criticism and improved his work and never bad talked Mike. It was very good to see situations like this and I think since I have seen these situations, I will now have a better understanding if this were to ever happen to me. I felt like even just observing this I became more of professional, because I now know how to deal with it. My industry does a fine job of keeping a balance between work and play. I think every industry should have some play in it, but to a certain extent. The Farm does just that.
There is play every day. It happens in the morning when everyone first gets here and there are no clients coming in for a while. We kid around with each other and watch some TV if we have time. Then we have days where we will go to the basketball hoop in our gym and play a game of horse or two vs. two. This week we also played a big game of wiffleball in the cages. We opened them all up and had a fun game with Champion. Of course all of this fun goes to an extent. Once a client steps into the facility or someone needs to get some work done, it changes right to serious work. There is some slacking around here of course, but not to the point where nothing ever gets done. I think the play side of a business is very important. I have seen the effect it has on everyone. The effect is a very positive one. It keeps everyone from dreading to come here every day, like a cubical job. Play lets you let off some steam and stress and helps a lot. This week felt like a long week. Having done an inventory check this week on everything we have received from Baseball Express, it took a while. To double check all of the order was correct I had to go through each box and count each individual item.
Luckily all of the items were there and the sizes were correct, except for one missing youth helmet. If I had not done the inventory check we would have been in a tough position when we distribute all of the gear out to the players. The experience of doing a true inventory check helped me get a grasp of how important it is to do the stuff no one wants to do. If no one does it then the business would run nowhere near efficient. I also put the Minuteman stickers on all of the youth helmets. This was some more tedious work, but it needed to be done, so we can distribute them all out to the teams. Even though it was a week full of tedious and long tasks, it taught me a lot about running a business efficiently. I talked with some of the clients at The Farm. I asked them about what they think of the industry and there was just a lot of positive feedback. Most of the feedback was about the people who work at The Farm, but as there is in any industry there was some negative feedback too.
The positive feedback was really about the attitude of the employees and how much they love what they do. The employees give their absolute full attention and give all the knowledge they have to the kids they are teaching. With all of the attention given comes compassion that compassion is spread to the kids and their families. This is one of the great reasons of why they keep coming back. The clients are seeing great progress and their confidence is being built up. This is something that will help the industry grow. It is a great way to get the word to mouth popularity of the industry booming. Along with the positives are the negatives. The biggest negative about The Farm is the communication part. It is not towards the clients, but towards the teams. The Farm struggles to get out emails out notifying times of practices and games sometimes. There are times when games get moved or something and the email is not sent out until way later and no one knows when to show up for the game. With the perception of having bad communication it only gives room to grow. We can get the general knowledge of our bad communication to be complaints of over communication. We do not want to reach the point of being annoying, but we want to get rid of the negative feedback we get and get it to a minimum. Our goal is always to improve and this is one of the ways we can. |