With over 150 employees housed at the Fremantle
Dockers (FFC) headquarters, the place can get a little busy and crowded at
times! It never ceases to amaze me how many different operations and agendas
are occurring within each separate department (and that’s just the
administration and operations side of things!). As explained previously the FFC
is split in to three distinct organisational areas. These include
Administration, Operations and Football. Being in the Marketing and Events department
I am interning within the Operations area. The Operations area includes 3
distinct departments: Events/ Marketing, Communications and Community
Development. Putting it simply Operations are the doers or the implementers of strategy,
whilst the Administration are the planners of strategic PR goals.
Myself being classified as a ‘doer’ or as the
Events Coordinator said in other words a ‘worker bee’, I have realised the
Events/ Marketing department work extremely hard. As part of my experience I
have done absolutely everything you could think of that an intern could
possibly do, plus more! Stocking fridges UPSTAIRS (this involved strenuous
traipsing up and down hills and stairs with cartons weighing in excess of 7 kg
each, wearing a dress and blazer I might add- would not recommend this!),
attending to 78 children plus their parents for afternoon tea at a children’s
football clinic (not as easy as it sounds), visiting a Major flgjghk (honestly
had the most complicated name in the world that I could not pronounce) at the
Fremantle Army museum to provide him with hundreds of tickets for his members
and much, much more. All and all a highly colorful array of tasks that have
taught me the great importance of appreciating the lesson in every opportunity
thrown your way. Positive thinking is key to this!
Following on from my colorful array of tasks a huge
part of maintaining any role within Events includes being excellent at time
management, highly organized and having very high self-confidence. As an Event
Coordinator so many people in various different departments internally and
externally are relying on your organisational skills and pro-activity and the
pressure can become pretty pressure cooker high at times! The best way I can
describe dealing with such pressure can be summed up in just a few words: do not doubt yourself for a second. The
second you doubt what time you have booked the venue or if you actually did
order the 200 gluten free, vegetarian, low fat canapes for the function
correctly, is the moment of your downfall. On my first few weeks at the FFC I
was in charge of counting all of the marketing collaterol in the hundreds for
the Game Day corporate dining rooms. Not listening to my own advice at all I
immediately began to question myself on how many hundreds of teeny tiny little
pamphlets that I had counted out for each room. Disastrous thinking set in and
I ridiculously nearly convinced myself that all of my counting had been flawed
and that the dining rooms in Patersons would not run with my poor numerical
skills to blame! It’s safe to say that Patersons stadium survived my horrendous
counting skills and overactive brain that Game Day and has continued to
function on the consecutive Game Days where my counting became much more self-assured
in the end.
So on that note a few words of wisdom. Trust
yourself, trust your team and for peats sake trust your counting skills!
