A Lime-style job ad had the marketing student stumbling
Matti Multanen started working for Lime with factory settings, i.e. straight after graduation, like many other Lime employees. He had just finished his Bachelor of Business Administration, with a major in Marketing, at Turku University of Applied Sciences. Hence, a job in sales was a natural choice. Matti noticed a job opening for the sales position in a job portal for students.
”I hadn’t even heard of Lime before – their three-year-old Finnish department was still in the garage phase and had only recently moved to their first office. Previously, they worked from the cleaning closet of Bisnode’s headquarters! However, the job announcement had already the same characteristics as our work today. There was that twinkle in the eye that caught my interest.”
Matti started at Lime Technologies (Lundalogik at the time) in January 2013 and was selling Lime CRM’s predecessor, Lime Easy.
Identity crisis
Sales, especially great sales, is hard work. You have to be a certain type of person, and some of us just don’t have what it takes. A good salesman is a wizard with words and does magic with the phone. Yet, when other salespeople began to work on their next sales, Matti was more interested in the implementation of the project. Rather than lifting the phone, he was studying the bits and pieces entered into the system.
”Whenever I could, I was helping my colleagues with their projects when their hands were full. I really liked working with the customers as well as leading the implementation projects. This was a real game changer – I realised that project management is my thing.”
Matti dedicated more and more of his time to implementation projects. His close circle had already seen it for a while, but Matti had to figure it out himself. He was a consultant trapped in a salesman’s body. Finally, in 2015, it was agreed that he could stop pretending and become an official consultant and project manager. Best decision ever.
Four years later, Matti had grown mentally and professionally. As one colleague expressed it, he had “hair on the other side”, meaning the clean-shaven, long-haired sales boy had become a bold and bearded consultant manager. Yes! You read it right. In May 2019, Matti was promoted to team leader of project managers.
Tending a flock of project managers
You might imagine that Matti’s job is now pulling him from all angles as he’s taking care that everything is under control while juggling a constant flow of projects. In reality though, things are going rather smoothly thanks to the small team of consultants that actively talk to each other.
Matti ensures that the workload is divided equally and based on everyone’s level of expertise. As all consultants are able to sit and work in the “consultant den”, information flows. However, Matti makes sure that information is shared not only informally, but also in formal team meetings a few times a week. Each member of his team also has an opportunity to share their thoughts and feelings in one-on-one meetings with him twice a month.
Naturally, Matti takes part in the recruiting, interviewing and onboarding of new talent. In addition, he organises training opportunities for his team and strives to ensure that each individual has a career path with development opportunities. In general, he believes the future will bring many new prospects.
“I’m very positive about the development prospects for project manager at Lime. We have had a relatively technology-heavy profile so far, but I believe the future will bring more focus on, for example, behavioural change and/or organisational development.”
“You learn a lot as you go”
A project manager working in IT often has quite a technical role and educational background. However, Matti was far from being a programmer guy when he started working in sales. On the contrary, when he became a project manager, he already understood the customers’ organisations and their needs and internal processes. And that is gold in this business. You can always learn the technical parts as you go, bit by bit.
”I have always been interested in information technology, so jumping over to the project team was actually not that hard. I’ve had the opportunity to learn a great deal along the way. Now I know that nothing is impossible. If you’re motivated and have the right attitude, you can learn a lot at Lime. When we’re recruiting, what we look for in an applicant is the right attitude as well as a willingness to learn the technical side.”
Matti’s passion outside of work is spending time outdoors and hiking. He’s made quite a trek professionally as well, and didn’t even know where he would end up when packing up his backpack in the beginning.
”If someone had asked me what my five-year plan was at the job interview, I doubt I’d have answered becoming a team leader for project managers. I mean, this has been an incredible journey.”