Day - 6 Auto Adapt

Wow what an incredibly eventful morning... I don't think anyone could explain it any better than my roommate Tyler Wagner. "So the morning started off on a not-so-good note. Let's start with waking up...usually the girls next-door wake us up when the showers are open, but that didn't happen. Luckily, we'd already waken up out of habit but our alarms didn't seem to go off…dodged a bullet there. Moving on to breakfast when everyone was all settled and grabbing a quick bite to eat, I decided to add what I thought was a hard boiled egg to my breakfast. Well...it definitely was not a HARD boiled egg but a soft-boiled egg. Next thing I knew the egg was all over the table, my suit, and my tie...just great. So we all rushed to do what we could to fix the mess and the girls came in clutch...gotta love em! After we got that issue resolved we all went to meet up for our private bus that was supposed to take us to the company...turns out that it was running 15 minutes late. So we decided to go sit in our room for a bit and then we all remembered Nick and Alex. We were supposed to wake them up! Immediately we started knocking on their door and telling them they had to get ready quick. On the bright side they had fifteen minutes because the bus was late, but we still felt terrible because we forget about them. As they both got ready we all started to talk about how the day wasn’t looking too good so far and that's when Joe's hand just started bleeding because they were so dry. Then we all started thinking about what could happen next. However, we decided to stay optimistic and the rest of the day went like this..." Luckily the rest of our day turned out pretty well.

Auto Adapt was our one and only stop of the day and let me tell you I know that this is going to be my favorite place we visit while being here in Sweden. After visiting this company and just hearing all of the things they do to help people who are in need is astounding. They are a very close company and they seem as if they are a family. This kind of atmosphere has really sparked my interest in this business. Before today I have always been on the fence about entering in business similar to this. As I stated in my first blog about Bruno I have to brothers who have CP which has forces them to use wheel chairs. We currently use quite a few items from either Auto Adept or Braun one of Auto Adept’s partners from the United States. Growing up using all of this equipment I feel like I would already be ahead of the game in this industry. After talking to Anna – Karin Holmqvist, and Hakan Sandberg and hearing their stories about why and how they entered into this market it has really made me want to become apart of this as well. Thanks to them I now really would like to enter into a marketing position in this market.

While visiting today Anna gave us a rundown of how they interview clients as well as some other HR tasks. For their latest position they had over 700 applications for one position! To me this just shows how wonderful it would be to work in this company. Even though they are doing such a great job they are still finding areas for improvement. Anna stated that in the coming year they want to improve their training program, company principles, and talent management. This company will definitely be able to cover those goals. They have such great managers who are in place there currently.

After Anna Hakan talked to us about how to start a successful business. For those of you who don’t know Hakan has started over 15 business, one of them being Auto Adapt. Hakan has so much incredible knowledge and experience in this field. I did everything I could to take in as much of his knowledge as I could. He gave us a 20 point presentation on how to become successful when starting your own business. As our professor was saying we basically just received our 3 year MBA from this presentation in 1 hr. I was extremely impressed with what Hakan had to say but I was even more impressed with some of the quotes he stated throughout the day. My very favorite was “Its okay to make mistakes, because you need to learn from your mistakes in order to grow”. Hearing this was just astonishing to me, today we have been brought up that if we make mistakes the punishments will be severe. I feel like using this approach allows his employees to have so much more freedom while working. When someone is able to not worry about being punished for making mistakes then that person has so much more opportunity to flourish and become a great employee. Hakan definitely understands this and welcomes it with open arms. Another one of my favorite quotes was his “be proactive not reactive”. This can be the motto for any beginning business owner. Being a proactive person means you create or control a situation by causing something to happen rather than responding to it after it has happened. In business being proactive is the best possible thing that you can do if you want to be successful as Hakan stated. These two quotes just gave me so much respect for Hakan and easily proved that he was a fantastic manager in my eyes. Hakan does a very good job of being proactive by constantly creating new goals and checking up on them for each department in his business. This is a great example of Hakan staying ahead of the game by constantly setting standards for his employees to meet that will help the business grow. I learned and incredible amount today not only about business but about life. What a great experience!

After we came back to the hotel JJ had us get together for our group dinner. We went to a restaurant just a few minutes away from the hotel. This seemed to be a very nice place to eat. After seeing this I soon found out the true history of this restaurant. Apparently this building back in history was one of the king’s favorite horror houses. I thought that was a very funny but interesting fact. The food there was terrific as well as the stout Joe and myself ordered. My very first dark beer!