Division Manager
Internship Experience
The EcoWash Division Manager experience is a unique way for young people to learn how to start and run a small business. We teach these skills by having an intern manage their own small division of the company over the course of a summer.
INTERVIEWS
Before your internship at EcoWash, there are some things you need to do. First, you need to get hired. We have a selective hiring process with 4 steps. At each step, we eliminate some candidates. This internship is a huge responsibility, and as such, we need every candidate to be a perfect fit. If it doesn't work for you your first time around, you can always reapply next year.
PRE-INTERNSHIP
After getting hired, we keep in touch to make sure everything is going well with you and that you are prepared for the summer. As a part of that preparation, we recommend you read the articles and watch the videos sent to you by your Regional Manager. These are a great way to get yourself ready for the summer ahead of you. These articles and videos will cover content such as how to pressure wash, how to stain, and tips for your internship from past interns. These subjects will be heavily covered in a more formal training later, but we find that those who work ahead are rewarded for their increased knowledge.
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SPRING TRAINING
Late spring is when the internship begins. For most interns, that means they are still in school. Don’t worry, we keep everything part-time and work around your school schedule to ensure you can still get all of your schoolwork done on time.
Our Spring Training is the first time we all get to see each other in person. This is a one-day long classroom-style training. Bring a notebook as we cover a lot. This first training focuses on marketing, sales, negotiation, and a little bit of management. This is not the last time we will discuss these topics.
After spring training, we get right to work in the following weeks on marketing and sales training in the field. Every time an intern is doing something for the first time a trained manager will be right there with them to make sure they are doing it correctly.
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MARKETING AND SALES TRAINING
Marketing training comes the weekend after Spring Training. In our marketing training, you will get an opportunity to learn how to effectively market your services online as well as door-to-door. These are both highly effective ways to market your division, and door-to-door is the best way to do it in the spring. After a few weeks in the spring, online marketing usually takes over for the rest of the summer. After marketing training comes sales training.
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Sales training is a series of estimates (sometimes called quotes) performed at multiple different properties. During sales training, you will get to watch your manager perform an estimate with a real client, and then once you are comfortable you will get to do one or more yourself. This is the first time you will be making high-ticket sales during the internship and certainly not the last. After training on sales and marketing comes production.
PRODUCTION TRAINING
Production is our term for “doing the work”. Production training involves doing pressure washing and staining projects so you can learn by doing. These take place before you ever have to worry about getting a project done on your own.
EARLY SUMMER
Early summer is when the work really begins. You’ve been fully trained, sold some work, and now you need to get that work done. Production begins now. This is the most stressful part of the internship experience.
During the early summer, we start having crews do the work you sold in the spring. You need to make sure they are getting the work done right and to the company standards. You need to deal with scheduling, tracking employee hours, and maintaining reasonable profit margins on all projects. While doing this, you need to keep selling work for future weeks. This can be very stressful and is a large reason why we say this internship is not for everyone.
If you can do well in the early summer, you have some good news. You will likely have a very easy rest of the summer and make yourself plenty of money. This is the time of year that distinguishes the top performers from the rest of the company.
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MID SUMMER
The month of July is one that can be difficult if you haven’t gotten your production figured out during May and June. This can be a continuance of the early summer struggles or it can be a time full of selling work and letting your crews take care of it. It all depends on how you set up your year and how prepared you were.
If you want to have an easy mid-summer you need to work hard in the spring and early summer to get lots of work sold and your employees trained well. If you could do both of those things all you need to do from here is keep your employees happy and keep selling work. Both of those are comparably simple tasks.
Mid-summer is also when we have our big sales competition. This competition is a bracket-style elimination and every week we award prizes to those who make it to the next round. In 2022, we awarded the final 4 with a salmon fishing trip with the CEO and the champion got 2 concert tickets to the show of his choice. The champion went to a Kendrick Lamar concert.
LATE SUMMER
The end of the internship is near. The top performers always finish strong. Almost everyone gets all of their work completed by the end of August if they need to. In rare circumstances, some individuals continue running their production into the fall. This is never because they are forced to but rather that their employees do not need much supervision and they would prefer to continue making money off commission while they sit in class.
To wrap up the year we finish our work and have some fun. We have regular company gatherings throughout the internship, but at the end of the year, we try to do something special for all of the hard work.
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POST INTERNSHIP
After your internship experience at EcoWash comes to a close, we leave you with a commission check (for top performers it can be over $10,000!) and a letter of recommendation from your manager. EcoWash has positions within the company for top interns and if you aren’t ready for that you can do the internship again and get a significant raise. We hope that you learned a lot from your experience and made quite a few friends.