Learning curve vs. doing curve

Jan here, the COO. I don’t believe in preemptive learning. What you’ve learned so far doesn’t really matter. No one will ask you about it. How many amazing things did you learn in your second semester of university? Or in 11th-grade math class? It’s all quickly forgotten.

I believe in doing.

What have you done? Because what you will do at Buena is something no one can ever take away from you. I also believe that learning is downstream from doing. You’ll be able to say that you brought a company with 4 employees from a 5% margin to 40% while increasing revenue. You won’t need to say that you learned to understand financial data, manage employees, or sell services. It'll be implicitly clear.

I don’t care what you’ve learned before or what you want to learn here. I leave that to the academic world. What matters to us is that you’ll do a lot here:

1. Financial overview: You’ll work directly with our Integration Managers, who completely own 4-7 portcos (portfolio companies). Overall you'd have to make sure portcos improve their margins - usually through growth.
2. Process management: Help your portcos get their tasks done faster. This includes changing how work is split up, teaching how to use our software, finding creative solutions to e.g. inbound mail and rearranging responsibilities between employees.
3. Recruiting: Get to know - and improve - our recruiting processes and help find suitable candidates for the portcos you are responsible for.
4. Product improvement: Your portcos will have unique challenges. You can dive in, understand them and then guide the product team to build features to elegantly solve those unique challenges with technology.

At Buena, we focus on giving you real responsibilities that make an immediate impact, all while you learn by doing.

Work directly with the Leadership Team

Anyone joining us as a Operations Intern has the opportunity to work directly with the Leadership Team. One could say that you’ll learn a lot from this, but as mentioned above, that’s secondary. Primarily, working with the Leadership Team means one main thing:

You can do a lot: You sit in one room with the COO and he and the integration manager you work with have the autonomy to approve everything and empower you to act quickly. To get a better understanding for what that means exactly ask the Integrations Manager you’ll meet in our recruiting process about how budgets work here.

Hard requirements

1. Native German
2. Everyday in the office

Application process

1. Brief conversation to cover the basics
2. Talk with one Integration Manager, that you’ll work with
3. Conversation with Jan (COO) about values, goals, and motivation
4. Office tour on-site
5. Contract signing
6. Onboarding

These steps can be completed in 4 days or sooner (depends on your starting date).

Read more about Buena here.