Retail Leadership Development, AT&T Mobility

>> Alright, so my name's Robert Mendoza. I graduated from USC in 2011. I currently work for AT&T Mobility. I started with AT&T in the Retail Leadership Development Program which is a two-year program. They started us off in Atlanta, Georgia at Mobility headquarters, and we get to meet all the senior vice presidents and officers of the company. From that point, they move us into the retail side of the business and they show us everything. So they rotate us from back to front on the retail end. I ran a store in Atlanta, Georgia; Houston, Texas; and now I'm here in Los Angeles, California doing my final rotation. Here in Los Angeles, I've managed three retail stores, one being downtown, the other one La Canada, and the other one in Studio City where I'm at currently. Collectively, the most employees I've managed is about 35 unionized employees. So we basically drive business in the Los Angeles market. And the goal is to have us get exposure on the front line, and then after the contract is over, we go back into the corporate side or we go up the chain on the retail segment to hopefully become a future leader of this company. So. So after the contract expires on the retail segment, I will be going to -- we basically can choose where we want to go. The main thing is we have to find basically like a mentor, someone who is going to support us, a champion that is going to pull us into their organization and then teach us that side of the business. Most, like I would say maybe about 25 percent go up the retail chain into the area manager position. So instead of -- they want to stay in retail; they manage a bunch of retail stores. Others want to go into the operations side of AT&T, so more of the networking and engineering, everything like that. There's a lot of avenues. It's a Fortune 12 company, so there's a lot of things that I can research into and see what I would like to do. It's just a matter of me finding something I want to do and then coming up with a game plan to get there. So. Well, a busy day starts with the doors open at 9:00. We've got customers coming in from 9 to 9 every day, 7 days a week. So I actually ran the largest corporate retail store in terms of volume in Los Angeles, so our foot traffic was around 30,000 people a month. So basically for me, with 35 employees I have to be able to handle basically the front-end sales all the way to the back-office operations. I'm responsible for everything in the store, so I need the help of my people to get that done. What would be characterized as busy I would say is the first of the month. Everyone's trying to get sales. The customer traffic is high because they got their first month's paycheck. A lot of disposable income in that downtown LA area that comes in and wants to buy phones. One thing that AT&T is really focused on is customer experience, and one thing that we're continuously improving on is wait time in the stores, specifically in our retail stores. So it's my job to be on the sales floor basically greeting customers and setting the right expectations and making sure they have a good retail experience before they leave. So.