CFO Students`Life

From Pizza to Party to Planning

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My Key Chief Financial Officer Learnings:
 

1. Leadership

2. Event Management

3. Work Documentation

1. Leadership

BaBing! A Mail popped onto my phone inviting me to free pizza and beer – No reason not to go – That was the general meeting of the club Students’ Life – An organization to enhance students lives by organizing cool activities and student support for the entire university.
 
I joined the general Meeting ready to take on an organizing position as I had just come out of quarantine and this was my first semester that was not online – I was surprised to see that the chief financial position was open and soon I was a candidate. After a small speech and a rather close vote I actually got the position – Great!
 
Students’ Life had around 80 members and the board of directors consisted of me and four other people. We had 2 CEOs, a second Financial officer to support me and a CTO. 

 

During my time I quickly noticed how much leadership and emotional persuation is necessary to motivate people to help planning and take on supporting positions such as grilling at events, selling drinks and taking care of the cash register etc – Unfortunately, we were not a united front as our 1. CEO was rarely in office and very busy with her master and work.

Thus, I was more independant than I thought and I learned to make connections and network on my own to find alternative solutions to problems and stay in touch with other student clubs at our university. I learned about the concept of a servant leader in a book and was eager to try it in practice – This is what I did in Students’ Life.

A servant leader is a person that listens well to the needs of people around him and tries to find solutions to satisfy stakeholders. In a academic paper I would write on the topic during my stay abroad in Birmingham, UK, I had the opportunity to interview the CEO of  BEC (Britisch Enterprise Community) Daniel Evans who taught me that the difficulty in Servant leadership is balancing the needs of ALL the stakeholders in a way that everyone feels like they “had a fair share of the cake”.

In my Case it was balancing the workload along the active members and ensuring that they feel appreciated and that the workload is distrubuted evenly and fairly. Another aspect was just showing up at the events, getting to know all the members better and also having fun together at big parties.

2. Event Management

Of Course, the core activity of the club was planning events such as volleyball tournaments, Beerpong tournaments, LAN Parties, and many more. the goal was to have one event per week.

Thus, although theoretically my job was only to control finances and ensure that the events we plan are at least not costing us more money than they bring us, I was almost always involved in key planning activites. From contacting sponsors to creating timetables and roadmaps for internal organization, I have done it all – I can confidently say that I am able to organize even big events such as the Semester starting party wiht over 5.000 sold out tickets.
 
 

The event I enjoyed planning the most was a collaboration with Our Future e.V., which is another (smaller) student organization at our campus that focuses on sustainability and planning environmental activites such as collecting garbage from the campus and teaching sustainability principles to other students.

Together with Frederic Münchsmeier, I developed the idea of planning a beer box run – With a sustainability aspect! A beer box in Germany has 20 bottles of beer, each containing 0,5l of beer and the goal is to carry that beer box from a starting point to a predetermined Goal that is usually a 1-2 h walk as a team of 4 people. Here’s the point though: The beer box has to be empty when you arrive!

Basically, the more you drink, the lighter the beer box is, but the harder it is to walk as you get dizzy, especially if you are drinking fast. On the other hand, if you carry the full beer box to the goal sober, you have to drink everything at the end – So there are many strategic possibilites for the best outcome. The winners (First team to reach the goal empty) get another beer box for FREE!

But how is that sustainable? We made the destination a lake where people drop a lot of garbage on the way and added the bonus rule, that you can get free bonus beers at the afterparty (at the lake) for every little garbage bag that you fill – Of course, we had no way of controlling if they actually collected the garbage, but in the end it seemed realistic that the teams genuinaly motivated eachother to compete by who can find and collect the most garbage!

The afterparty included a campfire and was amazing as we could party till late into the night and everyone enjoyed themselves at the beerpong tables we set up and the view of a beautiful sunset after a long walk. The event was amazing and I got great feedback from all that joined. Thus, I felt like this event should be possible to all coming students, no matter who is organizing the events to that time. Consequently, I realized the importance of work documentation.

3. Work Documentation

As Students’ Life is a very dynamic organisation, and semester for semester members of the board of directors finish their degrees and leave the univeristy, I made efforts to document the planned events nicely so that coming generation had it easy when planning similiar events.
 
To do this, I introduced the best project management software I know, Notion, to Students’ Life an started documenting my planning activities there – I onboarded all the members that engaged in planning activities and taught them how to plan and document all their projects in one workspace. It worked out great and I just had another session to teach the newer members how to use Notion to its full potential a few days ago – more than a year after leaving the organization to study and work abroad – This successful implementation of something useful I implemented increases my motivation to optimize processes and document sucesses and best practices, fe. in posts like this one.

 

My Conclusion

In conclusion, I learned a lot about having responsibilities and many people depending on you to properly do your work. looking back, this experience helped stregnthen my motivation and discipline in regard to process optimization and planning. Furthermore, I learned many aspects of being on the board of directors not mentioned here such as public speaking, appreciation and empathic communication.

All in all it was a very valuable experience of which I believe that I will profit a lot in the coming years as it gives me a solid foundation for management and leadership basics that must not be forgotten. In combination with concepts like starting with why form great inspiring leaders such as Simon Sinek, I belive I have a good balance between theoretical leadership knowledge and practical experience, in which I implement and test that theoretical knowledge!

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