MGT 2600 Final Report Hubbard Coe

Hubbard Coe [Date] [Course title]

Hubbard Coe

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Contents Company ...................................................................................................................................................... 2

Responsibilities ............................................................................................................................................ 4

Course Relevance ........................................................................................................................................ 6

Challenges & Resolutions ......................................................................................................................... 10

Works Cited ............................................................................................................................................... 12

Appendix .................................................................................................................................................... 13

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In August I was offered the chance to work at a local business called Wyo Speed as a

marketing intern. My interest in cars made this position a high priority not only academically but

also personally. The owners, Brian and Nadine Tremblay, had done work on my cars in the past

so I already had a relationship started with the business. This made it less of a shot in the dark

experience for me as opposed to an unknown business. While there I honed my social media

marketing skills and learned plenty about not only the automotive repair and modification

industries, but also about small businesses in general. I was given responsibilities and

expectations that I needed to meet or exceed, a nice change of pace from previous jobs. Working

at Wyo Speed taught me all about the struggles and hardships a small business can go through as

well as strategies to overcome them.

Company

Wyo Speed is a small business located on the northern edge of Laramie, WY. With less

than five employees, you could call it a “mom and pop” style business. While classified as an

“automotive repair” business, Wyo Speed offers many more services, particularly automotive

modification. While some physical products are offered there, the company mainly offers

services related to cars, although they can extend to both larger and smaller vehicles such as

semis and ATVs.

Company culture can be described as relaxed but professional. There are rules employees

must follow, but overall the rules do not define exactly how an employee is to behave and react.

As far as company philosophy is concerned, Wyo Speed prides itself in quality of service and

product. They focus on getting it done right the first time and being fair with their customers. My

position at Wyo Speed can be viewed in Figure 1 in the appendix of this report.

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A factor I find unique to Wyo Speed is the quality of service they provide. Most

small business automotive shops I’ve worked with in the past had severe customer relations

issues and were either difficult to approach or difficult to contact or both. Wyo Speed seems to

take these factors more seriously than others in the industry, particularly locally. The customer

experience resembles that of a somewhat larger business. Professionalism and friendliness are

apparent when you call to make an appointment or visit Wyo Speed in person. Brian and Nadine

create strong relationships with their customers which contributes heavily to repeat business as

well as word of mouth recommendations to other prospective customers.

One of the most apparent pieces of proof of this factor is the popularity of the shop with

the Camaro Club of the Rockies. Most club members live in Colorado but are willing to drive as

much as five hours just to have their car worked on at Wyo Speed even though there are plenty

of potential shops that are much closer to where they live. The club has developed somewhat of a

loyalty to Wyo Speed, I’ve often personally witnessed members recommending Wyo Speed over

other shops on the club’s Facebook page. Wyo Speed works closely with the club members and

even offers a discount that only they receive. I believe this has created a very strong customer

base that for some people may remain as long as Wyo Speed continues to do business. I am

personally able to post in the club Facebook page as well as communicate with its members. The

club page is used for all matters of discussions, and often is a place where people with questions

post them seeking answers. Being an employee at Wyo Speed allows me some manner of

credibility to offer help and suggestions on the page for these individuals. The fact that this sort

of help is allowable free of charge also helps these potential customers to trust Wyo Speed to be

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fair and truthful with them, especially when it comes time for them to pay their bill when they

have service preformed on their car.

Responsibilities

My most predominant responsibility at Wyo Speed is running the social media accounts.

Wyo Speed initially had a Facebook page before I began working there (Facebook, 2016).

However, it was difficult for Brian or Nadine to find the time to create interesting posts while at

the same time running the business. My internship has hopefully removed some of that burden

from them. For starters, on Facebook I try to post at least one picture or video of something in

the shop each day that I go to work there. These pictures are typically of cars or products that the

shop is working on at the time that I feel current customers or prospective customers may find

interesting or relevant. I also try to post humorous videos and pictures which seem to get a strong

positive reaction from page followers while also giving a good presentation of Wyo Speed’s

attitude towards cars. The Facebook page is also a common place for customers to ask us

questions, request quotes, and make appointments or place orders for future services and parts. I

am not the only one that will address these messages, but it is one of my responsibilities to at

minimum monitor them and be sure they receive replies punctually.

I was also responsible for utilizing Facebook to advertise a car show that Wyo Speed put

on in conjunction with Advance Auto Parts of Laramie this past August. Many people and

businesses use Facebook to organize events and notify attendees with updates and information. I

created the event page and used several utilities to promote it to people who would otherwise not

seen it without liking our Facebook page. This included Facebook Ads and Google Ads, which

allowed our reach to extend to several thousand people locally, and accounted for several

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attendees of the car show. I was also responsible for creating and distributing the paper flyer for

the car show, a tried and true method of notifying car show aficionados of the upcoming event. I

created the flyer, then solicited many local businesses to allow us to hang it where their

customers would see it. A copy of the flyer can be found in Figure 6 of the appendix. Overall the

attendance of the car show was nearly double that of the previous year’s show put on by Wyo

Speed.

I also created an Instagram for the company while I’ve been working there (Instagram,

2016). I typically post the same pictures that I would also post on Facebook, but the intentions

are slightly different. Instagram users are less focused on the practical sense of social media and

instead spend their time looking and reacting to pictures that spark their interest. Because of this,

the effective use of hashtags is much more important than on a different social media platform

such as Facebook. An explanation of hashtags can be found in Figure 2 in the appendix of this

report. Instagram has allowed Wyo Speed to spread its reach much farther than Facebook would

have through the use of these hashtags, getting our pictures into the phones of people from all

over the world. In fact, the first “follower” of our account that we received is from the United

Arab Emirates. While worldwide popularity isn’t necessarily a practical approach for a small

business located in Laramie, the popularity certainly lent some credibility to our posts and

attracted a few more customers.

Outside of social media, my responsibilities included several projects that took place

during my internship. A recent one was to build a new pricing matrix for Wyo Speed to

determine how we should markup the pricing of our parts used in services on customer cars.

Parts are essential in most services we provide and can range from quarts of motor oil to entire

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engines. Wyo Speed did use a markup strategy prior to my internship, but it wasn’t allowing

them to hit the necessary overhead required to have positive cash flow. I was responsible to

come up with a new one to increase capital taken in from parts charges, which required me to

build a database of pervious parts charges from scratch. The end product I came up with was

recently implemented so results are not yet apparent.

At the start of the internship, Brian and Nadine explained to me that they wanted Wyo

Speed to also offer a retail factor to their business. They wanted to sell performance parts to

customers, especially to Camaro owners of which the market for is enormous. To begin the

process of this addition, I was responsible with finding suppliers and creating partnerships with

them. I came up with a rather long list of over fifty manufacturers and suppliers and contacted

them to find which ones would be useful in Wyo Speeds retail future. While the retail plan is still

in motion, it has not been implemented yet as it is a fairly long, complicated, and especially

expensive process.

Course Relevance

Throughout the internship there have been more than a few times where I needed to

utilize concepts learned from previous classes in order to market effectively.

1. External factors is a concept that had a major impact on how I marketed. I learned about

this concept in MKT 3210 “Intro To Marketing”. A major one was the cultural

environment I was working in (Bright, 2012). There were two subcategories of people I

was marketing to; car people and regular people who own cars. I define car people as

anyone with an interest in cars or car related subjects, such as racing or humor for

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example. Car people are typically sharp in their understanding of automotive concepts

and culture. While the different sects and cliques of car interests vary widely, not all are

the types of people that came to our shop or followed our page. It was important for me

to recognize the typical car person that we were marketing to in order to avoid posting

something they would find unappealing or even offensive. The other type, regular people

who own cars, aren’t as discriminating with their tastes in cars. I found that they typically

were most interesting in knowing if Wyo Speed could perform whatever particular

service they needed done on their car. It was important to be respectful about their

automotive illiteracy that may or may not be present and present Wyo Speed as a “we do

it all” type of car business to increase confidence and trust from the customer. This type

of consumer didn’t want to listen to us carry on all day about their car and facts about it,

they just want to leave the car with us and when they returned it would be fixed.

Although their needs may have seemed simpler, they still required plenty of thought to

make Wyo Speed appeal to them, in fact I’d say it was sometimes more difficult than

appealing to the typical car person.

2. The marketing mix was also an important factor. I learned about this concept in MKT

4430 “Marketing Management”. Product, place, price, and promotion were all things I

took into account with the experience and projects (Mind Tools, 2016). Wyo Speed’s

product went mostly unchanged. However, additions to it were made; such as the

acquisition of a dynometer, a machine used to accurately measure the horsepower a car

produces. Wyo Speed is one of the only places in Wyoming that has one of these sought-

after machines which attracts more customers. Place was a factor that was already at peak

efficiency. Wyo Speed’s location is largely concrete and unable to be moved, but a

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service that is offered includes picking up the customer’s car and delivering it back to

them in places as far away as Colorado Springs adds to the convenience. Price was

tinkered with during the internship through a price matrix which I will explain in part 3 of

this section. Promotion was the most predominant factor of these four. I made some

major changes to how postings on social media accounts worked, and also made changes

to the convenience of finding information about Wyo Speed. This was accomplished by

working with major search engines such as Google and Yahoo to feature Wyo Speed and

information about the company when people searched it or terms such as “Laramie

automotive repair” and the like. Examples of what these searches appear as can be found

in Figure 3 and Figure 4 of the appendix.

3. Matrices and linear programming were other factors I used during this internship. I

learned about these concepts in MATH 2355 “Math Apps For Business”. Although it

may at first seem like a strange application for a marketing intern, it was practical for my

marketing experiences to be used with it. I was asked to create a pricing mark-up matrix

that would allow a universalized system of price markup for the various items and costs

we charge at Wyo Speed. The reason a matrix was necessary was because we determined

customers would be more focused on overall cost rather than individual costs (especially

of particular various items). I needed to determine a reasonable price a customer would

be willing to pay while also meeting or exceeding the monthly overhead. After

determining how far we were from reaching the overhead before my matrix I was able to

determine markup values that would be acceptable to a customer, followed by adjusting

each price bracket accordingly to meet the overhead with a reasonable margin of wiggle

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room. My database utilized Microsoft Excel and I used the dual method to come up with

the new pricing matrix to be used on all future parts sales.

4. COJO 2400 “Intro to Photography” is a class that heavily influenced the pictures that I

post and how I edit them prior to posting. Because I try to post at least one picture each

day that I am there working onto our social media accounts, the stack of photos has piled

high in the time I’ve been at Wyo Speed. Not all the pictures are up to my standards or

how I would prefer them, but all exhibit concepts learned in that class. An example of

one of these concepts would be the Rule of Thirds (Rowse, 2016). This concept implies

that a photo is more visually appealing when the main subject occupies a specific

intersection of quadrants in a picture rather that in the center. Although most photography

concepts are up for speculation, they are typically correct in many cases. An example of

this concept can be found in Figure 5 in the appendix. Another factor that I try to

occasionally include is a human element, a subject my teacher often was critical of as my

pictures rarely had people in them. This concept implies that a human subject within a

picture can make it more relatable for most people. It’s not necessary for all pictures, but

as my professor said, “your portfolio should always have at least a few”.

5. Business relationships is an additional concept I found prevalent in this internship. I

learned ab out it in MGT 3210 “Management & Organization”. In addition to my

observations of Brian and Nadine building relationships with customers, I found it was a

good opportunity for myself to do the same. I particularly branched out to the Camaro

Club of the Rockies, who had been loyal customers before I began my internship. While

working at Wyo Speed it was practical for me to become “friends” on Facebook with

some of these customers. This allowed me to be more personable in a less formal setting

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by doing various things such as commenting on their posts and sending them humorous

or interesting things. This allowed the customers to feel more trustworthy of a young guy

like myself in comparison to my bosses who have a proven positive reputation.

Challenges & Resolutions

Overall I think the biggest challenge was adapting concepts I had observed and executing

them in social media. I know this report makes it sound like I’m a huge fan of social media

marketing so why would this be a challenge? It was a challenge because it’s not a concept

anyone had ever taught me. There aren’t classes for it, informative articles are rarely written

about it, and the entire field is still relatively young. This made me nervous about the things I

thought I knew and the unknowns that lurked with each step into the field. Overall I found my

social media marketing experience to be positive and at least moderately effective. I had

aspirations of doubling the number of people who liked Wyo Speed and having tons of

customers coming through the door saying they heard about Wyo Speed on Facebook. After I got

my head out of the clouds I learned that a single positive reaction online seems to value far lower

than a positive reaction in real life. That is to say, word of mouth seemed to be more productive

as far as effort into the marketing was concerned than posting on social media. However, I still

believe social media marketing was an effective tool and will continue to be so.

Another challenge I found was the responsibility of the price markup, not necessarily

because I lacked confidence in myself but because it was the first time I had a job that involved a

company’s major source of income. The results of my work might determine if the company

comes out in the green or in the red. My employer’s trust in me inspired confidence and I feel

that I did a good job with the changes I helped to implement. Looking back on it there’s tons of

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things I would do differently to streamline the process, including making a macro for Microsoft

Excel to automatically update the markup matrix based on overhead requirements.

Results of my strategies on social media were overall effective. On Facebook, Wyo

Speed’s page likes have increased 20%, along with over 2000 individual post likes since the start

of my internship. Google reports that over 500 unique users have discovered Wyo Speed through

searches, and 50 have used it to call us. Instagram began from scratch with 0 followers, but now

the Wyo Speed account has 110 followers. Charts of these results can be found in the appendix.

Overall the experience at Wyo Speed has been invaluable to me. Due to the nature and

size of the business, future employers may not feel the same way. However, I feel like this

opportunity gave me the chance to not only sharpen my tools, but allowed me to gain new ones.

Before Wyo Speed I had no clue what it was like to work in an automotive environment, or in a

service based industry that wasn’t hospitality. In my time here I learned so much about cars and

the culture behind them. I learned about marketing online and offline. I learned about trust and

credibility. I learned about the realities, benefits, and obstacles a small business has. I learned the

power of social media and its own benefits and obstacles for a business. This experience has

taught me lessons I think will last me throughout my future career as a student as well as a

professional marketer and may even lead to new concepts and strategies in social media

marketing.

I thank the University of Wyoming for allowing this credited course, Jennifer Hendrick

for overseeing the course and assisting me with it, and Brian and Nadine Tremblay for allowing

me this rewarding experience and invaluable lessons.

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Works Cited

Facebook Page Insights. (n.d.). Retrieved December 5, 2016, from

https://www.facebook.com/business/a/page/page-insights

My Business. (n.d.). Retrieved December 05, 2016, from https://www.google.com/business/

Rowse, D. (2016, August 10). Rule of Thirds in Photography. Retrieved December 1, 2016, from

http://digital-photography-school.com/rule-of-thirds/

The six (6) external environmental forces that can influence your business. (2012, November

13). Retrieved December 09, 2016, from

http://mymarketingnotebook.blogspot.my/2012/11/the-six-6-external-environmental-

forces.html#!

The Marketing Mix and the 4 Ps: Understanding How to Position Your Market Offering. (n.d.).

Retrieved December 5, 2016, from

https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newSTR_94.html

Wyo Speed. (n.d.). Retrieved December 5, 2016, from https://www.facebook.com/wyospeed

Wyo Speed. (n.d.). Retrieved December 5, 2016, from https://www.instagram.com/wyospeed/

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Appendix

Table of Figures

Figure 1: Organization Chart ........................................................................................................ 14

Figure 2: Hashtags ........................................................................................................................ 14

Figure 3: Wyo Speed as It Appears on Google ............................................................................. 15

Figure 4: Wyo Speed as It Appears on Bing................................................................................. 16

Figure 5: Rule of Thirds ................................................................................................................ 17

Figure 6: Wyo Speed Car Show Flyer .......................................................................................... 18

Figure 7: Wyo Speed Google Search Insights .............................................................................. 19

Figure 8: Wyo Speed Facebook Page Likes Graph ...................................................................... 19

Figure 9: Wyo Speed Google Phone Insights ............................................................................... 20

Figure 10: Wyo Speed Instagram Insights .................................................................................... 20

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A hashtag is a linking device used by some social media platforms as tags to assist users

with finding similar content related to the hashtag. Hashtags are formatted with a pound sign (#)

followed by a word or words with no spaces. Examples of hashtag formatting are as follows:

#hashtag, #hashtagexample.

Figure 2: Hashtags

Wyo Speed

Brian Tremblay Nadine Tremblay

Bryce Sinner Justin Madden Me

Figure 1: Organization Chart

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Figure 3: Wyo Speed as It Appears on Google

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Figure 4: Wyo Speed as It Appears on Bing

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Figure 5: Rule of Thirds

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Figure 6: Wyo Speed Car Show Flyer

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Wyo Speed Facebook Page Likes

Figure 8: Wyo Speed Facebook Page Likes Graph

Figure 7: Wyo Speed Google Search Insights

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Figure 9: Wyo Speed Google Phone Insights

Figure 10: Wyo Speed Instagram Insights