The importance of digging deeper and trust
By Charles
This has been a good lesson in making sure you continue to dig and understand everything about the client and the organization and not just take the problem they present at face value. It also has reinforced how important trust has been in this project.
While I know I will not have the opportunity to visit Burkina Faso anytime soon I do feel very connected to the work, the client, and the mission. My colleague and I have spent most of the month of March having conversations with individuals with subject matter expertise in the following areas: impact investing, business incubators, women entrepreneurship, curriculum development and not-for-profit management. All these discussions have been helpful in the refining of our scope of work and the end deliverable for our client and his incubator.
At the end of my first blog post my colleague and I were quite certain we were going to help our client focus on a more formal recruitment process for entrepreneurs and mentors as well as doing a deep dive into the impact investing ecosystem in Western Africa. While we have performed the initial due diligence and research for this process we came to the decision to table these issues to address a much more pressing issue at the incubator. Upon further discussion with our client, it has become clear that the incubator needs to put its energy into strengthening the foundation of the organization before it can expand its operations and funding. Our client is the only person who has a focus on the incubator on a daily basis; however, we found out that this is not his main source of income or his main job and there is no one dedicated to managing the finances, marketing, operations on a full-time basis. The individual responsible for finances and accounting is a board member who is not responsive and very passive in his role. These discoveries have been critical because if we were to have pushed on with our current scope of work without addressing these internal structures we would not be setting the incubator up for success. Caroline provided us some of her research, which was also revealing in the necessity of having a strong organization before pursing external objectives. We are comfortable moving forward focusing on improving the incubator’s internal operations before we offer ideas to expand their external reach and impact.
This has been a good lesson in making sure you continue to dig and understand everything about the client and the organization and not just take the problem they present at face value. It also has reinforced how important trust has been in this project. Our client has trusted us to truly show how spread thin the incubator is, and I am confident he will be excited about this change in direction and to allow us to help him build out the incubator’s internal operations.
Unfortunately, we found out last week that our client lost his father. I feel very grateful that our client has been open in sharing this information and for keeping us updated on how he is doing on a personal level. I truly am grateful for the relationship we have developed with our client and it has certainly gone beyond the scope of work on this project. I do plan on visiting our client in Burkina Faso one day.