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Setting up a Framework for an Intern Program

(Part 2 of a summer-long blog series by Jesse Davis, co-founder, Entrustet)

So you wanna set up an Intern Program, but you don’t know where to start? This is the position I found myself in this past March. This post is laid out in a series of questions I asked myself back in March, and the answers I came up with eventually became the framework for the program. I compiled these answers together into an informal document outlining the program. The document only got used for internal purposes to get myself and co-founder on the same page with regards to the Intern Program, but as is the case with writing a business plan, it’s a necessary step to take just to make sure you have fully ironed through all the big ticket issues you’ll face along the way. As you read the questions and answers I came up with below, I encourage you to consider how you would answer the questions for yourself and your company.

Do you even need/want an Intern Program?

We were starting to ramp up operations shortly after launching in March, and I found myself spending about 50% of my time taking care of menial tasks such as searching Yellow Pages for lawyers and manually adding them to our contact management system one at a time–this is when it first dawned on me that if I could figure out a way to free up even half of that time for myself and co-founder, it would result in a dramatic increase in high-level task productivity.

Then I noticed that my partner and I were overlooking obvious grammatical mistakes in our marketing materials and on our website–a sign of the fact that once you’ve seen something so many times, you’re less likely to find errors and omissions. Also, our creativity was down because we were spending so much time looking at the same things over and over. We needed a fresh pair of eyes to help us take some new creative leaps, but didn’t want to spend the money on various consultants. It was now clear that an Intern Program could be of great value to us as a company.

Something that I’ll keep coming back to is the fact that setting up and implementing an Intern Program is a lot of work–I spent about 40% of my time in the month of March preparing, and now I spend roughly 10-15% of my time managing the current 9 interns. That said, if you are just super super busy at the moment and have too many things going on, then I would think long and hard about whether it makes sense to dive head first into an Intern Program at the moment–a thrown-together Program will actually hurt you more than it helps you. And if you don’t have the time to carefully lay out tasks and organize yourself, then you’ll spend your time worrying about finding work for the interns to do, which obviously is not a good situation to be in–for you NOR the intern.

Create a mission statement for the program

I admit mission statements are a bit corny, but there’s nothing wrong with taking some time to consider what you’d personally like to get out of the program in order for it to be deemed a success. Then, think about what you’d like the interns themselves to get out of the program. This is an interesting double-sided view that allows you to really set goals to make sure everyone has a successful experience, not just you as a company. The reason for this is obvious: if the interns are having a good experience, then they’ll obviously work much harder and be happier and put out better work. Here’s what we came up with at Entrustet:

What we as a company want to get out of the program:

• Save time by outsourcing many day-to-day tasks to interns
• Save money by using interns as replacements to certain consultants such as copyright editors
• Gain a fresh perspective by having new people look at certain areas of the company
• Test out our hiring & management skills on interns–a less risky option than testing these skills out on a paid employee

What we want the interns to get out of the program:

• They leave the summer with a real hands-on experience that they can be proud to put on their resume
• They leave the summer with a deep understanding of Entrustet’s operations and business model
• They were able to produce clear, useful deliverables throughout the course of the summer
• They leave the summer with the confidence to start a business at some point if they choose

When to start planning the Program and when to implement it?

I started planning the program in March, and it took me about a month to plan and start interviewing. We set a start date of late May for all positions, although a few of the interns wanted to begin on a  part-time basis even earlier than that, which we allowed them to do.

What types of jobs could you outsource to interns? What types of jobs make more sense to do yourself?

There are some jobs that anyone can do–adding contacts to your database, research, etc. Then there are some jobs that it makes more sense to do yourself–handling customer service, presenting on behalf of the company, reviewing contracts, etc. The trick is to formulate a list of jobs for the interns that includes 50% menial work (i.e. adding contacts to the database), and 50% creative projects–more detail on this particular subject in later posts. I encourage you to create a list of jobs that you could foresee interns doing. This is without a doubt the most important piece of your Program’s framework. Why is this the most important piece? Because it’s all well and dandy to say, “we’re just gonna have some interns do some work for us this summer so we can save some time and money,” but when it comes time to actually assigning projects, you’ll draw a blank. This is where I’d imagine most Intern Programs go wrong. Here’s an example of some of the tasks we came up with:

Financial modeling: building new/updating existing spreadsheets, projecting budgets, daily cash positions, cash projections (reflecting emerging trends in user growth, pricing levels and take rates), determining ROIs, research pricing models, and running price sensitivity analyses, etc.

Business development: Daily reports on user growth, take rates on various premium offerings/partner offers, estimate the value of a user’s digital assets,  estimate an attorney’s ROI from working with Entrustet, estimate how many people that hit the homepage for the first time end up signing up, etc.

Daily: add 10 law firms to our contact management system (we use Highrise)

Social Media: Digg project: http://www.earnersblog.com/digg-power-user/, Podcast, blog about being an intern, have them each sign up for Digg, Press page—add images/icons of publications, Google adwords – check the reports daily, look for spikes in traffic/conversion rate.  think about what other keywords we should be trying out, Facebook ads – we havent started this yet, but we will soon.  same as AdWords, facebook fan page – update it with new content, press or blog posts. twitter – search for digital assets, digital estate planning and other keywords.  respond to any inquiries.  post any content (blog posts, press etc) to our feed.  search for lawyers or anyone who is talking about us, digital assets or competition and put into excel spreadsheet, account deletion processes – same as google/microsoft and facebook.  create an account and go through and delete it.  take screenshots and write out hte process in a blog post, check google news and set up google alerts for all of our keywords, Look for legal and individiual entrepreneurship bloggers who might want to write about us.  make a database.  these would be small time people, respond to HARO (helpareporterout.com) inquiries.

Grouping

I found it helpful to consider making certain intern groups instead of just having general interns. This would accomplish a number of things:

• It would give some loose structure to task assignments
• It would help ensure we get the most value out of the Program by spreading tasks evenly across our operations
• It would help me organize tasks into separate categories
• Most importantly, it would allow the interns to work on things they found most interesting to them

So we decided to make 4 groups (note: your grouping choice may be TOTALLY different than ours, this is just an example of what worked for us):

• Social Media/PR group
• Finance/Business Development group
• Corporate Relations group
• Lawyer sales group

Who reports to who?

This was pretty easy to decide because my partner Nate and I split up tasks pretty evenly across operations. Nate handles our social media/PR initiatives and oversees our finances, while I run the lawyer sales program and corporate relations program. Thus, the first two groups above report to Nate, and the last two report to me.

How many interns would you ideally have?

You don’t want so many people that you’ll lose control and run out of work for them to do. This is the biggest concern I had going into this question. Think about how much time you will have to devote to managing the interns once the program is off the ground. I estimated about 10% of my time could go toward assigning, monitoring, and following up on intern projects. I have no real hardfast rule for figuring out exactly how many interns you need, but my gut told me that based on the workload we anticipated giving the interns and based on the 10% of my time that I could devote to managing them, we could have up to 10 interns before it could potentially get to be a problem.

What types of training will the interns need?

This is HUGE. Why is it so important? Because you cannot expect someone to do a decent job if they don’t know how to do it in the first place–and you CERTAINLY cannot expect them to take creative leaps on projects unless they have a deep understanding of the work they’re doing and its implications on the business as a whole.

So what types of training will the interns need? Well, this will obviously differ greatly between companies, but I suggest finding a good starting place. For us, the obvious starting place was to have each intern sign up for an Entrustet account and fully complete filling out their account. Then, we had them discuss what they liked and didn’t like about it. This stimulated great conversation, and actually ended up benefitting us greatly because we used several of their suggestions to make the site better. (That’s another great thing about interns: you’ve got great in-house market testing whenever you need it).

From there, just go back to the list of tasks you brainstormed and carefully consider what skills need to be acquired for each one. You’ll find that the answer is obvious, and most times ‘training’ just means having them look over your shoulder while you show them how to do a particular activity. Sometimes, though, the training will have to be more involved and may take longer. For instance, with out social media/PR interns we had to really focus on making sure they understand the messaging we want to convey in the public arena–do’s and don’ts for how we want the world to see us on the web is a critical lesson to teach any intern before allowing them to represent your company in the public domain. Remember, they are an extension of you and your company, so treat this with care–more on this particular subject in later posts.

Who will do the training?

Decide between yourself and partner(s) who will train which positions. It will probably be the same as who you choose for certain groups to report to.

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Next up, part 3 of the series: Interviewing & Hiring

Tags:

how to run a good intern program · intern program startup · Intern Program Tips · intern programs · startup interns · summer interns · tips for running a successful intern program