“Hello,
Wanted to give you a quick update about our Jibu water franchise project. Have had a whirlwind tour of Africa and beyond for the last month. Galen and I spent time in Rwanda, South Africa, Kenya and Dubai to continue to build relationships in those countries for future business purposes. But our main reason for the trip has been to launch 5 businesses on this trip: 2 in Uganda, 1 in Burundi and 2 in Congo.
However when we got on the ground, it became clear to us that the sites would not be ready to launch during this trip. So we cut our trip short, having just arrived back in the US. Now we are calling this our ‘just kidding’ trip: we thought we were going to launch, we thought that our entrepreneurs thought we were coming to launch,. But hey, even though we spent many months preparing and lots of time and money going to Africa- we weren’t really serious about launching- just kidding!
Let me explain. There are numerous major critical milestones that must occur for a site to be ‘ready to launch’ according to our detailed checklist. If even one of these milestones does not occur, it is a showstopper and we cannot launch the business at that time and must wait for resolution. For example, water filtration equipment and containers must have arrived in the country (and these items must have cleared customs in that country), the retail site must be ready for customers according to our standards, proper govt approvals to sell water must be obtained, and a few others. We had at least one of these critical milestones not occur in each of the 3 countries which stopped us in our tracks. And just to add a little spice, we faced some other ‘minor’ challenges as well, such as a surprise rebel attack in a normally peaceful city near one of our sites that put local folks on edge. We never felt threatened and our business hosts took good care of us, but we could hear gunshots from our hotel. (The situation is resolved peacefully for now thankfully.)
Even though we are disappointed to not launch at least one site on this trip, we were not surprised by any of this. We fully anticipated all these potential challenges and had been working toward resolution for many months before we went (well, except for the rebel attack.) But it is hard to know how ready a site really is until you are there. Despite frequent phone calls, email and other communication with our entrepreneurs on the ground for many months, this is a whole new way of doing projects for us and them.
Our business is pretty complex under the hood and hard for even many westerners to understand, let alone in places where what we are trying to do is an order of magnitude different than what they have ever seen in their culture. Inevitable that things get lost in translation across the time zones, horrible internet connections, cultural assumptions and language. And each person and situation is a little different. We are getting to know one another and finding ways to work together effectively. But nonetheless, no excuses. Even though we thought we were on top of it, a big takeaway is that we need to learn how to better manage and assess site readiness from afar if we want to avoid costly ‘just kidding’ trips in the future.
We have to keep in mind that we are launching pilots, which means that by definition we must have the expectation that we probably learn best by getting beat up from time to time. (Or maybe the fine print really reads: all the time?) After all, our real long term goal is to keep our eye on the ball, which is to crack the code on what it will take to make our new business model scale with the seeds of self-propogation in these environments. And we have built our business strategy on the idea that all the theory and pontification from the US will not get the job done, but rather to take small practical steps in order to fully understand and address the many operational challenges on the ground in each location and iterate the business model accordingly. We are getting there and this is all part of the learning curve. As we continue to pay the price for our hands-on learning, we are encouraged that we are developing robust, resilient and operationally effective processes while we are still small that will hopefully serve business growth very well in the years ahead.
Our plan is to go back to Africa in about a month to launch these 5 businesses. We are very hopeful that all the sites will be ready to go by then. So we take this as just a short delay in the bigger scheme of things. Hopefully then we can send you a ‘no kidding’ trip report!
Thankfully,
Randy Welsch”
