Pretty early on in my internship, I discovered my “place” in the business. The reason that this small team needed to hire an intern for a summer. To fully understand my role in the business, its best to dissect the roles of each employee and examine the gaps.

Ross

We’ll start with the founders. Ross, Dan, and Bryan. While all three of these guys are directing the company, it has been my observation that Ross does most of the directing and big picture planning. Ross is a bit of an every-man. He writes code, maintains databases, takes sale’s calls, and keeps check on everyone else in the company.

Dan

Dan is the “Creative Director”. He has a degree in arts and design. He’s the guy who spends the most time with Photoshop, CSS, and working with clients to get the design they want. Of course, he also has a say in the mission of the company as a founder.

Bryan

Bryan’s official title is “Director of Technology”. He oversees the more technical aspects behind hosting, load balancing and recently, content delivery. He makes sure their client’s sites run smoothly and as efficiently as possible.

Jason

Jason is the Project Manager. He works closely with all clients through phone and email and relays pertinent information to the directors via our in house ticket system. Jason also acts as technical support.

Tom

Tom works as supplemental customer support and as a sales representative.

With each person’s duties out of the way, now let’s focus on where Punchmark currently stands as a business.

Punchmark’s IP is in their custom website building framework and the numerous applications and services that they offer. This is the hunk of code base that has undergone 5 revisions in the 7+ years they’ve been in business. It’s nearing perfection at this point allowing them to focus more time and resources on customer acquisition instead of building “the system”.

Punchmark is certainly entering the growth phase of business. However, they have a substantial list of tiny bugs and feature requests that are currently not worth their time to work on. Enter me. I get handed the tasks that would normally be handed to Bryan or Ross.