Mike’s Three and a Half Years in Europe
After three and a half years of living and working in Europe I have only come to grasp one thing with absolute certainty: Europe is not the U.S.A. and the European Union is not a single market place. Granted, it is very nice to have a single currency in the form of the EURO.
In my case, I left a nice comfortable job as the Field Service Manager with the ETC Mother-ship in Middleton, WI for the diverse, multi-level working environment of Europe. In principle the general idea of my job is the same as when I worked in Middleton: Provide the highest level of customer service and exceed the expectations of customers. But ETC’s European companies are small organizations when compared to our U.S. Headquarters. Because of this, working in Europe tends to remind me of the ETC I started at as an intern in 1995. Everyone is doing everything and anything to get the job done. Now this is not to say that employees in the U.S. are not doing what it takes to meet our customers’ needs but there is a distinct advantage to the economies of scale that a larger organization can offer in terms of available resources. I have no doubt that some of you believe that the large size of ETC often makes it more difficult to work with but I can give you my personal insurance that every time I’m in the U.S. I hear conversations about how to improve the customer experience. It remains an overriding force that drives the company forward. As a matter of fact, I have often said that as soon as I feel ETC has stopped caring, that it would be time for me to leave. So far I’m planning on retiring from here.
In the U.S. I had the luxury of sitting in my office and focusing on the needs of customers and ASC’s (Authorized Service Providers). Sure I was involved with ‘other stuff’ but in the end I just had my little piece of the service puzzle. Work in Europe is nowhere near so compartmentalized. I get to move freely between service, shipping, customs and duties, projects, and finance, all on levels that I would never have been exposed to in the U.S. And this hold true for almost all the employees here. We run around and stick our fingers in the holes of the dam and pray we do not run out of fingers. It is maddening….but at the same time; I never go home at the end of the day feeling that I did not accomplish anything!