“Hi everyone,
Well Galen and I are finally heading back to Africa to launch a bunch of Jibu drinking water franchise businesses on Monday!
Itinerary is: Rwanda (preparing to launch with our new entrepreneur) , South Sudan (exploration for future launches), Uganda (2 business launches), Congo (2 business launches), Kenya (networking) and then back to Rwanda (1 business launch). So we hope to launch 5 new businesses on this trip and be in Africa for 6-8 weeks.
We anticipate each business launch to take about 7-10 days. We hope this allows us enough time to install the system, train the employees of our entrepreneurs on all the many aspects of the business operations, advertise locally, begin community development, handle the unanticipated challenges and pull off a grand opening. Then we will stick around for a few days to see how it goes and tweak our processes for the next one. This is the fun we have been working towards for the last year!
We are reasonably confident that our entrepreneurs will have these sites ‘no kidding’ ready this trip. ‘No kidding’ readiness to us means a high population retail location with electricity, water source, clean/secure building, and all the other items on our pre-launch checklist completed before we arrive. But we won’t know for certain until we get there. Each site faces a special set of challenges.
For instance, one ‘minor’ change since the last report is that we decided to not launch in Burundi but instead launch in Rwanda. No small matter to start from scratch in Rwanda about one month ago, reposition our equipment that was in Burundi to Rwanda, get government approvals, etc. But this in itself has been a tremendous learning opportunity that will serve us well down the road.
I hope you will enjoy following the mishaps of our trip from the Facebook or Twitter links found in the upper right hand corner of our website- https://jibuco.com
To refresh your memory or give some context for folks new to the project, our last few updates are pasted below.
Trepidatiously,
Randy Welsch”
