Today we went to Skapa in Gothenburg and met with their CEO, Erik Ekholm. Before we left for this trip each team was given one of the companies we are visiting to research and I had Skapa. When I was researching Skapa the main thing that I felt was that they are a small, close family and it is not work to them, it is what they love doing. When we got to the company today this was completely shown through Erik and the other employees.Here is a little bit about Erik Ekholm and Skapa! Erik is the CEO of Skapa and has a master of science and naval architect. Previously, Erik worked at Volvo Trucks as a design engineer. The company was founded in 1996 and currently has only 9 employees. Their main type of operations is business to business and some of their major customers include Caterpillar, Skanska, and Volvo Penta. Some of Erik’s tips for content marketing consisted of combining paid and organic, informing and activating your sales team for social selling, such as LinkedIn, and, most importantly, create compelling content that is relevant for the audience.An interesting fact about Europe is that Facebook is also used as a professional site for companies along with LinkedIn. One key takeaway that Erik mentioned was that emotionally engaging communication is strong communication. One thing that I could not find out while researching Skapa was what their competitive advantage was, so today I asked Erik what he thinks they are. He stated that their competitive advantage was their long knowledge, and craftsmanship and the ability to create technical content. Another interesting fact is that even though their website is in Swedish, 80 to 90 percent of their customers are English speaking. One thing that I found interesting was that they use WordPress for all of their blogs just like we are using, so being able to see this site being used in the real world was pretty nice!Today we also visited the Gothenburg University Business School, which was founded in 1923. The business school has 7,300 students and staffs 500 people. The school has about 51% female and 49% male. While we were at the school two professors, Claes G. Alvstam and Martin Öberg, presented to us about the university and Sweden. One interesting fact they shared with us about Sweden was that the GDP is about $550 billion. Something that I think the whole group is jealous of is that higher education in Sweden is completely free of charge for Swedish and EU citizens.
Daily Reflections:
– “Anything that does not support your goal/goals, has no place in your strategy.” -Erik Ekholm
– Erik’s advice for the upcoming graduates was: find a company that you can develop and learn a lot at
Off to Sweden We Go 