Relationship development is key to success
By Lauren
As a first-year student taking the Social Impact Seminar course, I came into this course excited to make an impact but, at the same time, nervous and anxious about how much help I would be able to provide. While there are still moments of doubt in the beginning stages of the project, I have quickly appreciated the support provided by my project partner, Professor Flammer, my classmates and Questrom faculty.
My project is based in Burkina Faso and focuses on women entrepreneurs. The organization is led by our client who is passionate about creating opportunities for young entrepreneurs to reach their full potential with the goal of increasing economic growth in the country. From the onset of the project, the client has been extremely responsive and excited about working together. This excitement has been something that has energized me throughout this project – something I now understand is vital in making a project successful. When interacting with the client, I realized during our first few meetings that I needed to adjust my strategy and focus on relationship building in the upfront.
Upon reflection, my excitement to get started in the project caused me to jump into the details without considering the importance of building trust with the client. This trust would ultimately help me to be more successful in gaining valuable information and creating a better strategy with my partner.
Additionally, I was paired with a teammate who is an expert in the venture capital space, and takes the time to teach me about areas where I’m less knowledgeable. As I’ve witnessed in my past before business school, the positive relationships I’ve developed with the working team contributes to the overall success of the project.
As we began diving into project details, my partner and I realized that the original ask was a lofty goal. During one of our early brainstorming sessions, we took a step back to think through the overall project timeline and what we could reasonably accomplish in our time working with the client. Instead of creating a client facing program for them, we’ve pivoted to working on an internal playbook that could help support the program when it is created. While the original project goal is an important one, we decided to adjust the scope of work so we could deliver a useful tool, that we could realistically create, that would support the larger goal. We found that instead of discussing this shift ahead of time with the client over a call, it was best to develop a first version of the scope and present it to the client for feedback. This was a great learning as when we reviewed it with our client, they were extremely pleased and aligned with where we were taking the work.
As we have moved forward in our project, I’ve come to realize the immense value of the BU community in helping to push our thinking further. During class, we were able to ask questions to our classmates and get advice/connections the will help push our project forward. Additionally, we have been able to connect with other faculty, like David Stolow, who’s knowledge of nonprofit administration and strategy helped our team reframe our project thinking and reprioritize our work.
This type of collaboration from the Questrom community was not something I expected when I began this class, however, it is vital to being able to complete a meaningful project.