Brazil (Spring 2020)

Making the most of a less than ideal situation

By Rebecca

[O]ur team put in a great deal of effort to add value to our organization and we have learned a lot along the way.

After the initial shock of our trip to Brazil being canceled, our worlds were turned upside down again with the announcement that school would be remote for the rest of the semester. We have had to adjust (along with the rest of the world) to a new normal of staying home and connecting on Zoom and Google Hangouts. These tools have proven to be invaluable for us to stay connected with our client in Brazil, while we finish up our final recommendations.

At first, I was nervous for us to present our initial findings over the computer. I was worried the hard work we put into the project wouldn’t translate well over Google Hangouts. However, these worries quickly disappeared when we spoke to our client. He was extremely accommodating to all of the quick changes and appreciative of the effort we had put into the project. After sharing our initial finding, it feels as though the recommendations we made are a real value add to the organization. We wanted to make the presentation a collaborative effort, rather than just presenting at our client. We told our client to feel empowered to ask us questions throughout the presentation, since at the end of the day, our work was for his benefit. He gave us detailed constructive feedback for each organization we researched for potential acquisition or partnership. He felt that we did a strong job of getting a baseline understanding of each organization, but recommended to deepen our research and dig deep below the surface to truly understand each organization. The feedback he gave us enabled us to construct a final report that we are proud of, that gives meaningful details on why each organization may be a good fit for our client to work with.

One concern I have, given that our project is focused on M&A strategy and inorganic growth, is what this means in the current situation with Coronavirus. Will M&A or partnership even be possible now? Will the companies we researched for this project even still exist when this is all said and done? These questions will remain unanswered until the crisis passes. And while I am grappling with this issue, I know at the end of the day, our team put in a great deal of effort to add value to our organization and we have learned a lot along the way. Regardless of the outcome from the Coronavirus, this project has been a value add to all involved.

Resilience during uncertain times

By Taylor

During uncertain times, it is imperative to have resilience to remain calm and confident that there will be a time when all of this is behind us. [...] [T]he community resilience work that our client is doing is proving to be more important now than ever.

We spent a few days being really bummed that we do not get to meet the team in person in Rio and see their work in real life. We were all looking forward to that. After that settled in, we realized the work we were doing is probably more important than ever because this pandemic was likely to affect them and their work. We had to quickly adapt the rest of our project and recommendations with these new constraints.

When we met with them virtually, we saw that they were going through the same thing we were, isolated and unsure about what the next few months will hold. We presented our initial research and recommendations virtually and the team was welcoming and engaged even though we were not in the room with them. They asked a lot of questions and seemed eager to figure out a plan to implement our recommendations.

We have continued to work hard to put together our final recommendations and plan for them. In addition, we have talked to industry experts about impact investing measurement techniques and have confirmed that our recommendations are in line with where industry professionals would have steered them.

Moreover, one of the biggest lessons in all this is things do not always go as planned. It is important to adapt to changes that unexpectedly come up. One of the skills I have reflected on a lot lately is resilience. During uncertain times, it is imperative to have resilience to remain calm and confident that there will be a time when all of this is behind us.

As someone who lives in a developed country and lives comfortably with more than the resources needed, that is much easier for me to say and envision than many other people experiencing this pandemic. I think of the communities that our client (who provides solar energy and training to favelas) is serving and how they may not be comforted by the resources or healthcare infrastructure available to them. I think about how important it is to equip these communities with resources that give them a sense of independence and ownership of their future. While solar initiatives and impact may not be at the forefront of donors’ and investors’ minds at this time, the community resilience work that our client is doing is proving to be more important now than ever.

The role of local business in a pandemic

By Emily

[O]ur contacts shared that their firm, a solar panel social enterprise, had become the trusted organization responsible for COVID-19 relief funds within the favela. Driven by their credibility in the community and access to a bank account, the client now oversees both collecting donations and distributing them to the community as aid for the current health crisis. [It] had me thinking about how being in this position will provide opportunities and challenges the client’s solar panel business endeavors.

On our final client call for this project our contacts shared that their firm, a solar panel social enterprise, had become the trusted organization responsible for COVID-19 relief funds within the favela. Driven by their credibility in the community and access to a bank account, the client now oversees both collecting donations and distributing them to the community as aid for the current health crisis. I was surprised when I heard about the client’s new role in the community. I would have expected these responsibilities to fall to the local government or NGO as opposed to a small local business. However, it also had me thinking about how being in this position will provide opportunities and challenges the client’s solar panel business endeavors.

On one hand, being selected by the community to be responsible for their livelihood speaks volumes to the client’s reputation in the favela. It shows how as an organization they have been able to gain both the awareness and trust required to have ownership of donated COVID-19 relief funds and power to determine how best to spend these funds. Playing this role in the favela will continue to build the client’s positive reputation and I believe will help them in advancing their business mission. Concurrently, the client is also forging relationships with high net-worth individuals and corporations who are donating the funds. These donors are trusting the client contacts have the capability to manage money and produce results. As our client is ultimately looking for impact investors in their business, the situation provides an opportunity build a track record with the parties that could be potential investors.

On the other hand, assuming this role in the community could create challenges for the client in moving to the next phase in their business. First or foremost, taking on this additional responsibility is using time and resources that could have otherwise be spent on growing the business. Similarly, there is currently no perceived end date to this pandemic. As such, there is uncertainty for the client of when these dual responsibilities will end. This may affect long term planning for the business and what they will realistically be able to accomplish. An additional challenge could be maintaining their core purpose within the community. While they are establishing a positive reputation in the favela, it is not for solar panel installation. This could create confusion in building awareness of who they are and what they offer as a business.

Overall, I think the role that the client is now playing is essential. The favela is struggling with COVID-19 and in need of food and health aid. As building community is a key component in our client’s business, in addition to their environmental goals, taking on this responsibility is aligned with their values. However, I believe it will be important for the client to be diligent in spending time on organization initiatives to make sure the business continues to move forward.

Sustainable finance

By Tanner

As an MBA student in my final year of the program I find the opportunity to use my education in finance to help the world not only fiscally, but socially and environmentally, very attractive.

It was an exciting time to start working on a sustainable finance consulting engagement. Blackrock had just announced that they would stop investing in unsustainable companies and several large fortune 500 organizations announced that they had plans on becoming carbon emission net zero. As an MBA student in my final year of the program I find the opportunity to use my education in finance to help the world not only fiscally, but socially and environmentally, very attractive.

I learned a great deal about the sustainable finance industry and consulting engagements in general from my team’s initial analysis of our project prompt to the first virtual meeting with the client. Our client was very responsive and engaged. He is a consultant himself and I think that helped make defining the scope and expectations a smooth process for the team. We came together on an initial direction and expected deliverables, and had planned reviews where the client would give us feedback throughout. The feedback we received was critical to our team being able to present focused analyses.

The team’s overall project organization and the client’s engagement made the project deliverables achievable. Our team’s organization allowed me to spend more time learning about our client’s business and the industry in general, which I found very interesting. I didn’t realize that the sub industry our client operated in existed before starting this project. It made me realize that there are far more opportunities and diverse roles available for people who focus on sustainability in business. I know there are roles in which I can use my education and skills to make a tangible positive impact on the world just like our client’s organization does.

Working with people from different cultures and backgrounds

By Abeba

It was also clear through this process that in order to accomplish our team’s goals, it was necessary to have the trust and involvement of our client every step of the way.

It still feels unreal that we were unable to travel to Brazil and meet the client we had built a connection with over the past few months. I was looking forward to meeting the rest of the team and spending time with them in person. Our client also seemed excited for our visit as he shared with us some activities he planned for when we arrived. He wanted to show our team around Rio, take us to see one of their designer’s store, and eat at a traditional restaurant. Although I was not able to travel to Brazil, I enjoyed hearing stories from one of my team members who visited a week earlier and had a chance to meet our client.

Despite all the chaos from the coronavirus, our group continued to meet each week to work on our project and communicate with our client through email. The past few weeks have been challenging because our team’s and our client’s working conditions have been disrupted. This has resulted in a delay in our communication, however we have all learned to be flexible and understanding during this difficult time. After a few weeks of not hearing back from our client, we decided to check-in through Whatsapp. It became clear to us that he was also encountering similar challenges of working from home. Struggling to balance work and taking care of family. In order to keep our momentum and not to add any more pressure to our client, we decided to focus on the recommendation that we received during our virtual presentation. The meeting had ensured us that we were on the right path.

This experience overall has taught me how to work with people from different cultures and backgrounds. I have also learned to be open minded when evaluating varies ideas and approaches during a consulting project (Millard, 2019). This meant learning how to asking the right questions to get the necessary information to be successful. It was also clear through this process that in order to accomplish our team’s goals, it was necessary to have the trust and involvement of our client every step of the way.

Strengthening resilience and engagement in times of crisis through social impact

By Faetitia

While we were deeply saddened that we were not able to go to Brazil and meet our clients in person and experience the communities in which they were working, the mission of our client’s organization and the larger impact of their work enabled us to remain resilient and engaged.

When I was first accepted to Questrom School of Business going on one of the Social Impact Field Seminar trips was an immediate goal of mine. As someone who values cross cultural learning and has a strong interest in social and health impacts globally and domestically, I was excited to partake on this field seminar to Brazil with an amazing team serving as consultants to a solar energy company working in the favelas.

As one can image, when I heard that our trip to Brazil was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic I was devastated. In the blink of an eye everything changed. It was as if all the conversations and cases I had learned in organizational behavior regarding resilience and flexibility in the professional world were coming to life. While we were deeply saddened that we were not able to go to Brazil and meet our clients in person and experience the communities in which they were working, the mission of our client’s organization and the larger impact of their work enabled us to remain resilient and engaged. Furthermore, recognizing that our clients were also feeling the same emotions and also dealing with the impacts of COVID-19 in their communities helped us come together in a time of uncertainty and actually strengthened our partnership.

What resonated the most to me about this local organization in Brazil was their commitment to their community and their goal of creating income generation and making utilities affordable for the residents in the favelas through education and training while simultaneously improving the environment. Our team was tasked with consulting this NGO on different ways they can raise money in the short and long term in order to sustain their organization and carry out their mission. It took a few meetings and in depth conversation to narrow down and define our scope of service with our client but it was a great learning exercise when it came to prioritizing what was most pertinent in a long list of priorities in a short amount of time.

Overall this experience has taught me so much in regards to resilience and the importance of being flexible and adaptable professionally. Furthermore, I learned a lot about cross cultural communication, and setting expectations with external constituents. I was thrilled at the positive feedback I received from our interim presentation and am excited to continue working with them and my team, albeit virtually, to put together a finalized report.

Cultural immersion and leveraging MBA skills

By Sindhu

I’ve had healthcare-related projects prior to this class, but I did not anticipate the level of depth understanding about a different culture that this project would provide.

One of the ideas, that our team came up with initially, was to provide monetary funds to the people of the low-income communities with the intent of encouraging community champions to take charge of programs that our client had initially put in place. The client was looking to find ways of measuring impact of their initiatives and ways to ensure that they would be easy to continue after leaving these regions. After bringing up the idea with the client, they told us that they’d considered this idea but were concerned about unnecessarily inflating the value of their currency in those areas, which would make it difficult for the other families to effectively take care of their own families. I personally wouldn’t have realized that consequence had I not run the idea by the client team first.

When my team presented our findings to the client, I was initially nervous as to how feasible and applicable our work would be. We did have several client calls and run some ideas by them, but I was worried about whether they would find our ideas feasible. Because we weren’t able to visit the client in person, we had a videoconference call with several team members instead. As expected, the presentation was more of a conversation between our team and our client’s. During the slideshow, we encouraged them to ask questions about the content or to rephrase what we were saying if there was any confusion due to the slight language barrier. In my past experiences with clients, I’d found that they prefer being interactive during a presentation to allow them to better understand the content, so the team felt it would be better to encourage the format in this situation as well. At the end of the call, they noted the recommendations they felt were easy to implement sooner rather than later, and our team definitely appreciated the feedback. Reflecting back to our first class session, we had a professor come in to talk more about doing consulting work with clients based in another country. As she had experience specifically with clients in Brazil, she was able to speak more to the cultural differences and how that may affect our client interactions. The overall gist was that Brazilian clients would be friendlier and more conversational than we might expect. After our presentation to the client, they asked to meet with us anytime if we were in the area, which I was not expecting because it was such a personal idea, that they didn’t have to offer.

Thinking about the project as a whole, I felt anxious until the point of presenting our ideas to the client. Hearing their feedback was an incredibly great and unique learning opportunity. I did not think I would be able to leverage my MBA school skills this early in my program, and though we were unable to travel, I have had a great experience throughout the Global Immersion Program this semester.

Setting expectations with a sustainability client

By Alexa W.

How do we as consultants encourage our clients to think about what information or tools they might be missing in order to succeed? And how can we help them work with limited resources, as social impact organizations often have?

I was looking forward to meeting our client in person and getting to know them on both a professional and personal level. But we were not able meet in person, and we were not able to go to Brazil due to COVID-19. However, we did get to meet with our client over video – to see not just our main point of contact but also to of his colleagues. Even this short interaction, where we could see each other and get feedback on the details of our project, was immensely helpful.

First, one lesson I learned was how important it is to clarify our analysis of the “current state” and differentiate it from our analysis of the future, or aspirational, state. In some aspects our preliminary presentation combined the two; you can’t understand where you’re going unless you understand the present. If we could do it again – and with more time for the project – I would have tried to drill down further with the client on scope. As consultants, we can only be useful if we help the client focus either on how things are currently are, or how they might be in the future (but not both). And if we focus on a future, what timeframe are we discussing? All of these parameters lead to different assumptions and strategies – such as pricing, growth rate, capital costs, operational decisions, etc. These are all crucial considerations for any organization, but I think especially for startups that are still finding their footing.

It is also important to clarify the end audience for our deliverables. Our project focused on “telling a story” for potential donors, but during our initial presentation the client also mentioned wanting to share with the organization’s CEO as a secondary audience. And our deliverables might also be shared with the members (end users) of the client’s programs – and as a fundraising tool as well! Again, I think a challenge we faced was focus – as much as we’d like our project to be everything to everyone, and as much as we want to say yes to the client, we likely had opportunity to speak up in this regard. As our first class session recommended creating a Statement of Work, I’m wishing we created one with too much detail rather than less.

Finally, I was impressed with our group’s ability to provide the client with data and research they responded positively to – whether it be financial data or market trends. For-profit and nonprofit organizations alike are dependent on data to make decisions, especially when they might be resource or time constrained. As a marketer by trade, I was happy to take a deep dive in consumer research and learn more about the market for sustainable products in Brazil, and learn how sales and distribution might work for our organization. I initially thought there would be parallels with the U.S. consumer market, but quickly realized there are additional nuances in Brazil that would be key to know for our client’s product.

How do we as consultants encourage our clients to think about what information or tools they might be missing in order to succeed? And how can we help them work with limited resources, as social impact organizations often have? We were certainly challenged this semester to make the most of our brief time, as well as our virtual meetings due to the unexpected circumstances. I am optimistic that we were able to strike a balance: giving them the support and frameworks they need to continue operating and potentially expand, while showing potential gaps or opportunities that would need formal processes for data collection/reporting for long-term success. We were able to think outside the box on strategy, leverage the resources and frameworks we have through our MBA program, and gain specialized expertise from classmates outside our group – all of which is to say we learned a great deal despite not having traveled to Brazil in March.

Cultural experience

By Tanner

The itinerary for our class trip was very exciting and promised great learning and life experiences. I was particularly excited for the visit to the Amazon rainforest which for me had attained almost mythical status after the countless hours spent learning about it when I was young. It was shaping up to be a unique and amazing experience that was unfortunately cut short due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

I was on the rooftop of our hotel when I found out the trip was cancelled, just a few hours after landing in Brazil. I remember getting a few calls and reading the emails in disbelief. It was an unfortunate but uncontrollable event and one that I wouldn’t let put a damper on things. I was lucky enough to be traveling with a fellow classmate and friend and we were confident that we would come up with a plan with the help of BU. We spent the night enjoying the local culture and re-organized our trip the next day. The best option was to fly back a week early, which left us with a few days to experience Brazil.

Brazil’s food is some of the best I’ve ever had. I often find myself craving pizza or a burger after several days of eating foreign cuisine, that didn’t happen with Brazilian food. I actually thought about going to a Brazilian steakhouse soon after landing back in Boston, but opted for a salad instead as I had just eaten a straight meat diet for a week. The people are amazing; we met and connected with several people that I’ll be sure to see again the next time I go to Brazil. The culture of Rio specifically was a great experience. We learned that it was one of the cities where wealth and poverty mixed, unlike a city like Sao Paolo that lacked affordable housing close by.

The views, food, culture, and people make Brazil an unmissable destination, one that I hope my fellow classmates can experience, and one that I’m lucky to have seen.

Learnings from a consulting project in global health

By Hannah

I learned about a very different healthcare system (in comparison to the U.S.), how to complete and communicate a project internationally, and the very important lesson that projects will rarely go according to plan.

I have been waiting to write this in hopes of being able to reflect back on COVID-19’s impact on the U.S. and the many indirect consequences—like this class. However, it does not appear that the spread is lessening in the near future, and online classes seem to be the new normal.

Last week, we presented to our client. Prior to it, I felt nervous that they would be disappointed in our decision to not travel to Brazil. That decision was the first of what has become many decisions by the school to protect the health and safety of the student body. However, our clients still welcomed us with (virtual) open arms and gave us the same kind of attention and time that we would have had in-person.

They showed interest and excitement for all of our research. One interesting element that my team was able to research was how to empower community women in Maranhao through entrepreneurship opportunities, establishing them as leaders in the community and measuring the impact of women empowerment on community success. I appreciated the client’s excitement for this idea, because it shows how healthcare is significantly impacted by social determinants. It also resembles that prevention healthcare is incredibly powerful, but maybe harder to measure, than band-aid treatments. This is not always accepted in Western medicine.

They were particularly interested in our suggestions to improve their Healthy Homes Program survey and what the data was presently showing us. The client was surprised that the community survey showed that community members do not view their presence as “public health” intervention. They mentioned that it is imperative to the success of their program that community members understand and support the initiative. I feel that this is a wonderful exhibit of why companies hire consultants—it can be difficult to spot gaps in work when the client is so entrenched in the day-to-day. Their excel sheet was not showing them anything different than our excel sheet (in fact, it was the same one), but it was easier for my teammate to notice a flaw than for the client to.

From here, we will synthesize their recommendations and comments into a final report that will help add closure to this project. When I signed up for this class last November, it was impossible to know that this is how it all would unfold. However, I have no question that this was still a worthwhile experience. I learned about a very different healthcare system (in comparison to the U.S.), how to complete and communicate a project internationally, and the very important lesson that projects will rarely go according to plan. I have an unbelievable amount of respect for the work our client has already done to improve access to clean water, empower community members and measure the impact of the program to show the cost savings of preventative care. Although Brazil is a developing country, in some ways, I feel their public health system may be far beyond that of the U.S.