I have always been an active supporter of college internship programs.  I was grateful for the one year internship my first boss, Stephen Goucher, created for me at First Interstate Bank during my Senior year at Arizona State University in 1991.  It turned into my first job.  I continued to be an advocate for internships during my 10 years at Intel Corporation and brought this same passion with me to BDM Consulting.

My business partner and I have collaborated with BYU Idaho over the last three years primarily because one of their Supply Chain Faculty members was one of my former employees at Intel.  I continue to look for opportunities to work with Professor Whitesides.   In our collaboration, we have taught a Supply Chain Class on campus and by Skype when I was not able available in person.  We have had students write supply chain blogs for our website and had them develop alternative business models for another BDM business investment.  This semester, I decided to take our collaboration to the next level and tap into the hidden and passionate talent that exists in the BYU Idaho  Department of Business Management.

I extended a basic internship offer to Ben Beck after I had lunch with him this summer.  He had been recommended by Professor Whitesides and I was impressed by his risk taking attitude and interest in entrepreneurship.  Ben was not phased at all by the fact that BDM was a relatively new consulting firm and in the process of refining its product offerings and growth strategy.  I immediately put Ben to work as an Assistant to Business Development and Marketing.  As part of his internship, I attempted to spend as much quality time with him to provide coaching and clear direction on my expectations.  I wanted this experience to be positive and I shared openly what it takes to grow a company including all of its challenges.  I appreciated Ben's discipline in executing his assignments and generating value added results for BDM during the short internship.  It was complicated by the fact that it was a virtual internship.  Ben still had classes each week on the BYU Idaho campus and we did all our follow up meetings weekly on the phone supported by the virtual tools that I use to drive accountability.  I was also on the road to Canada and back east during his time with me.

These logistic challenges had no impact.  Ben generated results that set up BDM's marketing strategies for success. The following is an outline of those contributions and recognizes his hard work.

Ben:

• helped me research the emerging solar industry in Arizona and provided me with a better understanding of the emerging technologies that I can use on teams as a member of the Greater Phoenix Economic Business Council.
• completed the research on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and the Airbus 380 that I will use as a case study for my upcoming trip to teach a Strategic Procurement class in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
• helped me to research target companies in Nebraska and Florida that we are looking at to provide corporate Supply Chain training.
• integrated google analytics into the BDM website so that I now have complete visibility to the behavior of our website traffic and the bounce rate.  I can now see what is attractive about our website and what needs help from a content perspective.
• cleaned up my google ad words campaign and provided more strategic direction on targeting the campaign built around focused keywords.  This increased my target market and reduced my costs from getting clicks around the world that could not be converted into potential leads.
• introduced the concept on our website of  "Request a Free Consultation" that created an actionable item on our website and has reduced the bounce rate.  He managed its implementation with our web hosting company.
• also research cost effective ways and helped us design an online email campaign which was just published this week.  This e-newsletter communicated BDM's accomplishments this quarter and offered our clients new services.

On behalf of the Management team at BDM Consulting,  I would like to thank Ben again for all his contributions as our intern.