The Power of Potential: Investing in Future McLane Leaders
November 9, 2023
Each summer, college students from across the country spend their summer learning and working in the McLane Sales Internship program. This summer, 14 interns were selected from over 100 applicants. McLane interns are undergraduate students, primarily majoring in business, management, marketing, and finance, usually between their Junior and Senior year.
Our interns kicked off their first week by visiting McLane’s headquarters in Temple, Texas. While there, they gained insight from teammates across different areas of responsibilities and learned how the different areas in our organization work together. A key focus during the week was McLane’s All4One transformation and what we are doing to become a more agile, innovative, and unified supply chain partner.
Throughout the summer, interns traveled to customers and different McLane locations for firsthand experiences like customer meetings, planning sessions, and site visits; working side by side national accounts, area sales managers, and field managers. They learned about customer management, reporting, and the sales life cycle. This provided valuable experience as they worked alongside teammates and customers. Interns took on real-world sales projects and went through intensive training in McLane’s sales and merchandising systems. The training helps build our intern’s knowledge of McLane’s internal mechanisms and aid them in preparation for their final Capstone project. The goal of the Capstone project is to bring a fresh set of eyes to the challenges and opportunities of bringing innovation from idea to execution as a teammate.
At the end of the summer, interns presented to the McLane executive team, with topics ranging from the growth of a McLane coffee program to design and execution of a social media plan for internships.
The McLane Sales Internship program provides important training and development to students near completion of their undergraduate degrees in invest in future teammates, among whom could include future McLane leaders Their projects take fresh looks at possible areas of innovations and new ways of thinking about accelerating thoughtful growth, finding efficiency, and reducing friction in our current work. We were delighted to offer and onboard 10 new teammates at the conclusion of the summer.