Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Today was our first full day in Prague and we got a lot accomplished. The breakfast wasn't nearly as extensive as it was in the other hotels but it was still good! We started off with a visit to T-Mobile at 9 am and learned a lot about the company. We were greeted with the cutest black, white, and pink notebooks, pink frisbees, sandwiches, refreshments, and gummy bears so I was a happy camper. I loved that the room was filled with hot pink (their signature color) and other bright colors; it made the room and atmosphere more lively and exciting.
T-Mobile was established in 1996 and 4 years later in 2000 they already had their first 1 million customers. Talk about fast-growing! 6 years later in 2006 they had reached over 5 million customers and the number is still growing. Nowadays they have 5.9 million customers just in the Czech Republic which has a population of 10 million; that's over half! The Czech Republic is their target area and with 99.3% coverage I'd say they're doing a very good job of making sure of that There are a total of 230,000 employees and in 2012 their net revenue was 60.1 billion euros (81.95 billion USD)...that blew me away! Their main revenue comes from America and Europe.
A little fact that I found really funny was that T-Mobile decided to find the person within their entire network that sends the most text messages. Turns out it was a 12 year old girl in a small village that sends 17,000 text messages a month. As much as I wanted to be surprised; I have a 12 year old little sister and this seems about accurate.
We then had the honor of meeting the CEO of T-Mobile Czech Republic and he told us a little about himself and more about the strategies he has for his company. He started out in the marketing department and was promoted to Marketing Director before he was then promoted to CEO in Slovakia. He spent 4 years there and then was hired on as CEO of the Czech Republic location. He told us that he values the company on their customer service and social media team saying that they are excellent! His strategy was composed of 4 different parts: having the best data network, best customer service, innovating with partners, and promoting growth within the business. He once told all of his employees that if they met 3 particular goals that he would all buy them a tablet. Unfortunately they fell short by only two months but I thought that was really cool of him to motivate his employees that way. There were many other things we learned but there's the short and sweet version.
Next stop: AVAST Software! I really enjoyed this visit because the guy who presented to us was very funny and definitely grabbed our attention! He started off telling us that AVAST was the acronym they chose for the name of the software before they even knew that meaning was "to stop."  How fitting for an anti-virus software, right?  It was the very first company to come out with a software for Windows 94.  Another significant fact of 94 was that they had 94 users in 7 months.  Basically they thought about closing the doors to the company numerous times and thought the software was going to fail.  They decided decided to do a free trial of the software to get the word out and within 39 months they had reached 1 million customers.  Hooray! It was going to succeed.  The most astonishing thing about this multi-billion dollar, highest paying, number one company to work for is that they do zero advertising.  That's right....zero.  They tried advertising once and spent $350,000 for a particular amount of ads and gained....wait for it......TWO customers.  Crazy, right?  Most companies rely primarily on their advertising to pull in their customers.  AVAST relies primarily on the word of mouth. 
A couple more fun facts before I wrap this up in time for dinner!:
Where does spam come from?....your own computer.
How many new viruses are developed each day for PCs?.....300,000
How many countries use AVAST?........234 (41 of them with over 1 million users)

I hope I was able to enlighten you all with tons of information and fun facts about these amazing, enormous, highly successful companies.  Keep reading for even more on our business visits and adventures in Prague!

xoxo,
Cassie

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