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THE BUSINESS PROMOTER

AN INSPIRING TALE ABOUT LAYING THE GROUNDS FOR ATTAINING SUCCESS IN BUSINESS

(WITH EMPHASIS ON SUCCESSFUL MICROFINANCING)

LINDSAY-YAIDOO, ISAAC KWAMENA

ISBN: 9789988173463 

2013

I do believe that GOD is the source of every blessing, including mine. I am grateful to him.

“Without L.O.V.E nothing else matters. Where there is LOVE there is life.” Mahatma Gandhi

DISCLAIMER

This book is published solely to posit ideas with regard to attaining success in business. The model business establishment herein considered is a microfinance company. This book does not attempt or claim to be a textbook of any sort. It is based on the author’s personal experiences working in business institutions, and as a business developer and advisor. The object is solely motivational.

Mention must be made of Subir Chowdhury’s “THE ICE CREAM MAKER”. Prof. Chowdhury is credited with developing LEO (Listen, Enhance, Optimize) as an important part of business and so on; Bruce Pandolfini’s “EVERY MOVE MUST HAVE A PURPOSE, Strategies from Chess for Business and Life”; Rudolf W. Giuliani’s book, “LEADERSHIP”, “the bset part of any leadership role is getting the chance to let people know how much their work means to you…”  GIMPA Journal November 2011 (Encounter Group Experience), by Dr. Ben Sarpong Mensah, The Learning Organization: Managing Knowledge for Business Success (Economist Intelligence Unit & IBM, 1996); Interview with Harvard Professor Sanjay Gulati, hosted by Peter Day on the BBC (The Business Forum, 2012 Topic: Why Business have to Change- What Ought to be done?) “After offering a product for so long successfully, companies become thick skinned…”and Professor Kwesi Agyeman’s “Leadership, Governance and Ethics” which served as reference books.

The names used herein were adopted from the author’s imaginations and do not apply to any persons or institutions in reality.

CONTENTS

Introduction

A Basketful of Water                                      ———————-  1

A Mentor is Helpful                                        ———————- 12

It Begins With Teamwork                             ———————– 27

The Secrets of L.O.V.E                                  ———————– 39

Working to Get It Right                               ———————— 54

Striving for Perfection                                 ————————- 60

Prelude

 Although Prof Kwesi Agyeman wasn’t one of my lecturers, during my study for the award of an

 MBA degree at GIMPA, his book: ‘Leadership, Governance and Ethics’ which I read as an adjunct

 source of knowledge impacted upon me profoundly. In the opening pages of that book, he explained that one definition of a leader is as a ‘Team-builder’: A person who builds, encourages and succeeds with a team.

 Citing the Biblical story of Moses, Prof Agyeman posits that even Moses, a man of God, had to be advised by Jethro, that he must not go solo because it was impossible for him to do it all alone, and that he needed a ‘Leadership,’ ‘Institution’, and ‘Governance’ system to be able to not only get the job done, but done well; and sees them in tandem, as with management, administration and operations.

 Notably, he further posits that terms like ‘team-leadership’, ‘strategic-leadership,’ ‘inclusive and participatory leadership,’ group-leadership etc or ‘cult leadership,’ charismatic leadership, so-called ‘Great-men,’ and what not, may be over; as dictatorship, despotism, and such forms of autocratic leaderships that critics say stifles productivity, seemed to have outlived their usefulness, relevance and importance in the pursuit of business.

The Changing face of Business: “Business is business,” used to be the old adage. Now, “Business is good business,” is on the throne, so to speak, meaning that beyond the traditional bottom line of the profit motive, there are other business virtues that are equally important; if not more so. The little adjective ‘good’ is a homage business is increasingly paying to the ‘ethical’ significance of business: that in the wake of certain environmental or global corporate and economical/ financial meltdowns, has gained strong prominence in corporate thinking the onus of ‘responsibility’ in doing business. Having thus realized that business is more than ‘short cut’ money-making, or profit, business must recognize that ‘People’ or ‘customers’ both internal and external is the most important.

Human beings matter through and through. Hence, the introduction of people into the consideration of corporate thinking has increased the attention business places on human involvement and values and along with it an increased and deeper understanding of the other obligations business has to not only their employees, customers, owners etc but also to the people in the communities in which it operates.

Business, although an abstract legal, economic and social entity, must live in a community or place with other human beings with whom it has to do business with as though it is also a human being, a citizen; albeit a good citizen. Thus, the face of business must assume the human face of a person living and operating in society. Therefore it, having the resources, and also capable of many social ventures individuals are destitute of, must endeavor to so act as would yield a win-win outcome if it would be a good citizen everyone in the community would be proud of.

Again, business is good business means that businesses must do good business to make ‘good money or profit’, to do good things to earn a good name, image and reputation which makes everyone proud, which in business sense, adds to and makes a good corporate value that is otherwise to dispense with (Culled from Prof. Kwesi Agyemang’s book: “Leadership, Governance and Ethics”)

THE BUSINESS PROMOTER

CHAPTER ONE

A Basketful of Water

It was a Friday morning in August when my hopes fell and I began thinking deeply about whether I hadn’t been bewitched, that I must never succeed in my endeavor at work and in my entire life.

I was working as Manager for Stellar Microfinance, a regional microfinance company, when Kobi, one of our credit officers, came breezing through the door about two hours later than I expected. He had gone to ‘chase’ after a loan defaulter, accompanied by a policeman in uniform. The defaulter had not only provided misleading information about herself but she was able to lie to Kobi, and convince him to give her the loan advances of four other persons she promised to deliver the loans to. I guessed that perhaps he had gone to meet her absence again. He shook his head with an easy going shrug and gave me a ‘thumbs down’ signal. He’d failed again to meet

the woman at home let alone recover a fraction of her debt obligation which was threatening us all. “We’ll meet her next time Boss,” he said nonchalantly, as the boxer ‘King Kong’ had recently assured the nation after his defeat.

It was no skin off his nose, I could tell. After all, he had not too long ago expressed his frustration about the pressure being mounted upon him and pointed out to his supervisor that we couldn’t reasonably expect everyone who took our loan to be that prompt; otherwise, he said, there would be no need for provision of bad debt as was the practice everywhere.

We’d been trying to retrieve several defaults of loans of some customers for over six months now. In fact, he seemed relieved. Going to the woman’s house including that of other defaulters had become an almost daily chore I made him and other credit officers perform. And they had been doing it morning before work, evening after work, and at any time of the day or week.

Early this year, I had really been counting on retrieving at least 90 percent of all loans in arrears. We had had a meeting and my staff were unanimous in suggesting that we needed to be more aggressive and forceful in retrieving our loans, and also involve the police in helping to compel defaulters to pay back. Someone had even suggested that we buy dumbbells for staff to train in order to ‘stay in shape’ and look more physical. That was the method successful microfinance companies adopted- being radical and sometimes physical through the use of ‘macho men’ and the police. Although I thought that that method was crude, I needed to lend my support to their own suggestions to any methodology that would make us succeed and would knock their socks off with sales. In some measure, that was the way Stellar Microfinance chalked up some original successes: early management had recruited staff with an eye (I must emphasize, in part) for those who looked menacing and ‘no-nonsense’. Poaching occurred and some of those staff went on to join other companies.

What was worrying me most was something I couldn’t tell Kobi’s supervisor or anyone else. Our boss and founder, Nana Ato Appiah, had recently expressed his disappointment to me at the unacceptable ‘Portfolio in arrears’, declining savings, poor attendance of customers to group meetings, increasing utility bills, and high staff turnover due to poor morale. Our profit margins were shrinking and shrinking steeply. Nana Ato had told me if things didn’t get better soon, he would have to make some serious changes. One solution, he said, would be to bring another management team on board. Or, he intimated, he might be forced to sell our company outright to another competitor, or scuttle the microfinance company altogether by selling the land to a real estate developer. “I don’t care what you have to do to turn things around, Karikari. But get it done; I’m putting this on your shoulders!”

With suburban sprawl spreading past the highway belt encircling the city of the ‘Gateway to West Africa’, I had no doubt Nana Ato could make more money selling the land and its other

assets to a developer than he could make running them with the current revenues. Either way, however, I would be out of a job. With a wife and two kids, and at least two other dependents, Nana Ato’s rebuke jolted me out of my compliancy.

Although I had lived in Accra previously, I had taken the job at Stellar Microfinance only one and half years earlier, after spending five years working in a couple of microfinance companies out of the region. Then I found employment with one of the biggest banks. Then unexpectedly, unemployment struck. I was made compulsorily redundant. It seemed to me only recently that it was now that I was settling down. The redundancy had come at my worst moments; I had taken a bank loan so I sold my old Camry with the expectation of buying a more ‘befitting’ car and paying a few years’ rent advance. A few days after the loan hit my account, I let go of my Camry at a give-away price. Having made only just a part payment to my landlord for him to complete the new residence I would move into, my redundancy letter came and apart from securing a place for my family to reside for a few years, all other plans fell through. My redundancy benefits would be used to pay for my obligations with the bank and leave me marginally indebted still. My wife, Alisa, had supported me from her teaching income in the Western Region and had single-handedly cared for our children’s upkeep, and extended her kindness to my aged father in the Central Region. Alas, there was no way we could swing our upkeep and everything else again on Alisa’s salary alone!

And if I failed at Stellar Microfinance, what would I do? I know, I wasn’t necessarily the smartest manager of a company such as ours, but I worked hard at my job. I had come up with a number of new initiatives and employee involvement activities aimed at getting the best out of ourselves and doing well across our targets. But lately, nothing seemed to be working. Although I had shifted our morning duties to an earlier time to enable us to prepare sufficiently for the day’s task, I was spending more time running after defaulters to check them out from their would-be hideouts even before daylight. And I reported to work late; tired and demoralized. We were caught in the middle and getting squeezed from both ends. Just over a year ago, I was hopeful that I would succeed in my job; but I’d began to run out of answers. Back then I had thought I had struck a pot of gold. Now, it seemed that pot of gold had almost melted away and evaporated fast leaving me with only mere traces of dust. What would I do, I worried, to avoid this fate? What would happen to all the people under me if Nana Ato sold the business and the entire estate? That morning, I had held out hope that going after our major defaulters- to get them pay back significantly what they owed might be our savior. Loan defaulters owed us much and our bad debt position was alarming and threatening and simply unacceptable. If even they could pay half of their total default (leaving out any interest calculation on default or delayed payment) and we try to build savings marginally, they would give us a foot in the door to try to land some successes and give us modest leverage on our balance sheet. But because they had been playing hide and seek with us and efforts to trace them and encourage them to live up to their

responsibilities were proving futile, morale was waning and we had to cut down drastically on dispensing loans.

So when Kobi returned to tell me that eventhough he had gone with a hired policeman he was unsuccessful in meeting one of our major defaulters after he had visited her home and spoken with some of her family members, my heart sank lower than the floor. Kobi said he had made the policeman wait just outside the house. He said he had barely spoken his first sentence to ask about her when her would-be husband started asking questions he regarded as offensive.

“Such as?”

“Such as the exact date we gave her the loan, the amount of loan, the interest amount, whether I know her well enough, where she conducted her business, what business she did…”

“Our interest rate on loans?”

“Yes,”Kobi said, “I’d never heard anyone ask me such questions before”.

I was dumbfounded. This was about the third report I was having this week about such close relatives and even spouses not being aware of what business their relatives did with us and asking such arcane questions.

I was soon alone in my office. ‘God if you are real you will have to prove yourself able to redeem my fate,’ I thought. My disappointment, however, soon dissipated into determination. I have been trained and I had some education, or so I thought. I couldn’t just let this undesirable trend be my lot.

Damn it, I would go and see the woman’s husband and put forward the company’s case to him myself. Although I was scheduled to meet with someone Nana Ato said he was sending to meet me that day, I found myself grabbing my keys before I was even aware of what I was doing. I was not the credit officer and Kobi had a supervisor. For the disbursement of this particular loan I was out of town and the processes had been speeded up for disbursement before I returned. I didn’t know the group or the woman herself well. But it was within my responsibility and I knew how crucial this default was. I had to get it.

I hopped into my car, a Corolla we had just bought three months earlier and had not finished paying for. I reflected ruefully, thinking of all those arrears which were likely to become bad debts, and the unsuccessful visits I had done myself anytime of the day to pursue defaulters. Kobi had briefed me verbally about the location of this woman defaulter’s house. It was somewhere about 30minutes’ drive from town, given a modest traffic situation. When I got to the area, I spent another 30minutes in search and finally found the customer’s residence. I met her daughter who said both her father and her mother had gone out.

Midday was fast approaching then. Although I had been reluctant to visit the premises of another microfinance institution, let alone its headquarters, because they had never regarded us as being worthy, I had no trouble finding Global Microfinance company; one of the leading non-bank financial institutions in the country, and arguably even within our sub-region. It was a huge building located at a major intersection. From across the parking lot you could see the elevator hurriedly descending and ascending through the slightly tinted glass fiber component of this seven-storey building. I took one good look at it before I entered through the automatic glass door. There were lots of orderly people in the open spaces as if they held several conferences simultaneously. I easily noticed the friendly banners which hung across the large wall announcing the institution’s vision and mission statement. I wanted to not like the place, but I still couldn’t help but notice the lengths Global Microfinance took to make every customer feel welcome. A blast of invitingly cool sweet-scented air greeted me. On such a hot August day, such a welcome of ambience was somewhat unusual in most offices when such a number of people crowded together. I walked rightwards towards a staircase in the interior of the ground floor. I inhaled an unmistakable fragrance, and looked upward to see a veritable wall of flowers, like a scene from a rich impressionist painting. The soft, soothing music of Papa Yankson’s ‘Kokoroko’ wafted through the air. The 20-second experience of walking into Global Microfinance was as warm a welcome as any modern ‘impressionist’ business hall can give you, inviting and exotic entering in just a few feet.

“Hello, how are you?”A friendly voice asked with such genuine sincerity that I assumed she had known me before. I didn’t recognize her, however, and must have looked puzzled.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“No thanks,” I answered. She was clearly not an official greeter, just a friendly employee doing her job arranging the floral display while saying hello to as many customers as she could. I soon heard a chorus of similar greetings around the hall, many of them quickly evolving into longer conversations.

My first look inside revealed just how clean and fresh, warm and welcoming the entire company was. It didn’t feel at all like my local company- and looked more organized and customer friendly than everywhere I had worked previously. But I quickly dismissed the thought. After all they were in the service business; they needed to ‘tangibilize the intangible.’ Just past the wall flowers I found the ‘Help Center’, manned by two cheerful employees, one of whom seemed free to answer a question.

“Hello Sir,” the help center woman said, “please, I’m Akos. How can I help you today?”

When I had gotten out of my car I’m sure I was looking downcast with a scowl, but I found it impossible to maintain such a disappointed and resigned expression in the face of such a friendly

smile. I delved deep into my long-term memory. His name, I recalled, was Philip Kwame Asante; and I decided that he was the person I wanted. We had worked in the same microfinance institution some years back. In fact we attended a formal orientation for new staff. He was employed as a management staff and I as a loans officer. But we took to each other and he always enquired if I had slept well, eaten well or was satisfied with the speaker etc. He left the organization to join Global Microfinance as I learnt.

“Does Mr. Phillip Kwame Asante still work here?” I asked.

“Ohhh, yes,” she said, grinning. “I’m sure he’s around here somewhere. Is he expecting you?”

“No,” I admitted. “Is that a problem?”

“Not at all,” she said, “He talks to lots of customers every day, and I doubt if many of them have booked appointment with him earlier.”

“Well, actually,” I said, “I’m not really a customer. I’m an old friend. I haven’t seen him in at least eight years.”

“Wow!” she laughed jokingly, “Does he owe you money?”

“No,” I said smiling, unable to resist her humor. “Actually I’m here to pay a courtesy call.”

“If you haven’t seen Uncle Philip in a while, maybe I’d better take you to him”.

Akos stepped out from behind the counter, told her coworker she’d be right back, and led me through to the rear of the large ground floor.

“Is his office at the back of the apartment?” I asked.

“Uncle Phillip’s office will be our last stop. You are more likely to find him at the fresh fruits and vegetables section than sitting at his desk. Most of the time he’s roaming the ‘trust conferences’ on the ground floor observing proceedings, talking with customers and teams and arranging deliveries.”

There were lots of things to observe. What I noticed most of all, though, was the number of employees we walked past- dozens, with coworkers talking with customers. It was clear that rather than regarding their customers’ questions as a nuisance, it was a favorite part of their jobs. Akos found Phillip helping a customer at the fruits and vegetables section discussing the vast array of choices. He appeared a bit older than I’d remembered, but he had aged well, still lean and spry, with the same glint burning brightly in his eyes. Philip was supervising the packaging of fruits and vegetables for some customers to ensure that they get the best and freshest. He gave us a ‘Just a moment’ gesture, than asked the customers more questions about how often they

visited the company and how they had benefited from the scheme and whether their lives were truly being transformed in any way. Two of the women were saying that they visited Global Microfinance at least thrice every week. They both agreed that they were benefiting from the company’s innovation. What they liked best was the willingness of the employees to listen to and serve them. And what Global Microfinance could do better? “Hmmm,” they said, “that’s hard to say. We are grateful to God for you.”

“Thanks Antie Mary, and thank you Hajia and thank you Osofo Maame.”

“We are the ones who have to thank you,” the woman called Antie Mary said with emphasis, on behalf of the several persons (looking quite satisfied).

When he turned to us, he said “You have to be Kwame Karikari; we once worked for the same company and met in Kumasi for an orientation isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said, extending my hand. “You have an amazing memory,” he chuckled. He thanked Akos for the help. “It’s great to see you again, Kwame. Can I buy you a drink?”

“Okay,” I said.

Philip started walking me toward the café in the rear of the large building, awash with brightness of inside lightening and natural sunlight pouring through the slightly tinted glass windows, and he found an open table where we could chat.

A friendly waitress came over to take our order. “Do you have Malta Guinness?” I asked.

“Yes Sir,” the waitress said. “And you Uncle Philip?”

“Make it two, Agatha. Thanks”.

Then Philip turned his attention back to me. “So, to what do I owe this pleasure?”

“First, it’s good to see you again,” I said, suddenly a little embarrassed that I hadn’t stopped to see him before. I had forgotten what a friendly and open person he was to me the very first time we met.

“Ditto,” he replied. “But I’ve got a hunch you didn’t come down here just to say hello.”

His remark disarmed me. He must be used to sales calls by now, I realized.

“You are right,” I said. “I’m the manager of Stellar Microfinance. I’ve been there for nearly two years. And I have been dying to succeed in my work for a long time. I remember how you brought a lot of experience to bear on our former institution. I also heard about how you have

helped greatly when Global Microfinance began its operations. So I thought I’d come in and see if you still worked here.”

He spread his arms. “Now you have your answer.”

“What do you do here now?” I asked.

“Because I got in on the ground floor at Global Microfinance- lucky timing- I rose to become one of the company’s vice-presidents. In a year’s time, I will ask the board, if I could help start up a branch in my home region.” He looked around the café. “And it’s working out very well.”

“So you’re a deputy CEO here?”

“Yes, I guess you could say that,” he said. “Though a lot of our management ideas and decisions come from the people in the smocks you passed throughout the ground floor.”

“Then do you decide how everything is done here?”

“I have a lot of say in it, sure,” he said, “though we have departments whose heads make decisions too”.

“I came here to seek your help,” I said.“I’m sinking in on all sides. My work is not going in the right direction at all. I saw you contribute a lot to change things for the better in our previous institution. By being here I feel proud of what I see. My staff and I have been doing everything possible with the best strategies to succeed but we are not. It’s wearing me down and I feel hopeless.”

At that moment Agatha brought our Malta drinks to the table. Philip thanked her, and then took a sip of his before turning to me; his eyes piercing through my thoughts.

“I think I can help you there,” he said, reflecting on what I’d asked. “But let me ask you a few questions first.”

“Sure,” I said. I felt I knew my product line cold- no pun intended- and could handle anything he threw my way.

“You are convinced your strategies are the best. Is that because of the good staff you have?”

“Of course,” I said. “Well, most of them,” I admitted. “My staff may not be the best in the industry but they are doing their very best and I would say much more dedicated than most others in other organizations. And we are able to discuss things openly.”

“My guess is, however, you’re using your own criteria in judging your institution. But when we discuss all your operations and processes into details you may be far down the list.”

My sheepish silence confirmed his suspicions. “Do you people talk to the customers about what they are looking for in a microfinance company?”

I had no answer for that one either. We always thought that we knew — that they needed money to carry on or invest into their business. The fact was, we usually didn’t. If he had pressed me, I would have been forced to admit that we really weren’t into finding out more. We took it for granted that everyone who walked through our doors needed some microfinance loan. Instead, we relied solely on the customer’s loan application to guide us and give us a little idea of who the person was and why he/she needed our loan. We taunted that we had the lowest interest levy on our loans and perhaps the highest interest bonus on customer’s savings and so we were more interested in helping the clients. Things were working fine at first but not any longer. We were far ahead of most competitors two years ago and Stellar Microfinance became popular; in part- so did I. I knew all this and realized that Philip probably did too. My continued silence told him just where we stood. Just like that, he had shifted me from offence to defense.

“I have to ask,” Philip went on, “is successful micro-financing really the driving force behind your brand? Does it really shape everything you do?” I could only bite my lips embarrassed.

“I think the reason you’re feeling dispirited,” he continued in a surprisingly direct manner, “is not because you feel you don’t have good staff but because you are missing out in having the best customers. I am afraid that approach is not going to work. You would be amazed that here we won’t agree with your criteria or your results.

“Karikari,” he said speaking softly, “I’ve worked for several microfinance companies; and banks, I may add, and I’m sure you spend a lot of time at your company worrying over how to improve your performance in view of the targets that have been set so that you would remain successful in business. You clearly have pride in what you do.

But you don’t seem to know where to begin about what successful microfinance involves, and how you can improve it. You’re sinking because success is not forthcoming. You want to make more loans available to good customers who can pay back on time and have them build their savings with you. I understand that. But your people, or I must say your management style, is not bent on finding out what your customers want. Your focus is on selling your loans and obtaining customers savings and not much else.

“I’m not surprised,” Philip said. “What you do at Stellar Microfinance is similar to what so many companies in our country do. Let me tell you something most experts have observed about us. When it comes to ideas- coming up with new imaginative ideas- God has been bias to give us so

much. That is part of our DNA and so some say that God is a Ghanaian. Other nations may not be so endowed. But when it comes to making it practical for implementation, to really ensure a constant, continual daily efforts to improve a product or service, to really ensure that it meets exacting standards every time, and thereby build lasting loyalty, we falter. Oftentimes, we work with a ‘success-reverse’ kind of mentality; we want what we can ‘get–out’ for ourselves but not what we can ‘put- in’ to be longer lasting.”

I felt humiliated. I could tell I was near tears – unbelievably, to me, for I was a petty stoic person. I only hope he’d stop.

“I’m sorry,” he said. But I’m a bit older and hopefully a little wiser. I’ve already made the mistakes you’re making now. At Global Microfinance, continuous review of operations is at the heart of everything we do. We might be the exception in our industry- where everyone else here seems intent on putting in his or her best to be successful with our customers. And that’s why we’ve been so tremendously successful”.

“Uncle Philip,” I finally said, the knot in my stomach urging me to come clean. “I need help. The fact is I’m in trouble. If I can’t help Stellar Microfinance overcome its present challenges and increase revenues and profits- and soon! Nana Ato, our owner, has threatened to fire the current management team or sell off the whole company. Either way, I’m out of a job or our scores of staff are out of work. Ato has charged me with shaking things up, and I don’t know what to do- I just don’t know how to turn things around at Stellar Microfinance. I’ve got a family and a few dependents (my aged father included). I’m embarrassed to ask this of you, when I haven’t seen you in so long a time- but I need your help. I’m sure you may have a way to do it. Tell me what I can do to make success a part of our culture, too”.

Phillip looked at me thoughtfully. Then he nodded his head. “If you’re looking for help in running a microfinance business successfully, we might as well go to the source. Global Microfinance is built on the idea of excellence, and excellence starts with helping others as much as you can, every day. Excellence isn’t a task or chore we perform to get something done. It is a passion to help others that restores us in the process. Until you understand that, you’ll never change your thinking, or provide the best services in order to get the desired results out. The first step, my brother, is to start talking to and taking care of the people who have taken care of you. Let me ask you something. You’ve been worried about how things have been going for a while, right?”

I nodded, numbly.

“One place to start — Have you talked about your concerns with your closest adviser and consumer — your wife?”

I shook my head, suddenly embarrassed again.

He looked at his watch. “Listen, I’ve got to tackle a few things here this afternoon. But I’ve got some time tomorrow and Monday –being an Eid holiday. We could meet here again and I’ll give you a few pointers on how to get started. Improving your performance won’t happen overnight- it will take work. But I think I can give you some suggestions on how to get the ball rolling- and get your owner off your back.” I didn’t do much at the office that day, but that no longer seemed so important.

THE BUSINESS PROMOTER

CHAPTER TWO

A Mentor is Helpful

Although I went home that day with more questions than answers, at least I had the sense that the questions were leading me in the right direction.

That night, after Alisa and I had put our daughters to bed, I had a long talk with her- about what

was going on at my work. When I told her about Nana Ato’s ultimatums and the fact that it was up to me to turn things around, Alisa was stunned.

“Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?” she asked, obviously hurt.

“I didn’t want to worry you unnecessarily,” I said, “but I was wrong to keep it to myself. I’m sorry.”

Over the next hour before we went to bed, we talked about Stellar Microfinance, about the debts due to default payments, and our fears. After her initial anger over how much of my challenges I’d been keeping from her, she was incredibly helpful and supportive, offering to shoulder even more of the burden at home and with our daughter while I struggled to find answers at work. I was surprised at how good it felt simply to share my fears and concerns, and not keep them hidden, at least, from a person I cared about. After all, she would be equally affected, if not more.

The next morning I woke up eager to talk again with Philip. I wore a crisp African batik boubou top-and-down and sandals. For some reason, I sensed that Philip would notice the cultural details and see them as a sign of being myself; confident and resolute. I drove up to Global Microfinance with a completely different mindset than the one I’d had the day before. Rather than being distraught, I was looking for advice and, hopefully, answers.

I found Phillip waiting for me at the front entrance. Before long we were seated at the same table we’d sat at the day before.

A different waitress arrived to take our orders.

“Fruit drink, Phillip?”

“Yes, Ewurabena and four grips of koose, thank you. Karikari, what would you like?”

“The same.”

“Same for my guest, please”

Phillip seemed genuinely pleased to see me. “You look better, more relaxed,” he said in a typically direct manner.

“I feel a lot better.”

“You told your wife about your troubles at your workplace?”

I laughed. “How could I not, after our conversation yesterday.”

And how did she respond?
“Well, she was surprised about the situation at Stellar Microfinance, of course, but very supportive, which felt awfully good.”

“Good,” Philip said. “Good for both of you.”

“When I left here yesterday, I felt embarrassed,” I admitted. “I was willing to put aside a half day or more for most days — running after defaulters and even trying to involve their spouses to help out but I hadn’t been willing to spend a half hour telling my wife what’s been bothering me at work. What I don’t understand yet, though, is the connection between my talking to my wife, and my challenges at ‘Stellar.”

Phillip paused. “Think about what you did. You showed respect for the relationship you and your wife have had over the years. You took your time to express your feelings to her, so that she would know what was bothering you. You asked her for her opinions, you showed you cared for her and trusted her.”

“Yes” I said, “And believe me, I’m glad I did. But what’s that got to do with micro financing?”

“It all comes down to taking care of those who matter to you. Because business, any business, is about people — the people you work with, and the customers you sell to. Let me explain it

this way,” Phillip said, “when I wake up in the morning, I don’t say to myself ‘Work again? Oh God!’ Or ‘those customers are boring!’ Or even, ‘how can we make our numbers today at Global Microfinance?’ I say, ‘what can we do for the people who’ve done so much for us?’ Sometimes, when our targets are down near the end of the month and I feel myself and our teammates starting to press and sway a bit from having time for our customers, I tell them ‘let’s not worry about it. Let’s have fun! If we’re going to miss our target, we might as well do so staying focused, and earn some points in the process with our customers’.

Once, I gave every staff a special lunch and a gift for their homes. And the first time we took that approach, something remarkable happened: We had a blast, and our numbers went up. We beat our goals! We’ve done it a few times since, and it’s worked every time. My point is this: Attaining your targets is the result, the by-product of great service, well-thought-out processes, and great teamwork — not an end in itself.”

“But how is that connected to attaining success as Stellar?” I asked.

Ewurabena returned with our fresh pineapple juice and koose. Phillip paused, “Thank you, Ewurabena. These look nice”. I bit a piece of the sweet smelling koose. It was delicious as it looked.

“Fun and success,” Phillip repeated, “how are they connected? Excellent question. And it speaks to the foundation you need to build to begin making success part of everything you do at Stellar.” He took a sip of the pineapple juice.

He looked at me closely. “Karikari, what’s your favorite hobby?”

“Chess,” I offered.

“How often do you play?”

“Every other fortnight — if I can help it.”
“O ‘really? You and me both brother,” he said with an air of satisfaction. “And when you are playing chess, are you thinking about anything else?”

“Not if I can help it I,” I said.

“In other words, you’re entirely focused on what you’re doing. So let me ask you, what do you like about it?”

“I read a lot about chess and grandmasters and their play. And when I am playing and I do an important maneuver and checkmate my opponent and my friends see how a formidable player I am, what’s not to like about it?
“You clearly are passionate about it,” Phillip said. “That’s great. Because without passion, nothing is fun. Doesn’t matter if your hobby is playing chess, or driving, or painting, or writing, or gardening. If you don’t put much of yourself into it, you can’t get much out of it.” “That’s true,” I said.

“What I’ve noticed about people is that they almost always work harder to have and enjoy their hobbies than their jobs. They spend all kinds of time and efforts and energy on something that cost them money – just because they love it! You probably spend a few minutes most days at the office or in your car thinking about your last round with your wife, or something useful you read recently, or some new idea, or the new ‘variation’ you’re looking forward to play during a chess game.”

I laughed. “Guilty as charged.”

“Let me tell you a secret. Your employees do the same thing. They put their hobbies ahead of their work!”

“Well, is that a problem?” I asked, suddenly defensive about the people who worked under me.

“I mean, if it doesn’t affect their work?”

“Not at all,” Phillip replied. “But my point is this. If you want to turn your place around, you need to get your people to invest themselves in their work the way they do with their hobbies. How do you do that? It has to start at the top, with you.”

I couldn’t help but be struck by how true Phillip’s observation sounded so true. It made complete sense. Most of my staff was doing one course or another — doing evening classes or distance learning of some sort. I was once disappointed to hear a female employee retorting angrily on phone not long ago, “Do you think I am here to let you waste my time at the expense of my education?” Sometimes a few would even want to open their notebooks while they are at work, and they appear to be waiting just for time to knock off.

I needed to find a way to make our employees as committed to their jobs some more as they probably were to their other inclinations. Today’s success at work had a bearing on their future successes and the achievement of their aspirations.

I was a chess player and I had forgotten how to apply my chess mentality into my work. In chess, a player always plays to win or fights for a draw by doing the same thing a good player does in trying to win: by committing fully, by extracting everything possible out of the position. The message is the same, no matter the game. To get what you want stay committed, think and play your best. That’s an advice for anyone in business. When you’re losing, you are going to go down unless you fight back. You can’t just acquiesce. That simply doesn’t work. To get the most, you have to give the most. You have to reach beyond, and then beyond that. And that’s just the start. Chris Enyinda (visiting lecturer, GIMPA MBA 2008) once said, “Karikari, if you don’t go to the extreme you will always find excuses.”

“All right,” I said to my newfound mentor. “So before I create a culture of commitment, I need to find a way to better motivate our workforce. But how do I do that?”

“The first step,” Philip said, “is to turn what you do every day out of necessity into something you want to do, something you love to do.

Here’s something that has always been useful to me,” Philip said, pulling a small laminated card out of his wallet. It contained some verse from a poem by an American named Robert Frost

called, “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” stating that the narrator’s goal in life was‘ to unite’ his avocation and vocation, as his ‘two eyes make one in sight.’

“We’ve all met people — whether in public offices or private establishments — whose body language and responses made you imagine whether they ever hoped for promotion or were simply waiting for their dismissal day,” Phillip continued. “But not the guy who takes away the ‘bola’ from homes within my neighborhood. He always seems to have a smile and a friendly greeting. Our old ‘bolaman’ seemed to hate his work, and it showed. Out new ‘bolaman’ is godsend! One day I asked him how he managed to always be so upbeat. He told me, respectfully, ‘Massa, everyone needs their ‘bola’ cleared. When most people miss a day of work, no one notices — someone may ‘cover’ for them. But if the ‘bolaman’ is absent one day, everyone go see! The fact is we’re important. We help people too with their day-to-day lives. And because I know I’m helping people, and making a difference, (may be small) I can’t help but enjoy what I am doing.’”

“All right,” I conceded. “But the importance of every job isn’t always that obvious. Some people feel that their efforts or the little best of them they must demonstrate now is unnecessary.”

“Trust me,” Phillip said, “if you have a job, you’re needed or else your job wouldn’t exist! It doesn’t matter whether you are a manager, or a cashier, or a janitor or security man. But people have to see how valuable their jobs are to those around them. Do you think Agatha or Ewurabena grew up dreaming of serving pastries and drinks in a café? Did Akos, the woman you met yesterday at the ‘Help Center’, set her sights on working at an information stand? Somehow, I don’t think so. But the way they throw themselves into their work, you’d think they did. And why do they do that? Because we make it clear how important they are, to our customers and to ‘Global’. We value their input and opinions. We make them responsible and encourage their contributions. And because of that, they regard their jobs highly and as fun! Finding ways to foster that kind of motivation is part of our mission at Global Microfinance. On paper, their jobs aren’t glamorous. But you can make any job fun, and fulfilling if you show them how they are contributing!”

“I am sure you pay them quite well,” I said.

“Not necessarily! The secret of motivation doesn’t always lie in increasing the paychecks of workers; but rather in their sense of achievement. Motivation depends on achievements, recognition and responsibility. Because you love playing chess, you read about it; the grandmasters and their moves in order to play it and win your game. That makes you always want to stand out as a good player.”

“Right now, morale at ‘Stellar’ is very low; admitted. People are grumbling about the customers, their coworkers, their supervisors and virtually everything!”

Philip grimaced. “Those are real problems, Karikari; I’m, not going to lie to you. What do you think the cause or causes might be?”

“The causes?” I asked with a tone of surprise.

“People don’t start disliking their jobs and coworkers for no reason. Is there anything specific they’re complaining about?”

“Everything, and nothing, it seems to me. I guess they feel like there is nothing they can do to maybe make a difference,” I admitted, surprised by my sudden insight.

“How do you ensure your employees take care of your customers?” I asked.

“Let’s go back to the basics. We may have to do this today and then we can wrap up on the Eid holiday, Monday. Are you okay with that?”

“Yes, very well,” I said as I sat up to brace myself.

“Karikari,” Philip called me to get my undivided attention, “Is Stellar Microfinance Company duly certified by the Central Bank to operate as a microfinance company in Ghana?”

“Yes. Very much so.”

“What do you understand by ‘Microfinance’?”

“I would say it is ‘dispensing loans to those mainly doing informal small business for their business expansion, additional income and be able to pay back our loans.”

“Do you per chance do recruitment of your client based on religion or education?”

“Not necessarily so; I would say”.

“Do you discuss microfinance operations with your staff regularly?”

Umm..sometimes. Oftentimes though, we focus on discussing the shortfalls in our targets and how we need to intensify our pursuit of defaulters and involve the police or their relatives help us get out money back.”

“Are you practicing the group guarantee scheme?

“Yes”

“And what is the average size of a group?

“Twenty-five. In that way we can become more cost-effective while strengthening our monitoring and group cohesion.”

“Do you always give out all your loans in cash to your clients?”

“Yes”

“Did I hear you say that you have put a hold on all disbursements of loans in view of the high bad debt position?”

“Yes”

Finally, let me ask you for the criteria you’ve set in selecting your customers for your loans.

Phillips questions put me off balance. Do we have to get a criteria ourselves? I wondered.

“Umm…. Because of the group guarantee scheme we operate, we’ve left group formation and new recruitment mostly in the hands of the group leaders and their members. We entrust the group leaders and their members with checking on each other and give us the necessary feedback or ‘whistle blowing’, if they have doubts about any one member.”

“Do you give the group leaders any preferential treatment sometimes?”

“As in tips and the rest?”

“Yes.”

“No. By offering them the opportunity to be leaders of groups they are building their capacity to become community leaders. Let me say that most of the leaders now are also leaders in their mosques, churches and social organizations and they feel privileged to serve in their groups.”

“Do you give chequebooks or withdrawal books to your customers?”

“Not really. Each member’s savings is done before their names and under the group. They have passbooks but withdrawals are restrictive.”

“Good. You have answered frankly. Our approach to micro financing at Global Microfinance is different and I hope you may find it refining as I share our success story with you.”

Phillip had now jotted down some ideas on a sheet of paper and passed it on to me. I picked it up and looked at it intently but briefly.

Some difference between Microfinance and Conventional Banking

Conventional Banking Microfinance Borrowing Physical collateral or salary payment Large size loans Concentrates on few well-known clients Emphasis on institutional sustainability Clients approach institution for services – must be an account holder Thrives on individual Institutional worthiness and loyalty Capacity building is not a priority. Some (Group Guarantee) collateral Small size loans Large number of clients and still counting Approach based on both institutional and client sustainability. Services taken to the doorsteps of customers Thrives on group cohesion and solidarity Capacity building of clientele is key.   [1]

Phillip said, “I want you to look at those points sometime later. Right now I want to shed some light on the operations of the work that we do.

“Today’s practice of microfinance has built upon what was ever done before. Microfinance is a social innovation and it consists of all the services and activities which are provided to customers to enable them to succeed in their enterprise.

Microfinance has a major concept of ‘giving’ in it but too often that is glossed over. The end result of the service we provide must be to make our customers better off than they came in. If not, your loans are in trouble. First thing, always bear in mind that your presence must add value, be helpful to the organization. And you must expect that, especially, from your staff too. The greater part of your job is about motivating your staff and making decisions. To do that effectively, you need to have an understanding of the persons and the issues –that is, to know your staff and your customers fully. In our business, I always believe that it is better to work with good and educated people who will put their work and customers ahead of what they themselves can get out at customers or institutional expense.

“See, all work, especially microfinance, has a social dimension. In our work we are social entrepreneurs. Let me tell you a little about us i.e. Global Microfinance. Initially, the concept of our microfinance operations was to be ‘Africa centered’-where we would be networked with producers (and encourage them to produce more) all across Africa and provide ready market for their output. Don’t forget, we can encourage more people to engage in production if they can be assured a ready payment (market). Take for example the large portions of arable lands which lie idle all across the country and even across Africa as a whole and yet able-bodied men and women are moving about complaining that there are no jobs. At Global Microfinance, we may provide proof of being able to utilize a land facility we lease in a way and manner that is productive, provide employment and inure to the benefit of all those involved in the chain. And so if we undertake to cultivate say twenty acres of carrots or any other vegetable, we are able to liaise with say-the Department of Crop Science at a university or the World Food Programme for the best seedlings and advice. Whether by the efforts of the individual farmer or by our direct involvement, we liaise with the workers on the field so that we pay them for their effort every step of the process from land clearing, planting, watering, fertilizer application, weed and pest control, harvesting and selling.

“We have identified that if the poor in the rural areas are willing to work the land, our land tenure system called ‘ebunu’ is not motivating enough. In any case, a man plants, relies on the weather, and then waits for several months before he may harvest and then sends his produce to the market himself and looks for buyers. As social entrepreneurs, we appreciated the efforts and yet the frustrations. As an institution, we have some capacity and are better placed to help intervene for our common good. In that way we look all across Africa and encourage all persons to engage in some form of productive activity which we will pay for. Global has employed people to rear cows, goats and sheep and enters into bee-making, compost making, sugar cane for sugar, you name it. We’ve got people who cost and supervise all our input-output schedules over the number of production days. We hire people and pay their wages on a daily basis. That is to say, we recognize their achievements through the efforts they put in and give them value for it which is their wages. That motivates them and everyday each one of them is poised to work, believing that we will be prompt in recognizing and rewarding their efforts. There you are, we invest in the environment by creating the opportunities that will make people earn income and a living.

The end result here is to provide employment and produce standardized products that are safe

and healthy for us. The world is now a global village. What we can’t easily get in Africa, we import, and of course we export our products too to other places and continents. You saw how busy our ground floor is, always. You may not believe that some of our clients sell electrical gadgets of all sorts, artworks of ceramics and paintings, and you name it. We look all across Africa, first, to encourage innovation and production by buying efforts and products at a producer price which is competitive so that we can in turn make it available in some other part of Africa and beyond. Our microfinance clients are happy to take their selling items from us at the best quality but most competitive wholesale price. In that way we do not always give our clients physical or raw cash but also in the form of items or goods which they sell for cash. Each customer has an account with us. They sell, pay back and take more orders. Depending on the quantity or bulkiness of the good, we make it available at the clients’ doorsteps.”

“Umm,” I murmured. “I’ve been seeing some sheds around town with the inscription ‘Global’ now I know you make those sheds for your clients.”

“Yes, those sheds belong to our clients. We designed them. We wanted to raise the bar in terms of quality and safety by the way and manner our fruits and vegetable sellers handled their wares. We made the sheds with roofs and wire mesh to keep them safe from flies and improper handling. Then some of our customers selling local sandals, ceramic wares etc found them useful for erecting/arranging their wares.

“The feedback we are getting from all our clients is that the public is finding more confidence in our brand and the products we sell so that the sheds we give to our customers are in themselves advertisements for quality products at competitive price(s). Everywhere is a market so long as there is space for interaction. So we are making those sheds available at vantage spaces all through the communities for our clients at our expense.”

“Hey, Uncle Phillip, You, I mean, Global Microfinance, is soon going to monopolize the microfinance landscape and kick us out of business,” I quipped.

“Nope, not that. According to the principle of subsidiarity, we need and complement each other. See, there is lots of useful research undertaken by the students in our various universities who are food scientists, chemists, biologists, industrialists, process engineers, you name it. Most of those useful research suggesting how we can apply little effort to help ourselves is not being put to use …but things must change … social entrepreneurs must act. Global Microfinance is setting the pace. Anyway, that’s for us. “Let’s get back to discussing how you may spark change and turn the corner at”Stellar “. He pulled three straw month-falls of the pineapple juice and swallowed it in a relaxed manner and continued.

“Everyone needs to be trained. For a start, your approach in dealing with your customers may be counter-productive. Beware of adversarial and arms-length relationships with your customers. Human relationship, based on constant appreciation of interdependency and mutual trust is more important in getting the best out of persons than adversarial — involving the use of coercion. Formerly, people thought that applying pressure would make clients pay their debts. That approach may work temporarily. In our industry, companies are competing on the basis of how to reduce risk. The risk you identify which are very important to you –say the risk of loan default, could be mitigated if you invest in something which not only aids the customer in some way but also appeals to the customers’ conscience based on the law of interdependency, which they see as being your effort or investment to help them succeed.”

I said, “Like the sheds Global Microfinance is providing to her customers?”

“Yes. But that is only a small fraction of the picture. You need to help your frontline troopers

succeed, which will rebound to your ultimate success. Let me point out a few things:

“One, I think your group membership of twenty-five is too large. The leaders may find group control difficult. Besides, some members may not attach much seriousness and commitment to your desires and standards. The risk of ‘cronyism’ may be high as dishonest leaders may introduce their own agents as members. Most of the ‘would-be’ members are only there to receive your loan(s) and then turn it over to one person parading as ‘leader’. Because the group is large, information sharing may be diffused and principles may be relaxed, and there will always be a spokesperson(s) to cover someone up.

“Two: Group guarantee schemes based on ‘self-selection’ has not proven, in my experience, to be the panacea to risk of default payment. And here, after initial groupings, you must conduct your independent interviews and have an assessment or suitability criterion to accept a client. You conduct interviews at ‘Stellar’ when you want to employ suitable staff, don’t you?”

“Three: Your group leaders will work for you and be of better service if you make every effort to recognize and appreciate the role they play. A token or bonus set aside for them will not only motivate them to work hard but also appeal to their conscience to be more loyal and committed.

“Four: It will be positive branding if you provide savings or withdrawal passbooks to both the individual customer and to the groups. Some microfinance operators insist upon a savings reserve ratio of at least ten percent of loan amount. Such amount can be deposited into a ‘common’ group account while the individuals are encouraged to save separately. See, not many years ago, the popular belief was that microfinance customers were ‘put off’ by the banking halls of banks because of their opulent ambience etc. That notion is simply not true. Microfinance customers want to feel they matter too. In service marketing, ambience of our official operating premises counts. They say we need to tangibilize the intangible. What our customers don’t like may be undue delays and no one to assist them do things they would want to get done. We need to make it attractive for our customers to save with us and nowhere else. In part, a welcoming ambience gives our customers some confidence to believe that little things matter to us; that we are here to serve them and we are here for good.

Five: Endeavor not to let the default of one person or one group hinder your ability to continue with your normal operations. Your clients have value expectations. They believe that they are doing business with you because you are efficient, reliable and dependable. By meeting their value expectations, you would be enhancing their confidence in your services which assures them that you are there for them. Continued client confidence in your services will help them evolve from being mere clients to being your ‘gate-keepers’. Here, good clients would become

more interested in your success and welfare; keeping their eyes on the horizon to look out for potential bad lots.

Loan default is really undesirable and must be handled quickly but amicably. The more loan default stays in the system, the higher its cost. Always plan production smoothing in advance, with back-ups (i.e. how many loans can we make in say one week).”

I gulped large mouthfuls of fruit juice. Contagiously, Philip imitated me. He belched slightly and continued.

“You need to become customer centric. Every company has two kinds of customers, those outside the company, and those inside the company. And your first customers are your internal ones; your employees or coworkers. If you don’t take care of your employees, you can’t expect them to take care of your customers outside of the company.

“Every company finds its own ways to ensure that employees take care of the company’s customers the way managers want them to. At Global Microfinance, to a surprisingly large degree,” Phillip said, “I don’t make sure of it, our employees do. We have over one hundred team members at any given time on the ground. There is simply no way I could play policemen for every worker if they’re determined to undermine our business. Instead, we utilize a friendly form of peer pressure and peer monitoring to get everyone going in the same direction. Our team members encourage each other in a way that lets everyone know they’re part of and accountable to the team. Trust me, it’s much better to have them all urging each other on instead of me trying to cheer the whole team on all by myself.”

“So how do you accomplish that?”

“Tell you what — why don’t we ask someone?” Philip said, turning to Ewurabena. “Ewurabena, can you join us for a few minutes?”

“Sure,” she said.“Just let me tie up a few loose ends and I’ll be right over.”

A minute later Ewurabena was back.

“Don’t you have customers to attend to now?” I asked her, looking around the café.

“My colleague Paa Kwesi said he’d do it for me.”

“But he… wont he be attending to other customers at the bar?” I asked, concerned that by spending time to talk to us, Ewurabena would keep customers waiting unduly.

“Not the way we handle it”, Ewurabena said, “If I spend some personal time out of my main duty post, I cover for it with extra time.”

“But what if a coworker doesn’t pull his or her weight?” Doesn’t that hurt everyone else?”

“It could,” she said, “in other sections, maybe. But it’s almost impossible here in this section. First, we have the power to review each other’s work and pay. And second, we pick our teammates.”

It was incredulous. “You do?”

Ewurabena and Phillip both laughed. He doesn’t believe you Uncle Phillip? she asked.

“Not that, Ewurabena, it’s probably better coming from you.”

“Well,” she said, “at Global Microfinance, when we need to hire someone, we put our entire team in this section to work. We have about twenty full timers to work on it. We screen the applicants; interview the finalists, then pick one new candidate, by majority vote, for one month probation. After that month, we vote again. So being an employee’s cousin might help you get an interview, but it won’t get you the job if you can’t cut it, because no one wants in a team someone who’s not going to carry his/her weight, and cost them money, or poor customer service. And after you hire them, it’s pretty hard to complain about a team mate when you helped to pick them!”

“So each employee feels a sense of ownership over their workplace and the people they work with.” I said.

“Exactly,” Phillip said.“Each team: the fruits and vegetable team, the arts and craft team, the animal and poultry team, or the bakery team- has a lot of power to make their own decisions.”

Turning to me fully to speak, Phillip said, “When you have that kind of teamwork and autonomy, you become engaged and committed to your work, and it becomes fun. “The point is,” he went on, “if you give your employees responsibility, and treat them as the important parts of your business that they are, they respond. Give them the right tools and training, encouragement and compensation, give them the opportunity to be heard, and they’ll be more engaged in their work and more invested in your business. We’ve found that when you set up the right systems, your teammates push each other far harder than you could ever push them. And the better we treat our employees, the better they treat our customers. It never happens any other way. This, Karikari, is the foundation for teamwork which leads to successful outcomes.

This is the kind of environment in which commitment and teamwork can take root and flourish. This is the foundation of purposeful organization, leading to success.”

Before taking leave of each other, Phillip gave me two separate scripts. “You may want to look at them, and I hope they will contribute some information to you.”

THE BUSINESS PROMOTER

CHAPTER THREE

Breaking The Ice

The urge to go to my office at Stellar Microfinance so I could read the scripts and think about how I could put Phillip’s ideas to work was overwhelming. I thanked Phillip for his advice and insight, and Ewurabena for her time- and for the juice and koose. “Would you mind telling me more about how you create a culture of success another time?”

“Sure,” Phillip said, laughing. “Give me a call anytime. And let me know how things go,” he said as he took leave.

I had stood up to leave, but with the serene environment and a heightened appetite for any information that may be of help to me, I sat down to read and digest what I could get from the two sets of photocopies. The first pair of sheets was titled, ‘Encounter Group Experience.’ It provided so much learning for me. The highlight of Encounter Group Experience described a small group intervention which is a prominent Organization Development (OD) method for achieving change (Mirvis 1988) through laboratory training, sometimes called the ‘cultural island or T-Group or Encounter Group. It’s about a real meeting between people, where each ‘treats the other as a full human being’. Here, the leader’s role in simply “to facilitate what is going on, to participate as a full human being, and to encourage people to be more honest and more self–disclosing”. It discussed several learning points:

• Lack of structure produces anxiety and dependency
• The individual and the group
• Human processual issues in encounter group development
• The myth of the leader role in group
• Groups and individual strength
• Organic properties of group: Interpersonal relations
• Group design, dependency and effectiveness
• Group facilitation and leadership
• Group transition through ‘groupness”

The concept of how a task can be accomplished by the group if the human processual issue — such as roles, intimacy issues of trust, disclosure, authority, conflict management etc is not first settled. It observes that people in a group are having relational difficulties such as identity, trust, disclosure, engagement, involvement, intimacy, inclusion. There is no question that those intrinsic motivation issues are essential for task accomplishment and successful group life. It is ‘irresponsible’ therefore for organizations to bring people together, throw them out there, and threat them as ‘spare parts’, as ‘factors of production; but not create the conditions for them to enjoy group life. On the other hand, it is beneficial to allow the group to develop organically, to figure out their relational issues, and to try to solve them by themselves. A healthy group then is that which has over time developed its own mechanism to address its developmental problems. Outside solutions, as much as possible, should be minimal.

The second separate sheet of photocopy had as its heading: The learning Organization: Managing Knowledge for Business success; a 1996 study conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit and IBM. They identified eleven elements of a learning organization.

1. Articulation and continual reinforcement of values and goals that go beyond profits.
2. Learning or innovation as a corporate goal.
3. Individual performance measurement systems that identify specific learning objectives.
4. Rewards and compensations that take learning achievements and collaborative behaviors into consideration.
5. Structures and routine work activities that encourage the sharing of ideas.
6. Strong cultivation of corporate history and traditions.
7. Trust and frequent communication between upper management and all other levels.
8. Physical work environments that promote teamwork and the spontaneous flow of ideas.
9. Routine meetings that include discussions of the company’s values.
10. Compatibility with corporate values include as a factor in recruiting and hiring.
11. Organization of people into smaller work groups to encourage entrepreneurialism.

Networking

• Share best practices and models so that they leverage each other’s learning.
• Get ideas from each other and learn about mistakes made.
• Have a timely flow of information.
• Plan meetings.
• Reuse each other’s materials so they don’t duplicate efforts.

I didn’t return to the house as I thought I would when I was about to take leave of Philip. Being fired up with more energy and enthusiasm than I could ever remember feeling before, I soon realize that I was driving towards ‘Stellar’. As I drew near the building, a few things suddenly became obvious to me: I noticed, as if for the first time, that we had no signage with our

company’s name. There was neither a sign post, nor was there any indication on the building of what we did. When I waved to the lone securityman and walked through the main door, a low hum of mediocrity seemed to fill the air. It hit me like an offensive odor after spending most of the previous day and this morning at Global Microfinance.

Peeping through a door, I found three of our employees in the general office. I asked one of them, Ben, being the senior, to quickly use the office phone to dial all the 26 other staff and ask them to attend an emergency meeting the next day at 9am. I followed up the phone call by sending each and every employee a text message of a meeting.

It was 9 O’clock prompt. I asked Ben to let all the staff meet me in the general office. Since I offered to foot their transportation, nearly all the staff was present. I felt pleased. I decided to go straight to the point:

“I’ve decided to go straight to the point.” I told them. That seemed to get their attention immediately. “We don’t have much time; things are working against us. All of you know, I am sure, that we have been facing stiff challenges of late. We’ve had an alarming portfolio in arrears situation, our group savings levels are woefully down, we’ve suspended disbursement for several weeks now. I’ve been told that either we pull up our boot straps and change course for rapid progress, or Stellar Microfinance is going to be sold. If that happens, who knows when our last payday might be? And that includes me.”

That wiped the nonchalant expression off their faces. Several leaned forward in their seats.

“When did you find this out?” One of the supervisors asked. “A few days back,” I said. “I wasn’t sure whether to tell you or not. But I realized we’re all in this together. We’re going to sink or swim as a team, like it or not.”

The questions started flowing. How long would we have to turn things around? Which loan officers and their supervisors had the worse default amounts? Why did we have to put a hold on disbursements? Why didn’t we compel the clients to save more?
When their questions were exhausted, I explained that I wasn’t sure how much more time we had on our side. That was for the owner, Nana Ato to decide. “But,” I added, “why leave this to chance? We all have bills to pay and families who depend on us. Yes, it may be our loans officers and their supervisors’ job to make problem-free loans, but it’s the job, also, of all of us to support each and everyone. Right now I want to figure out where we stand, in your view, and what we can do to make Stellar Microfinance a better microfinance company. First, what do you think of the job we’re doing now?”

There was a lot of mumbling. I heard “Could do better”, and “Haven’t really thought about it.” A few of the loan officers and supervisors began grumbling, trading accusations at one another. I intervened in the din.

“How many people think we practice the best microfinance services in the region?”
Not a hand went up.

“How many people love working here?”

Again, eyes shifted around the room, but no hands.

“All right,” I said. Before, I would have gotten angry at their honesty in this way, but I remembered something Phillip had told me: ‘All information was good information’.

“We’ve identified two of our biggest problems: We don’t practice the best microfinance services, and people don’t love working here. Now, how can we fix that?”

There was a pause. No one spoke.

I tried again. What can we do to make our services better? How can we make this company a better place to work?” Again, no takers. I reached into my back pocket, pulled out my wallet, and said, “A hundred Ghana Cedis for the best ideas.”

“Well,” said Julie, one of the staff, “we resorted to asking the police to help us retrieve our debts, I will like to know how far that is yielding fruits.”

“All right,” I said, “Good. Can someone write these down?” Julie volunteered and quickly got a pen and sheet.

A loans supervisor called Wofa raised his hand and opined that he thought that the amount of petty cash set aside for attending group meetings and so on was too small.

“Good,” I said, “keep them coming.”

A loans officer raised his hand and began to complain about the attitude of his colleagues and the supervisors bitterly. He placed the blame squarely at their doorsteps for the lack of teamwork and commitment to make every effort to retrieve the loans. A supervisor stood up and began to rebuke the loans officer.

Then a supervisor suggested that we endeavor to raise the minimum savings amount required of groups before they can access a loan. As soon as the supervisor had spoken, Angie entered. I had asked her to buy soft drinks and light pastries to cover everyone. She began to distribute a drink of Malta Guinness, Sprite and Coca Cola to each one without asking which particular drink anyone wanted. Angie was sociable but tough on principles and I had great respect for her although I made it a policy to play a balance card. Someone remarked that his only drinks were beer and Guinness Stout and so Angie should produce the money worth of his drink in cash. After some initial heckling over drinks, and having listed several ideas, they seemed to be focused on their drinks. Then Julie, the recorder, spoke and said that almost everyone had voiced out their contributions with regard to the ideas we sought and yet I had not proffered one myself.

I made some random call-outs of some staff to put them on the spot. “Mr. Bentil is there anything you think that we can do to improve our performances across board?”

He said, “Report to work much earlier and close later”. His response generated murmurings. I then called ‘Wofa’ who was a supervisor with the largest default amount.

“Has the use of our police friends been of help to us so far?”

He wasted no time to say that at first the involvement of police escorts brought some pressure to bear on the customers which made them pay their debts. “But now,” he remarked, “they don’t fear the police anymore. Most of them have connived with their family members and so even if such defaulting clients are at home the family members would say that they don’t know where our customers had gone. Besides, a senior policeman recently rebuked his junior colleague severely, that it was not a policeman’s duty to get involved in the apprehension of our loan defaulters.”

Time was not on our side and I needed to act: to push reforms as quickly as possible but with tact. Although I love reading and made it a point to read something new on business concepts from the Internet or magazines etc. every day, my recent reading of ‘Encounter Group Experiences’ and ‘The Learning Organization’ meant a lot. Also, my interaction with Phillip, my mentor, had been invaluable and worth millions.

“All right”, I began “We will work as a group to bring out the best in ourselves –we need someone who will be our ‘Reform Czar’; someone who will co-ordinate our common resolve and enforce our decisions”.

Wofa Donkor, a burly and jovial older fellow, said, “Boss, since that is a special operation can’t we call it, ‘Operation Reform?’” Bentil raised his hand and suggested, “Operation pull-your-weight.” Julie suggested, ‘Project Zero-Past-Due’. I felt pleased that the suggestions that were coming for a ‘name’ were pointing in the same direction and the group was in consensus.

“Okay,” I said, “we will adopt a code name or a name tag; but can we nominate the one who would be the enforcer of our proposed reforms?”

Eyes began to move around. I obviously had a choice in mind but I needed to restrain myself from nominating someone so that the group would be allowed to function. Then Shaibu, the youngest employee, raised his hand and said, “ I nominate Angie!”

Brilliant! I almost exclaimed. Angie looked stunned, and for some strange reasons she looked at me fast. She had read my body language, accompanied by a quick slight nod. Someone had seconded Shaibu’s nomination and Angie spoke to confirm her acceptance. Things happened fast and Angie was nominated by popular choice. There was no dissent. To my pleasant surprise

Angie raised her hand and said that she would need a deputy. Smartly enough, she nominated the loans officer with the largest amount of debt, Kobi. Kobi was also overwhelmingly endorsed. He too requested to have a deputy. And in that manner, every other person was someone’s deputy until it was left with the one person- Wofa Donkor. He then raised his hand and observed that since every other employee would now have the official obligation to watch his every step he would be vulnerable to the possibility that someone would abuse their powers and victimize him so he needed to have his own power to check every other employee in case of excesses or favoritism or inaction. Everyone laughed. I reminded him that I too would be checked. I, however, nominated him to be the chief rapporteur –and it was agreed.

Things were moving in the right direction so far, and I needed to seize the moment, by educating them convincingly. The possible trouble shooter was now Angie’s deputy, and I was sure that she could handle him. Wofa Donkor had a way of being casual and not minding group activities. I hope that with his new responsibilities he would be more inclined to get involved. The teacher in me was on edge. I needed to proceed from the known to the unknown. We needed to be at par for a take-off; we needed to start off from the basics.

A lot of energy was running through my veins with ideas. But I decided that my first duty now was to reinforce the group cohesion and promote gamesmanship. I was somewhat guilty of not showing much personal interest in my employee’s affairs.

“You know,” I began, “I wonder how many of us know where the rest of us live and any other thing.”

Wofa was the first to observe that he had gone to visit Angie about three months ago. Although he met her absence, she had refused to reciprocate. Julie observed that although she had made time to attempt visiting almost everyone, nobody had visited her. With that, more than half of the guys asked her to look out for them over the next weekend.

Here, again, I liked the group discussion which ensued. I sought to break down barriers. Then I asked the ‘Welfare Committee’ to draw out a plan of action to make provision for staff socialization or outing at least once every month. They would study the details and brief us at our next meeting.

“As you know,” I was on the floor again, “we charge the most competitive interest rate on our loans. But it seems that that is where our competitive edge remains. I want us to be specific and identify some main causes of customers defaulting to pay our loans. The group came up with the points:

i. Customers dishonesty which led to multiple borrowing,

ii. Lack of commitment of customers to attend group meeting,

iii. Our delays in disbursement,

iv. Insufficient petty cash to chase after defaulters,

v. Work overload.

“How much do we know about our customers?” I asked. “Good question,” someone remarked.

I asked one of the loan officers to describe the process normally adopted to recruit a new client. He gave his narration and added that the normal start for a group was to have twenty- five members; in that way cost could be minimized.

I then asked another loan officer to describe the processes of a typical group meeting. Angie suggested that they perform a role play which I found very useful for our discussion. Before I knew it, Sara was acting as loan officer while most of the other group members acted as clients. Wofa Donkor said he would act as supervisor. But someone soon protested that he already had the highest number of officers with defaulting clients under his watch so he didn’t merit being one — even now. I reminded them that it was even better he performed his role now, since we could all have the opportunity to assess and critique our operations.

I facilitated a discussion again. “So, what are the flaws or what can we do to improve the processes?” After some useful group discussions I took the floor.

“The experts say that there is no bad borrower, but there is a bad lender. I am sure that makes sense. Therefore it is always the lender’s fault. So anyhow you look at it, the ball is in our court,” I began. Wofa Donkor cleared his throat and everyone began to sit upright and listen attentively. I continued, “As to how much we know our customers it is clear that always we are only interested in the main start process of ‘disbursing loans’ and the main other end of process of ‘customers paying back their repayment’. We do not care about the rest of the process. In other words, we are more particular about the activities than the people. We have failed to show genuine interest in going beyond the activity, and also take responsibility for ensuring that our customers succeed. That means, in part, we have adopted arms-length approach to doing business with our customers. We have refused to see our customers as our indispensable partners that their success is our success. But our relationship must be mutual. In a sense, they work for us; they butter our bread and, therefore, it follows that ourselves, our attitudes, our processes and operations must be refined if we are going to get the best out of them. It is a win-win partnership that we seek. See, our being here is like a tripod stand: the company, the individual (employees) and the customers. The company sits at the base without which there would be neither customers nor ourselves. What I mean is that the company’s interest and survival is paramount. The customers’ interest is next. We must subdue all our personal (sometimes selfish) interest, by and large, and make some sacrifice for our long-term successes. All of you/us are managers in waiting. We must now aim at teamwork which will give us successes and then we can go on to justify why we can go on and

open more branches of “Stellar Microfinance” in most places. So, it starts with us: We will pledge ourselves never to make any ‘bad’ loans again. Can we mention a few things each of us need to do to demonstrate our individual reform for our success?” More hands went up and I was impressed because it indicated a lot.

“Kobi,” I pointed out. “Timeliness,” he said. “If we stick to our time reporting at work and to our meeting with our customers that will help.”

“Thank you, Kobi,” I said.

To Angie I pointed. “Yes, Angie?”

Angie said, “Honesty. All of us need to be more honest and sincere with ourselves, the business and our customers more than ever before.”

“Thanks Angie,” I said. I gave the opportunity for few others to opine which they did, emphasizing personal values.

“What about our appearances … our dressing? Apart from being punctual and encouraging ourselves to go the extra mile and report to meetings first, ahead of the members, our appearance and body language count a lot. We must be neatly dressed and have a professional look always. It follows also, that when we appear ready to meet our clients for business, they would invariably respond likewise.”

I paused and asked if they wanted us to take a break, already two persons had just gone out to attend to the call of nature. Much to my encouragement, the group urged me on.

“The area of communication is often played down. Communication is everything. The way we speak or communicate means a lot. The way we speak or communicate to our clients must show that we ourselves are disciplined. It must be sober and respectful of our customers. Someone asked, “Eh Boss, even if the person owes us and wants to play games?”
“Yes sir! It is better to be calm and respectful to our clients even in the face of provocation. Let’s always adopt a posture which tells them that because we don’t expect them to lie to us, we believe everything they tell us. Let our posture be to help them with their own efforts in the face of difficulties. We can guide them sometimes in the decisions they have to make. We must have it at the back of our minds always, to turn over every stone and try to hear every pin drop well before, and, when customers are in some difficulty, so that we will unearth every cover and get to the bottom of issues in order to give meaningful suggestions. But that is why we are here anyway. We need to unearth the risk first before it gets too late. That means making every effort to know our clients and even those close to them also.

“Our credit assessment must be done every day! Any time an interested person approaches us, it’s our duty to obtain certain basic information and conduct our checks. Before and after any disbursement, we need to intensify our interaction with our clients.” Everyone was still looking at me intently. I asked Julie if she was writing anything down which would help to guide Angie and co. She nodded well.

“I will like to state my position on some of the suggestions you made earlier:

First, what Wofa Donkor said is revealing; the police ought not to be used by us for the collection of our debt.” I looked across and saw straight faces looking at me. But I continued. “The relationships we have had with our clients have not only been an arms-length sort of relationship but also have also been adversarial. The use of the police to apply certain coercion or pressure to get out clients to pay our loans only deepens the mistrust and our unwillingness to communicate more with the clients and those who matter to them -their families – to find out how we can partner and overcome the challenge they and us face for a win-win outcome.

Second: Henceforth, our group size will range from 8 to 12 members. We will not compromise on quality interaction and monitoring and assessment of clients in the name of being cost-effective. A group having 25 members lends itself to loose commitment and inability to assess well (on our part) what each one is doing. Also, we will set aside a token amount as stipend for the three leaders in each and every group- which we will put in their own personal accounts with us. Effective group leaders will still be motivated, even though we will set up ‘whistle blowers’ procedure to enable each and every group member to provide feedback or grievance to us, where necessary.”

Mr. Bentil said, “Then boss, we will need more staff.”

Sara said, “That is just what I was about to say.”

“Yes. We will surely need more staff,” I said. “But we’re walking on a thin rope now. If we make progress, there will surely be the need for extra hands. And everyone of us here will sit down again to do the selection of applicants so that each and everyone of us know and agree beforehand who is coming to work with us. Right now, it’s how we must act to succeed.” Someone casually said that we would succeed.

Angie spoke, “I know at least three competent but unemployed persons who have spoken to me to help them find employment in our kind of company.”

Wofa Donkor remarked in response to Angie, “Angie you know of three persons but I have at least four persons who would like to join us if there was the opportunity.” Julie placed the discussion back on track when she said, “Everyone has someone out there that they would like to

help get employment, preferably with us, so let’s focus and allow our meeting to proceed. Please speak to the Boss.”

I resumed my discourse. “So, to ensure that we are all responsible for getting only the best people as our clients, we will let each existing group help us and recruit new clients. The number one criterion for possible selection is ‘honesty’. The second criteria must be availability, and willingness (or better determination) to do some form of business activity even though he or she may not have been in business earlier. In that way, we would broaden the net for recruitment drive while we sieve for the best, and set them up ourselves by giving them knowledge and skills training, business discipline, our conditions and value expectations and so on. Proportionally, we will apportion 25% of new client screening to the individual/existing groups while we, as a company, will conduct 75% of the client assessment. Apart from the loans officer and the loans supervisor, and the individual group assessment feedback, there will be an internally loan assessment/client assessment committee which would have its own set of criteria for approving forms relating to new client assessment, ongoing client/group assessment, and loan assessment of the individual(s) as well as the group.”

Angie then lifted her hand up to get attention. She obviously needed some clarification. “Karikari,” she began, “Did you say that a token stipend will be paid directly into the individual savings accounts of the leaders?”

“Yes,” I said, and I knew this would come up.

“How is that going to be? We only have the group savings scheme?”

“We will add or broaden our savings product line to include individual client savings to encourage personal savings of our customers and help them increase their liquid asset with us.

“Finally,” I said, “loan officers and their supervisors need to begin thinking of how to re-organize the group to fit the size I spoke about. The group formation should be based on certain useful criteria such as neighborhood, religion, products sold, and the rest.” I reminded them again that our company did not operate on the premise of ‘save with us and we will give you loans’. Rather, anyone who had the right character, attitude, values, commitment and readiness to be trained to do something for a living.

There was still calm in the room and Julie seized the opportunity to make a statement.“We did not settle on the name tag for this operation,” she said. Someone suggested that we adopt ‘operation reforms’ another person suggested ‘operation pull-your-weight’ still another person suggested ‘project zero-past-due.’“With all that we have discussed and resolved to do, I suggest

we adopt the code name ‘operation succeed’ with our boss being our ‘Success Czar’ while Angie becomes our ‘implementation Czar’.”

Wofa Donkor spoke and I agreed with him outright. He said, “All of us will surely be success czars. Of course, our boss will always be. But right now we need to cast the spotlight on our implementation czar and all her deputies.” There was laughter.

I realized that the group could still endure for a few more minutes without overstretching their enthusiasm. I asked the loan supervisors to work with their loan officers and design a visitation schedule for the coming week. They should divide our operational area into four. Each day the next week, the whole staff would visit the various group meetings and interact with our clients with the aim of breaking down barriers and try to find out any information which would be useful to us and learn more about them, their families, and businesses and so on. I nominated Mr. Bentil to be in charge and his colleagues accepted it. After we’d visited them, we would plan and undertake community work with our clients –within each of the four zones. Philip’s advice was fresh in my mind. We needed to be social entrepreneurs and invest in our clients and know their families and be interested and involved within their living or working communities.

“Thank you for making the sacrifice by being here. And the ideas that came from you were great,” I said looking at what Julie had scribbled down.

“Can we succeed?”

“Yes we can!” was the enthusiastic response.

‘So who gets the hundred?” Shaibu asked.

I had forgotten about the money.  “You all do. Take it and get yourself a nice lunch.”

A lady said, “Heh no!” at Shaibu. “We are all in this together”.

Shaibu said, “Ah, there really is a free lunch!”

THE BUSINESS PROMOTER
CHAPTER FOUR

The Secret of L.O.V.E

Days after my meeting with our employees things were beginning to take a much visible shape at “Stellar”. I had discussed with Alisa some of my initiatives that would require extra source of funding. “Sure,” she had said, “You need to succeed.” And to my humbling surprise she gave me five hundred cedis as her own contribution to help with my ‘change project’.

Without saying so, Phillip had given me a wealth of ideas which challenged me to reconsider how I managed the people under me and the things that matter to succeed. My encounter with Phillip educated me a lot. Oftentimes I was either in the habit of deciding what people should do or I simply left things into their hands instead of listening to what they had to say by operating from consensus and group involvement.

This was not a small thing, I realized. It was key to making group effort and teamwork the way we work in our kind of business. Like a lot of managers, according to Phillip, I blamed my company’s lack of successes on the quality of our customers.

But teamwork which provided the basis for access, I soon learnt, starts with strong leadership. It starts with me listening more closely to our workers, and to our customers and getting involved with them at all levels to interact and know them better. And I recognized that what was true for me at work was true at home as well. I loved my wife and my daughters, but did I listen to what they had to say? Did I make it a habit of asking them what was important to them rather than assuming our views were the same? Just in the last few days, Alisa had noticed the difference in how I listened to her, and our daughters at almost every opportunity and the way I was playing with them and helping with home chores. As at the company, already my recent approach and attitude was paying dividends.

The days went fast. I wanted to talk with Phillip about how things were changing – and get some more coaching. “So,” Phillip said, diving right in when I was sitting down and he came to meet me. “What’s new?”I told him about my meeting with the Stellar Microfinance employees and the ideas and the resolve to improve our plight and engage our clients as partners. “They were reluctant to open up at first. But after getting their feet wet, it was as if a dam had burst. I got a lot of good ideas and discussion about things we can do to improve conditions at stellar!”

“I’m pleased. Give yourself some credit, Karikari. Not many managers would have the courage to open up the floor like that to their employees.”

“Hey, desperate times require second counsel!”

“Perhaps. But remember, what you did a couple of weeks ago you can do anytime, whether you’re desperate or not,” Phillip said. “Infact, the more often you listen to your employees, and interact more with your clients during good times or not the less desperate you will be.

“You have tilled the soil, to prepare it for the seed of success, by reaching out to all your main stakeholders. The next thing you need to do as a manager,” Phillip said smiling, “is to focus on what you and your employees do, not just the results,”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“As I said at our conversation, when I focus solely on results, on profits, we don’t do as well. But when we focus on helping people, we excel. Focus on what you do, not just the results.

Let me explain it in chess terms. Chess illustrates that a vulnerable king can be used as a weapon. The lowly pawn can beat the lofty queen. It can even become it. You can calculate, but maybe there’s a simple rule. You try it, but it doesn’t apply. Or it does, and there’s an exception. So you’re losing; but suddenly, there’s a brilliant move. Now you’re going to win if you can only engage your pieces purposefully. Chess players are not restricted by premonitions. They are resourceful, perceptive, flexible, imaginative, and pragmatic- they can make something out of nothing or reduce a great complexity to its bare essentials. Chess principles make excellent advice in the business world. Play with a plan. Don’t waste material. Seek small advantages. But much transcends chess and applies directly to life. Chess players make it their business to master both the obvious and the ambiguous. Their rules are as straightforward as they are subtle. But chess is not the mere play of contradictions. It is also a contest. Great truths are true for any game: chess or business. Success in either could be hard if it weren’t so simple.”

Phillip took a sip of his bottled water. “If we keep taking care of our people – our internal customers – and the things we need to do to satisfy our external customers, making their experiences with us the best we can possibly make them, the other benefits seem to take care of themselves. But the second we start focusing solely on profits, we lose track of our customers’ need, and the profits disappear.”

“Okay,” I said, “that makes sense. I need to focus on what we’re doing to get the results, not just the result themselves.”

“Exactly,” Phillip said.

“But how does one create a culture of excellence?”

“Success in institutions is the result of both ‘people power’ and what some may call ‘process power’. In other words, it is the result of the people who work for you, as well as how you do things in running your business. The foundation for success is laid by creating a motivated team. And, as you know, that will happen only when you value your team. Once you’ve established a motivated, engaged workforce – the people power part – you are ready to focus on the ‘how’ of how you do things. At Global Microfinance, we use L.O.V.E to help lead the way.”

“Love?” I asked, confused. “Who’s in love?

Phillip laughed. “Love isn’t a person or an attribute. It’s an acronym. It stands for Listen, Optimize, Value, and Enrich. Although we need the attribute of ‘love’ in our business relationships and dealings with others, I prefer to explain the acronym in the order of ‘LEVO.’ It has to do with listening to your customers, enriching the products or services you offer, identifying the value expectations of customers, and optimizing the customer experience. It is part of the language we all use, from the president of our business to the janitor who mops the floor constantly. You’ve already learned about listening to your internal customers. Well, you need to listen to your external customers in the same way.”

“Huh” I uttered doubtfully. “This may be a great approach for a retail outlet but we’re in micro financing. We don’t have traditional customers.”

“Wrong!” Phillip said. “That is one of the biggest mistakes companies make, that taking care of customers is not their domain. Let me tell you something: once you go to people, or people come to you, or you meet them at a common venue, you have customers. And if you have customers, you’re in service. And if you plan to stay in business, your most important job is to take care of those customers!”

“Okay,” I said, reflecting on Phillip’s point. “But there must be more to Global Microfinance’s success than that.”

“Of course,” Phillip said. “After all, I’ve only begun to tell you about LEVO. But the second I forget those first, basic principles, nothing else I do really matters.

“All right, so let me see if I‘ve got it so far: First I need to motivate our workforce by showing them how important they are. Second, if we’re in business, we’re in service.”

“Right,” Phillip said, pleased.

“Okay,” I said. “So please continue with LEVO”.

“With LEVO, the first step is to listen. Listen to your client or customers –both your internal and external customers. Find out what they need and what they want. In business, if you don’t listen well, you have little chance of doing anything else well that matters. Every company says it listens, but few really do. Too often they end up with Deejay Syndrome.”

I laughed. “Deejay Syndrome? What’s that?”

“I was a deejay in college, believe it or not. Back then everything was on ‘albums’.“You know,” he said with a twinkle in his eye, “those big black vinyl discs you played on a turntable.”

“Ohhh yeah,” I laughed, playing along.

“Anyway”, Phillip continued, “as a deejay, I’d play all the songs I liked, assuming everyone else would like them too if they had any taste. My boss, who’d worked at a major radio station in the city, told me that was the biggest and most common mistake of deejays — and also the biggest ratings killer. He told me it wasn’t my job to make people like my music. It’s my job to play the music they wanted. And you find that out only by asking them. That’s how we invented the call-in-request lines. ‘Tell us what you want, and we’ll play it’. “When it comes to Global,” Phillip said, “we not only try to find out what our customers want in terms of the service quality and products – we try to give them just about anything they ask for. It’s so rare for a customer to ask for anything more that when they do, we knock ourselves out to fulfill their request. And that should hold true for every company, whether it’s a commercial business selling to other businesses or a company that makes sporting apparel.”

“But don’t your efforts to give customers whatever they want confuse your massage? Global Microfinance is known originally for helping small enterprises develop by giving them money to invest more and expand their business,” I said, “yet you give out virtually every item to such would-be entrepreneurs and even engage in agriculture and animal husbandry. Doesn’t that confuse your message?”

“Our focus is on innovative ways of helping everyone who thinks that we are relevant to them and needs our assistance. And our standards are uncompromising,” Phillip said.

“And that’s exactly what makes us different from most non-bank financial institutions. Whether you are in business or not and you are willing to do something for yourself but don’t know where or how to start, come to us. Because that’s all we do. It pays to be known for something which may be helpful to the larger community and people. What our customers can believe is that we genuinely want to help them and they must be ready for a partnership. Within that framework, our mission is to give our customers what they want. Do you know who our ideal customer is?” Phillip asked.

“I guess not.”

Phillip said smiling, “Anyone who wants to do something productive. Anyone! The bottom line is: the value of a service is defined by the customer. And you can get their definition only by listening to them.”

“So point number one,” I said, “is listening to what your customers want instead of just giving them what they think they want.”

“Bingo,” Phillip said, grinning, “But there’s a little more to satisfying your customers than just that. You see, most customers have several different needs.

The first is the most basic: providing the bare minimum the customer expects so he goes away

without complaining. These needs are so fundamental that customers don’t even ask for them– they simply expect them to be there. With cars, we expect them to start up every time and run reliably. With hotels, we expect a safe, clean, comfortable room to be ready for us, as assured by the reservation we’ve made. For Global, our wares and products meant for our customers to resell to the public needs to be of high grade quality and standards.

“The second need has to do with performance. When a customer requests a certain product or service, it must do what it is expected to do. We must provide it and it must perform and be satisfactory as promised. The third customer need is what we think of as excitement- giving the customers that extra something that gets their attention, that delights them, and makes your product or service stand out. For us, as a microfinance company, that means making sure the service our staff provided is as exceptional as the products and items we provide. We have plenty of teammates to help people and find out their complaints and what they want. We look for ways to make every aspect of our customers’ experience a positive one, from the moment they enter our premises to the moment they leave the checkout counter. Sounds simple, but you’d be amazed at how few businesses work to provide that for their customers.

Without these, the customer may not complain, or necessarily be disappointed. But with these: such as play toys to entertain children, a free water dispenser, friendly staff willing to assist, you can provide a way to dramatically increase a customer’s delight and loyalty.”

“Good point,” I acknowledge, taking another sip of my water.

“Let me tell you about something that happened to me last month in a banking hall. I was seated in a chair meant for waiting customers in the bank. Just about few seats ahead of me were other customers too. An older gentleman, about 75, stepped forward from the queue and then asked the female customer attendant, sitting behind her desk, to use their place of convenience. She told him, “I’m sorry, sir, but we don’t have a place of convenience here meant for the customers.”

“You’re kidding me,” I exclaimed. “She refused to help such an old customer?”

“Yes,” Phillip said. A man sitting near me, hearing this, asked the customer attendant, “You mean if you can’t help this old man yourself can’t you let any other person help him now?”

“No Sir, the lady said, sticking to her guns. It’s not for outsiders.” Right then her phone started to ring.

“Mine, did she pick it up?”

“No she dared not. Here, an employee couldn’t or wouldn’t make any judgments for herself; all she could do was parrot the bank policy. Well, this man got up, held the oldman’s hand and walked him to the manager. By this time, everyone was watching this drama unfold. The manager himself led the poor oldman to use their lavatory. I’m sure he merely urinated. Meanwhile, our lady had stood up from her seat, we suspected, to listen to her call.

When the man stepped back into the banking hall still escorting the aged man closely, everyone looked at him with appreciation and respect.”

“Good for him,” I said, surprised at how upset I felt about the incident. “What did the lady banker do?”

“She stayed out of sight until we had been attended to. Then she emerged as if nothing had happened. But her brittle expression betrayed her feelings; underneath she was seething. It was pretty clear to all of us that she wasn’t the least bit sorry about her refusal to help the old man. The message she conveyed was that she could care less about him, or any of us. She didn’t have a clue about the first rule of business; that business is first and foremost about the customer! She probably never will. She’s a perfect example of someone who is customer tone-deaf. And that is true of a lot of businesses as well; they don’t listen to their customers.”

“What a story,” I said. “But it does raise a question. What if everyone in the banking hall started asking to use their lavatories?”

“Good Point,” Phillip said, “here’s how we tell our people at ‘Global’ to handle the ‘exceptions’: First, help the customer out if you can. But when you do, let them know you’re doing something special. We might tell them, ‘Normally, we don’t do that or render that service also, but for you, I’ll let us make the exception.’ This let the others know that not everyone can have the use of their lavatory, and it let the customer know they’re being given special attention. None of us in that banking hall would have minded that we couldn’t have access to their lavatory. We would have been thrilled just to see the so-called customer service attendant help this older customer.”

“Think what the use of a bank’s lavatory cost the bank,” Phillip said, “a cedi? Or 50 pesewas? And what it would have cost them had the manager not behaved responsibly? How many of the people who were on the bank’s premises have retold that story? Heck, I’ve been telling all my staff the past month! How many people would go out of their way to avoid that particular bank simply because an aged customer was denied a place to urinate? It amazes me how many companies watch the pesewas instead of the cedis.” He continued. “At Global’ our most important policy is: Help people! Help your customers. And it doesn’t matter whether you are in

banking or non-bank institutions or make cars, or sell groceries, whether your customer is another business or the general customer. You just don’t lose a customer because you refused to do something they asked for, especially something simple and perhaps costless like letting an aged customer use a lav.”

I couldn’t help but believe his narration. A few weeks ago, I was trekking about 10 minutes every morning to buy fresh bread from a bakery within my area. A freelance bread seller once convinced me and offered to supply me every morning with bread: she won my loyalty.

I thought back at my declining sales and performance targets and started to see why it had failed so badly. “You know,” I said, “Thinking about this, I can’t help being embarrassed by how I originally approached you.”

“Karikari, you approached me the way 90percent of the other business people and managers approach me, as a salesperson. And I give you credit. You were more passionate than most. You clearly believed in your product, and your people, and that’s a start. But you were focused entirely on you – why your customers should build their savings and not owe any debt–instead of asking them to find out the challenges they face and how you could be of help to them. It seems like a simple shift, but there’s a big difference. Mark Twain (1833-1910) said, ‘The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small, manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.’

“You need to put aside your concerns for a moment about making your sales quota or increasing revenues, and think about taking care of the people who are your customers. Companies that do that will make more than enough money and can feel good in the process.”

We had adjusted our proposed field visitation. It was a Monday morning and to my pleasant surprise most of the employees had reported to work before 7. I immediately believed that most of them were expecting a group visitation from all of us. But rather than us embarking on the visitation to be a part of each group meeting, we conducted a staff meeting again. We decided to first let the loan officers and supervisors send out the notices of our visitation throughout this week. We will join them sometime soon. By consensus, we agreed that we needed to do some more home work and consider a budget, and prepare to refresh our customers while each of us thought about the method we needed to adopt to bridge the gap and promote a better relationship between us and our clients. “The emphasis,” I said, “is to LISTEN to them.”

Just at the official close of work that day I asked a few staff while they were in the general office. “How receptive were our customers to the meeting with them soon?”

“They are excited and looking forward to it”, was what most of the loan officers and supervisors said. In fact, they asked us what we would do for them, since the whole company would be out to meet them. One loans officer said, when I told them that we were planning to meet them to share with them by way of comestibles and ideas and to get to know ourselves and them better, they expressed their excitement and said they would even invite their family members i.e. their husbands, their wives and other kinsmen.”

“Good,” I said, “the more the better.”

I was not sure what to do with the budget that had been drawn. At first, my line of thought was to take most, if not all, of the budget cost alone, even if it meant borrowing from my own external sources. After all, Nana Ato had giving me the ultimatum and he was counting on my leadership to change things. “If the credit would come to me, then, of course, the other responsibilities and liabilities should be borne by me,” I thought. I, however, soon realized that I could in no way shoulder all the cost alone. Then I remembered that I had already told my staff that we were all in this together. ‘We either pull up together or go down together’ so why leave them out of contributing financially to help the new reforms succeed, even if it meant us sacrificing half of our salaries? After all, we had all been liable in one way or the other.

But it quickly dawned upon me that Nana Ato needed to know what plans and reforms we had decided upon- and the cost involved. The decision was made. I called on Nana Ato, our owner, to ask for the resources to follow up on some of our immediate plans from the meeting with our employees. It was, of course, the last thing he wanted to hear. But I explained that I needed the money to do what he’d asked for: to do better across the board and increase profits.

“Karikari, you’re making me mad. You think this is a joke, I expect to see results, and I mean fast, if you want to keep your job!”.Thinking of my family and dependents and my soon-to-open rent advance, my stomach did flip-flops. But I knew I was doing the right thing. I told him that all I wanted was some cedis to support our strategy budget for the next two weeks. Nana Ato would not buy the idea until I promised him that if he could give me what I needed, I would do so much to raise the profile and asset position of the company within a given time period. He finally agreed to chip in about a thousand cedis; chump change for a business our size, but a near record investment from a notoriously cheap owner. “Now get me some results, or else!”

When I popped in to see Phillip one afternoon a few weeks later, I told him of the progress we’d made in putting the first part of LEVO into effect. Phillip couldn’t have been more pleased.

“Congratulations,” Phillip smiled. “Sounds like you’re doing the right thing. I’ve found at Global that when we’re listening to our customers, as well as we should, they help guide us on how to meet their changing needs and desires. After all, no company can keep doing the same things for people that they did six years ago or even six moths ago!”
But there remained a sobering reality to my small effort. The fact was, I was taking only the first steps of a long journey to teamwork and success at Stellar Microfinance, and I knew time was running out. “So where do I go from here? “I asked, not sure of his answer.

Phillip smiled again, “Ready for your next lesson?”

“You bet!”

“Okay. Well, the more specific we discover what our customers desires are, the more nuanced our solutions must be.”

“I’m with you,” I said.

“That brings us to the second part of LEVO-enrichment. It’s not enough to just listen to our customers. We must respond to them by enriching their experience and perception of Global’s products and services. And to do so we need new ideas and innovators.”

“That’s what they call brain waves?”

“Yes. But that’s not all. We need our clerks and stock boys and departmental heads with their eyes open and their brains working. And that’s what the first step of enrichment is all about: realizing that enrichment involves everyone.”

“Walk with me for a moment,” he said getting up. We headed over to the information desk where we found Akos, the woman who had first helped me find Philip at my initial visit, chatting functionally, with a customer. When Akos was free, Phillip asked if we could talk with her. Akos asked one of the checkout people to cover for her before joining us.

Thinking about how unusual it would have appeared in another company, to enlist the aid of a checkout person to help out at the information desk, I asked her, “Does this happen often?” “Good question,” Phillip said, “Akos?”

“Well, at one of our team meetings some time ago, she explained, “we decided that everyone could swap places sometimes, so we could more easily cover for each other for a few minutes, or even a day or two, if someone was unexpectedly out. That way, things still run smoothly, regardless of who’s there. Also, you don’t feel trapped doing the same job every day. And as a result, we’ve come to rely on each other a little bit more, which brings us closer together as a team.”

“Great idea,” I admitted.

“It was Akos’, in fact,” Phillip said.

“Global Microfinance is built on a thousand great ideas. And I’m only good for a dozen or so. As you’ve found out, if you want to get the best ideas, you’ve got to ask your people. They know more than anyone does about what they do every day.”

“You know, Uncle Phillip, let me switch with Ahemaa,” Akos said. “She can tell you, Karikari, about our checkout lines”. A few moments later, Ahemaa came over to talk with us. “Through our weekly customer focus group at our products store,” Phillip explained, “we discovered that one of the most important things to our customers was convenience. It is as important to them as our products and price, if not more so. So we decided to serve them better by cutting down their time in the checkout lines”.

“What a great idea,” I said. “There’s nothing I hate more than waiting in line.”

“The idea was Ahemaa’s,” he said, introducing her to me. “She saw the problem develop every day at her section.”

At Phillip’s invitation, Ahemaa explained how she had spearheaded their strategy to cut down on the cashier lines.

“Last year, during my vacation, I travelled to visit my sister in another region. She works with a certain bank as a teller. While there, I observed that she had very little time for herself and her home. She would leave her home early at 6:30 and return after 7pm. One day, I went to town and made a stopover at her workplace. I felt so much unease and sympathy for her as there were so many customers waiting in a long queue to be served while there were empty cages. I noticed some similarity between the work I do and the work which my sister did. She worked long hours and kept standing all through. Sad, but true.” Ahemaa said. “I pondered over our similar plight a lot. Anyway, at one of our meetings the week after I came back from that region, I thought of why we should make our customers wait to buy our products, to give us their money. It seemed to me we should be eager to let them pay us, not make them wait. It’s not only a source of irritation to them; it was just plain stupid on our part. We worked so hard to get our customers on our premises and provide the things they wanted. Why should we undermine the process at the point of payment?

“I realized that, like the casinos, we should always have extra cashier ready. We should never make our customers wait to give us their money. Everyone on our team agreed. So we doubled the number of checkout lines. And someone suggested that we angle them to make them seem less obtrusive, and take up less space. And thanks to another suggestion by one of our teammates, we put the checkout lines at the far end so people didn’t see customers exiting when they came in. Instead, they walked into a dazzling array of our products and other services. And finally, we assigned one clerk to each of the new checkout lines in order to keep customers moving.”

“But with this system, don’t you have a lot of clerks waiting around much of the time?” I asked. “Take a look for yourself,” she said, turning to the lines. “We decided to always have two more lanes open than we need.” Phillip and Ahemaa grinned.

“Come with us,” Ahemaa said, leading me past the checkout lines. In the corresponding product isles leading into each checkout lane, we saw a person in a dark green smock stocking goods, packaging orders, talking with customers – but always keeping an eye on her aisle, and the green light above, which indicates when a cashier is ready to serve them.

“When one of your fellow checkout team members realizes they need another checkout line,” Ahemaa said, “they simply turn the green light on at your aisle. You look up, and you you’re back in the game. This keeps us flexible, it keeps our aisles, our counters first rate and it keeps our checkout process operating at top speed, zipping customers through as fast as possible.”

“And it creates more of a sense of accountability among each of our team members,” Phillip added. “Everyone is looking out for someone else, as in any good team. While you’re at the checkout counter, you need to keep your eye on the flow of customers, and open and close registers accordingly. And when you’re not at the register, you contribute in other ways. If you are the person who oversees aisle six, the vegetable aisle, you want to make sure you are serving customers at your best. The bottom line,” Phillip concluded, “is that unlike most other stores and services institutions, the customer experience here isn’t one of waiting in line to check out – it’s all about letting them have the best experience. The less time you spend waiting to pay, the more time you’ll have to get more products on credit basis. And the faster you’ll want to come back,”

“Wow,” I said. “No wonder, Global Microfinance is taking over the supply of products and loans to most of the SMEs all over.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear that. That’s our goal!” Phillip said. “But Ahemaa & her friends took it one step further. Someone on the cashier team came up with the idea of setting up our lines ‘banking style’ with one line of the customers feeding into whatever cashier lines were open, so you don’t worry about picking the wrong line. It’s more efficient, too, since every cashier usually has only one customer at a time.”

“Clever,” I said.         

“The banks invented it, not us,” Ahemaa said. “We were just smart enough to apply it to a microfinance store, here at ‘Global’.”

“And what I love about it,” Phillip said, “is that we’re borrowing the best idea from lots of places. We’re constantly looking for ways to improve what we do, to better serve our customers and make their experience a good one. We’re constantly coming up with ways to do things faster,

better, and more efficiently. And ultimately that leads to more customers, more satisfied customers, and greater margins. If you want to stay ahead in your business, whatever business you’re in, you need to keep reinventing the wheel. If you’re in the car manufacturing business, you need to develop cars with better gas mileage, better safety features, entertainment systems and the like. To keep ahead of the competition, you need to be thinking about how to improve your processes, product and service every day. Gone must by the days in our country when goods and services providers and institutions felt that it didn’t matter whatever they gave to their customers: i.e. the customer had no choice.

“To be able to create all this,” he said, stretching out his hand to depict the expanded additional cages, “we needed to take a stance that making our customers wait ten to fifteen minutes to give us their money was unacceptable.

“Our success, at heart, comes down to three things: First, a strong desire to change how we do things whenever we see something we think we can do better. Second, a willingness to think outside the box to come up with the best possible solution; And third, an urge to improve everything we do. That means being attentive to every last detail.”

“But how do you come up with all these ideas?” I asked.

“I’m not as smart as I look!” Phillip joked. “I ask the customers. I ask our employees, and they ask our customers, too! We have meetings, where we throw ideas around.

That’s the fun part. If you want to come up with creative concepts to please the customer, you have to think creatively and work creatively. You have to borrow ideas shamelessly from other businesses and cultures. We simply get a few people sitting around a table, pick a concern, and generate as many ideas as possible for solving it. If you want to keep the ideas flowing, you can’t criticize people for coming up with an idea that won’t work.”

“But what if they are dumb ideas?” I asked.

“If you want their input, there are no dumb ideas!” Phillip exclaimed. “Just let them fly. What we are looking for are the few ideas that stick. The key to finding them is to create the kind of environment that doesn’t penalize ideas but rewards it.

“Most of all, you need to think beyond the status quo,” Phillip went on. “Just because we’ve always done it one way doesn’t mean we have to keep on doing it that way. Our first president, Kwame Nkrumah, did a lot to empower us and reinforce our capacity through his slogan of the ‘African personality’. He believed that we are capable of doing what is best for ourselves. While others asked ‘why not later? He asked ‘why not now?’ If we seek to help and support a certain

service that would help our customers now, why wait till later? That’s the attitude I try to encourage. I want all of our employees to think that way.”

“But time is money, too,” I said. “With all these meetings, isn’t there a danger of becoming too pie-in-the-sky? Of losing focus?”

“There could be,” Phillip admitted. “If we weren’t focused on coming up with specific, clear – cut projects that we know we can complete. We decide which ideas we want to pursue, reduce them to as few steps as possible, and then start ‘nailing down’ who’s going to do what, and when. Without goals, or deadlines, or leadership, there’s no focus, no urgency, no accountability. With our approach things happen, trust me!”

“But you’re supposed to be a non-bank microfinance institution, not a manufacturing company,” I responded. “Improving our processes at ‘Stellar’ wouldn’t be that simple.”

“Karikari, the same principles apply. You know, we’re a microfinance institution, too. We use the same principles – the desire to change, the willingness to think outside the box, the constant urge to improve in order to give out the best products and services.

“See, let me tell you something which will challenge you. We found out that at least 95 percent of all the people in this country eat something containing wheat every day in the form of bread, pastries, cereals you name it. Until recently about 99% of all the wheat (the sole raw material for making wheat flour) was imported from mainly North America. That revelation challenged us to think, ‘what could we do to not only ensure local content and participation in the supply chain, for wheat, but also to provide security and stability of supply to our customers – the people who add value to the flour and ensure an all-year-round employment and provision of food for all of us. Initially, it was observed that there were very large well-established wheat farms in the USA alone which no investor in the cultivation of wheat on our continent could compete with. We established our case and liaised with the several departments of crop science to identify somewhere here that the land is very suitable for the cultivation of wheat. We identified the land and identified all the other inputs and cost. Then the aspect of high quality grade wheat was looked at.

When Global took the decision to undertake a pilot investment to cultivate one thousand acres, our harvest was spectacular. No sooner had we harvested our wheat and provided employment to so many extra people, than wheat imports to Africa came flooding onto the markets at under-cut prices, meant to undermine our initiative. We met with some of the bigwigs in the cultivation of wheat and the FAO. We stated our case by arguing that it was in the interest of our own people too and the world’s food security and so on for us to be involved in what we did.

Now we have an MOU with the flour companies here. They saw the reason behind why they should patronize us and keep us in production. At Global we produce based on agreed standards and quality. The prices of both flour and bread have at least stabilized or been reduced. The sources of supply of wheat now include our own internal/local African sources. It enhances the living standards of all those within the chains.”

“Is that an aspect of microfinancing with an eye on social investment?”

“You got it!” We are constantly looking for new ideas to change and or improve everything we do in order to benefit our communities and those in them.”

THE BUSINESS PROMOTER

CHAPTER 5

Working to Get it Right

The budget estimate I had submitted to our owner, Nana Ato, to convince him for the funding we needed was prudent. It did not list items for refreshment with our customers but it included such other items as paint and other incidentals. By following the budget to the letter, we would soon run into deficit. I remained resolute to pursue this cause I had embarked upon even at the expense of my next paycheck.

I soon realized that the need for us to hire independent marketing research would be invaluable. By the close of the week, the marketing group we had hired had arranged for us to meet with three focus groups during three weekdays. Some of our employees felt that we weren’t ready for such extra costs, because we’d only begun to implement changes to our operations.

“Maybe we are, and maybe we’re not,” I told them. “But we can spend weeks, even months trying to guess what our customers want from us. Why not bring them in now and let them find out using their expertise about what our customers think about us?” I thought back to something Phillip had told me: ‘Remember, the challenges of your customers in this business are ultimately yours and the issues involved are best defined by the customer, not by us.’ I was originally tempted to invite only the group leaders to take part in the focus groups. While we, the employees, carried on with our normal business. But as Phillip had pointed out, quality is for everyone. I figured out that having our people hear the pros and cons of our products and services from the customers would be a lot more revealing than leaving things to only ourselves. We needed to unearth all possible information.

On the first day, at least 95 percent of our customers showed up with their families and it was as if everyone in the entire community had suddenly constituted our membership. The focus group coordinator then selected twenty customers into a prepared room.

“We would love to know what you like, and what you don’t like about us,” the coordinator began. “Please feel free to express yourselves.” This seemed to the opening several were expecting.“Well,” an elderly, bulky woman began, “I am the leader of a group and we, in the group, work hard to always get a zero-past-due. But my group members are very concerned that further disbursements have ceased.”

“Anything else?” Our focus group coordinator asked.

“Yes,” someone said, “sometimes we waste a lot of our time when the staff i.e. loan officers are late to meetings.”

I glanced at Angie, trying to conceal concern. But we both knew we had problems. Several other complaints surfaced, as well as a lot of compliments. At least the responses weren’t all bad.

“Okay,” said the coordinator. “We appreciate your cooperation, and your candor. Is there anything else you want to add before we finish?”

“Most of your staff are good but one or two of them are dishonest. They sometimes even connive with some group leaders and members to give them double loans; for whatever reasons, only they themselves know.”

That one hurts, because it cuts right to the quick. “Thank you,” the coordinator said. “That’s just the kind of feedback we are looking for. We appreciate your time.”

Several of us met with the marketing group we’d hired immediately afterward, amid the servings of food and soft drinks and music.

“Heh,” said Angie, “that was hard to listen to.”

“Yes,” I nodded. “But was any of it untrue? After all, they had to tell it as it is, without embellishments.”

“That’s why it stung,” Angie said.

I nodded. “Well,” Angie said, “we heard what they had to say. In essence most of what they had to say have been captured in our reforms strategy already.”

We had a meeting outdoors that day. We looked at the pros and cons of the focus group report but that was placed in the hands of Angie ,our reform czar.

I briefed our staff about some other things we still needed to get done in spite of our exhausted budget. My next decision was to tackle the beautification of our workplace. I launched right in, “We have bought most of what we need to give our physical work environment a facelift. And I have to ask for us to make sacrifices to be at ‘Stellar’ tomorrow to help with the paintings and other re-arrangements.”

Someone said sarcastically, “We will install a company pool and spa.”

“Are some works going to be tackled out of our paychecks?” Wofa quizzed.

“No,” I assured them. “Nana Ato may even be willing to pay a little extra for some other things we need to tackle. So if you are willing to come in this Saturday from nine to three to improve your workplace, we can do this. And there will be lunch.”

I heard a few mumbled “Okays” while a few others grumbled, until I spoke. “Folks, we spend eight hours a day here, minimum. And none of us likes the way this place looks from the outside, or feels from the inside. In exchange for a few hours, we can make the forty hours we spend here every week a lot more efficient, and more pleasant.”

There were some positive responses to that, but I needed everyone’s support. “When was the last time Nana Ato put any money into this place?” I asked. It was the kind of comment that could get me fired, but I was in danger of that already. “Well, he’s given us the money we need to follow up on the suggestions we all made.” If we don’t follow up, what does that say about us,

that we’re the ones who don’t care? But if we come through, we have all the benefits to gain. We can’t afford to pass this up.

“So,” I said, looking out at them, “Who’s with me?” Half the hands went up immediately. The other half soon followed, and Wofa too. I smiled, relieved. “All right”, I said. “Let’s break this down. Who wants to be on the paint crew?” We went over each project, assigning people to every task.

Near the end of our one-hour meeting, we heard from a surprising source: shy Frances. “If we improve the place enough,” she said, “we may even be able to invite politicians and schoolchildren in to see what we are doing to help.”

“That’s also a good way to promote our company and generate some community goodwill.” Wofa admitted. Phillip was right. Sometimes great ideas piggyback on other ideas, large or

small. We ended the meeting on a high note.

I found myself driving to ‘Global Microfinance’ several weeks later without an appointment, confident that Phillip would find time for me. I was bubbling over with the good news I had to share. I was on fire with the renewed energy as a result of some events we had gone through during the several weeks. One of the main successful events was our employee’s makeover of our work space- what Frances described as, “We are here to stay.” I had gotten T-shirts printed up for everyone with this phrase on the front, and our company name at the back, and passed them out first thing that Saturday morning so we could work in them and look like a team. My toddler daughter Cheska accompanied me. To my pleasant surprise, some staff brought young kids and they were running madly around in the large compound, and helping out too. And a million volts of positive energy were being directed toward our work – and each other.

One batch washed the building and painted it a shiny white. One of the more artistic of our employees painted a moral of a rainbow emerging from some puffy clouds. I was amazed at the hidden talents of our staff.

Just cleaning the dusty windows looking out in the forecourt made a huge difference. Wofa Donkor had worked for a carpet installer in an earlier life and was happy to show off his skills.

We had bought some more attractive, inexpressive chairs and tables to complete the transformation. We also installed new lights and billboards proudly displaying our name. With such a large turnout and with everyone working enthusiastically, we finished most of the tasks we had designed by early afternoon and sat down to a pre-ordered lunch. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d seen our employees enjoy themselves so fully. We really did seem like a team rather than

company employees whose common thread was the fact that we all worked at Stellar Microfinance. For the first time that I could remember, I sensed that the men and women around me left ‘Stellar’ at the end of the time allocated, almost reluctantly. And they came back again on Monday totally pumped. The energy level has been so high that everyone seemed carried away by a wave of enthusiasm.

Productivity, I noticed, had been through the roof. But most of all, the attitudes and the atmosphere on the floor and in the back offices were more upbeat than I had ever seen. We had constructed a new billboard in front of the company, proudly displaying our name – and what we do — to the world. It seemed like a nice show of our newfound pride, and the perfect topping to new initiatives.

We no doubt needed to adopt some of the wonderful ideas we had compiled from especially our external customers. For example, it touched my heart when one or two of our clients had complained about the fight they needed to undertake every day while having their babies on their backs and chasing after maize or tomatoes or yam lorries just to lay hold on what little quantity they could get and sell.

The middlemen who had the lorries to collect the food from distant or nearby farms were unscrupulous, having no consistent customers. And they would sell to the women a crate of tomatoes expensively what they bought from the tomatoes farm cheaply.

It made sense to help those who virtually worked for us with the loans we give to them. Why do we give our customers our money and leave them to their fate? Expecting them to pay us back the capital amount and interest, whatever small it was, with all the risk factors and environmental challenges was simply inhumane and unreasonable. For me, the popular belief that you needed to give the customers training in order to build or enhance their capacities to

make them productive or sensible enough to meet our expectation by paying on time and saving with us- ‘credit with savings’ was mostly mythical and fallacious; tantamount to wishful thinking. After all, most of these women have been doing their small businesses for donkey years. They knew what money was and the benefits of savings also. Most of them were prepared to work long hours – rain or shine even with their babies on their backs – just to eke out a living. The environment they worked in had been harsh, unfriendly and mostly to blame for their often inability to make real progress. In this business you don’t win by beating the competition, if any. You win by achieving customer bonding. In fact, staying ahead of the competitive edge doesn’t always mean looking out at competitors to imitate them and perhaps out-do them. Success will invariably require being proactive- even with the adoption of new technologies and educating our customers along. What could we at Stellar do to help the people who worked for us, I thought.

Phillip and ‘Global’ had come big time and won my admiration. They were setting the pace by helping their customers. Things were changing and age-old traditional concepts needed to be relooked at. Risk mitigation is investment. I needed to work with the employees and meet with our owner – we needed to be social entrepreneurs, the vision was much bigger. ‘Success,’ Phillip had said, ‘is a race without a finish line.’

THE BUSINESS PROMOTER

CHAPTER SIX

Striving For Perfection

When I arrived at Global Microfinance, Phillip could tell from the look on my face that things were improving at ‘Stellar’. When I shared what we had been doing and what little successes we had been achieving steadily over the past weeks with our customers, he smiled.

“Well done,” he said, “very well done.” From him, those few words of praise meant a great deal to me. “You’ve learned a lot, and you’ve improved things almost immediately. It shows how committed you and your employees at Stellar Microfinance are to changing the way you do things. I think you’re ready for the next step, the biggest step.”

It was what I’d hoped to hear.

“Great,” I said. “I know the ‘L’ in LEVO stands for Listen, both to our internal and external customers. And the ‘E’ is for Enrich, up and down the organization. What does the ‘V’ stands for?

“V” is for Value: Give value to your customers. In other words, what value do your customers get as their returns by associating themselves with you?

“See, your customers have expectations of you; that you will provide them with products in the right form, right place and time. If not, you are likely to lose the competition because someone else would have satisfied them. Their conclusion says, ‘if you can’t take care of us somebody else would’. Always keep in mind that our customers may not necessarily say so but they are always asking: ‘Is there any value? Where is it? We, as providers, must then ask ourselves, ‘What are our customers looking for? How well are we doing to satisfy their value expectations and endeavor to exceed whatever we are doing?”

“But can a single organization such as ours satisfy all the demands of our clients?”

“Surely! Whenever customers pay money to enjoy a good or service, they are making a claim, ‘Give me what I need and what I need is the solution, i.e. the value. Relationship marketing and customer value creation is dependent on those attributes which go to meeting the customers’ expectations. The end result is a lifelong customer loyalty, and they recommending us to others. Is that not what we want?”

“But the clients… they will always want to take undue advantage of the many microfinance and lending institutions scattered all over and undertake multiple borrowings. Often, they come with a certain mindset so it makes it difficult for us to adopt a long-term comprehensive plan which would be implementable to benefit them and us.”

“I don’t agree with that idea. You must conduct a root cause research to determine why your customers behave in a certain way. They don’t start behaving wrongly suddenly. Truth is,

reactionary moves make us make more mistakes. You can have a system in place which sees customers and their demand as being predictable. Successful companies must be able to forecast demand and be able to understand the supply chain. Part of the supply chain is a network. We need to identify what we need to do. It requires determining and stating what we need to do to arrive at that.”

“So the value of money we give to them to put into their businesses to help expand is not sufficient? Must we give them bigger loans if they have not demonstrated the capacity to pay even the smaller loans oftentimes?”

“Money here is not the value your customers want. They want to be better off by being more productive in order to earn some income to make a living for themselves and their vulnerable dependants. By the nature of your operations, you must ensure that they are better off in your books as well as to themselves- according to some standard measure – by associating themselves with your service. Money here is only a means to help them make progress to that end. Do you travel by commercial vehicles sometimes?”

“Yes.”

“Have you decided on the value you claim or want to claim whenever you travel? I am sure that for almost all of us, safety is the value. When a person needs medical attention, s/he would like to see the best doctor in the best facility. The service value to the patient who visits the hospital to see a doctor is to get well. And some health facilities have pasted a notice which says, ‘See the doctor immediately in case of emergency’. Here, the hospital management is affirming that sometimes, different cases may require prompt attention in order to give a patient that value of cure.

“In our form of business, knowing your customers well is more than half of the criteria for success. In your case, knowing your customer’s name, age, house number, marital status, number of dependents etc is not enough. Taking your customers daily or weekly cash flow information may be helpful if only the discussion between you and your customers is detailed, sincere and transparent. Beyond that, I would suggest that you must be interested in learning something about the expenditure patterns of their dependents also.”

“Ha, Uncle Phillip. We have many clients in our books. To attempt to have up-to-date information about themselves and their dependents – activities and spending patterns – wouldn’t that be too time consuming for us? We would end up literally collecting information every day rather than providing microfinance services.”

“I’m glad you didn’t say, ‘financial services’. If you are providing microfinance services, you are providing more than financial services. Here, every information is necessary. Bear in mind that the microfinance practitioner is an intelligence officer. They are constantly on the lookout and monitoring everything about their customers in order to have a basis to pre-determine fault spots. One fault spot overlooked may fester and become a nemesis for your loans. One bad loan recovery may have a contagious effect and you don’t want that. To forestall that situation, go beyond the expenditure or cash flow information of the main family member, your customer, and widen the net to their dependents. Label a cost figure upon each of them and you’ll find it useful. Bottom line: information is everything. Inadequate or wrong information leads to uncertainties and forecast inaccuracies. Accurate forecast is dependent on actionable intelligence. Let me give you some very practical examples of how certain improvement could be attained.

“If you are, say, a pastor and you care for the salvation of persons within your vicinity and want to encourage them to be a part of your church, do you know the best approach?”

“Preaching to them?”

“Not necessarily, for that will place no moral or emotional obligation on a listener who hears a preaching message either on radio, or TV or real. Such messages may have the demerit of being too impersonal and distant: ‘You neither know me nor do I know you (personally) so there’s no bond.’ But if a pastor truly cares for his conspicuously absent congregant, or a doctor truly cares for the full recovery of his patient, or a schoolteacher has deep concern for the unsatisfactory performance of her pupil, or even, a politician truly has the wellbeing of his electorates at heart, the smartest thing to do to appeal to the conscience of people is go down to them and get to know them, personally. Visit their homes. The initiative must be ours so to do if we want them to believe and trust us and have them committed to us. After all, such a patient at least knows which doctor to seek when in need of a doctor. And the same mentality cuts across to all persons who have certain need for support or authority.”

Again I thought about Phillip’s idea about giving value to your customer and I realized how true that was. I had maintained one barbershop to groom my hair for at least two years. When I started visiting the place, the charge for barbering one’s hair for a male adult was two cedis. Then within a year there were leaflets and fliers informing their clients about two new branches of the barbershop which would be opened in nearby suburbs. At the time, I was impressed that the owner had been thoughtful to consider his clients as worthy of being communicated to, as a sign of courtesy and partnership. But this year alone the charge for barbering a male adult’s hair had been increased two fold; from two cedis to four cedis, and then six cedis without any prior communication to the clients. I, subsequently, visited a barbershop close to where I live and I felt

pampered. The charge was two cedis and the barber gave me his business card to call him anytime I needed him and he would come to offer his services.

He took my cellphone number also, as he said, ‘to inform you anytime we are not available for normal operations or of increases in fees charged for services, etc.’ Aside from the more economical charge, I felt that they had a better value package for anyone who walked through their doors.

“Can you explain what the ‘O’ means? I’ve forgotten the principle you said it stands for,” I asked.

“Perhaps you can guess,” Phillip said. “If you listen to what your customers want, and you find innovative ways to enrich your business, what’s next?”

I could have given the usual clichés: order your work, be opened up to ideas, and all that – but I suspected Phillip had something more specific in mind. And I really didn’t know what it was. I thought about the letter O, searching for a clue, but nothing came to mind. “Uncle Phillip, you’ve got me,” I said.

Phillip said with a wry smile, “This last step might be the most important of all, and is probably the toughest”. I had talked with Phillip a great deal over the past weeks, but I had never heard him adopt such a serious tone. Whatever he was going to tell me next, I knew he believed it devotedly.

“The next step is to optimize what you’re doing,” he said. “Not just improve: optimize. How do you do that? By striving for perfection.”

“Yes it’s not enough to simply do your best. At Global, perfection is a real and tangible goal, something we break down and try to achieve piece by piece. To achieve perfection, you need to do several things: First, you need to recognize the price of failure. If you fail, your business, your family, your friends and maybe your own person, may falter. This is not for the faint-hearted. Second, you need to do it right the first time. That means planning for perfection from the very beginning, instead of looking for good enough and then fixing things up after the fact. In other words, you have to prevent fires, and not fight them. Third, you need to get absolutely dogged on the details. Fourth, you need to develop a sense of what I think as ‘productive paranoia’ someone once said “only the paranoid survives”. It means constantly worrying over what else you might do – about the competition, about the opportunities you might be missing, about the next new thing. People and companies that get complacent ultimately fail.

“And fifth, you need to instill in everyone in your team a passion for perfection every minute of the day. You need to transform it from a task into a mission, and you need to be very honest about how you are doing and about what you need to do to be the best.”

“But how do I carry out these steps”?

“If you’re going to take the Optimize stage seriously, you need to see the situation for what it is. You remember what I told you the first day you came in here? It is believed that civilization started in Africa – names like Egypt, Gao, Timbuktu, Marrakesh were prominent. We achieved world excellence then, but we didn’t seem to maintain it. For us, I think we’ve gotten better at listening to our customers, both internally and externally. But excellence in terms of constantly enriching and improving our products and services and most of all, optimizing what we do, have never been a priority, much less a mission. As Africans we seem to have a blind spot that prevents us from seeing what it takes to keep the corporate machine humming at the highest levels, and from having the commitment to make that happen every day. It is something we all know that most banks, for example, that were once Ghanaian owned did run down or had to be liquidated to foreigners who ended up reviving them into more profitable ventures.”

“Isn’t that human nature?” I offered. “I mean, it’s always more exciting to attack the castle than maintain and defend it. It’s more fun to get to the top than it is to work at the endless improvements and adjustments needed to stay there.”

“Of course it is,” Phillip said. “But it’s also human nature to want to sleep even while in a meeting, to talk whenever you feel like it- regardless of who’s already speaking, and to become impatient waiting for a traffic light to turn green. But to create a successful society, we have to learn how to adopt human nature. The same is true of corporations. While it’s exciting to build something new, we can’t sustain excellence unless we find the energy and skills and motivation to maintain excellence – quality – in everything we do.”

“So how do I optimize what we do at Stellar?”

“Again, the first step is to recognize the price of failure. When you realize how painful and costly it is to fall short of perfection, the passion you need to prevent failure grows.”

People say, ‘Don’t sweat the small stuff’. That might be a good approach to downplaying the small irritations and stresses of life, but it’s a horrible approach to running a business. When you’re playing chess, the small stuff is the big stuff! That same principle applies to running a business. Taking care of the small stuff may not be life and death for us, but it can be, and often is, the difference between us and our competitors.”

Phillip’s point made sense. I thought about the football World Cup of 2010 in South Africa. Our players (Black Stars) were considered more skillful by many followers of the game. They won all the games during the qualifying stages, but when it came to the semi-finals, the knock-out stage, we failed miserably to live to the expectation of many.

Then I recalled another example that was closer home. The Ghana Water Company always assured the citizenry that the water which flowed through our pipes was even safer to drink than the bottled water`. But why won’t they invest a little more to make the tap water clearer and place marginal charges upon users was a subject matter altogether. As a result most citizens prefer to buy sachet water or bottled water to drink, which they regard to be safer based on the clear look alone. That is the reason people would be willing to pay extra pesewas for something they could get very cheaply out of the tap. The price of failure, my brother, even a small simple negligence could be costly to many.

Philip continued, “Sometimes real quality is invisible. If your product and service are flawless, people rarely talk about it. But the costs of poor quality are tangible, and their effect will cost you something: money, customers, and ultimately the success of your business.”

“So how do I do that?”

“You can start by putting less emphasis on company firemen: the guys who are solving the problems or flare-ups that happen at every company every day – and more emphasis on fire marshals – the people who prevent them from ever occurring.

“At Global, a fire marshal is anyone who can detect a potential problem and prevent it, or one who suggests proactive ideas to help solve our customers’ problems.”

“In other words,” I said, “everyone?”

“Exactly,” Philip said, “of course everyone!” Any building that waits for a real fireman to spot smoke and flames is a building that is about to burn down. Likewise the companies; when anyone in any department has an idea or sees something that can improve the way we do things, they are encouraged – required – to speak up. And they’re rewarded for it rather than punished for it, whether the suggestion relates to their department or team or not. If you want to create a business that is fire proof, you do put aside issues of turf and territory. The fact is, if

you want to get rid of the big problems, first get rid of the small or potential problems by encouraging all employers to see themselves as having a common goal.

“When dealing with something as large as an organization, or a community, if you eliminate the small problems first, you don’t give the big problems a chance to take root.

“Look around you,” Phillip said, pointing towards the clean counters and other sections of the grounds floor, “what do you see on our floors? Nothing, ever; whenever something falls, we pick it up, or clean it. We believe that floors that aren’t spotless are the sign of a sloppy company. And that kind of sloppiness spreads quickly. Here, everyone’s aprons are clean. Everyone ties them in the back, at the waist. The tie strings never hang freely, or are loosely tied. Each team member’s name tag goes on the upper right of the apron, so customers can read it when they turn to greet them. These may seem like small things, but this attention to detail adds up, what ever business you are in. It makes an impression. We believe it even affects the way our workers feel about themselves.”

I thought about the changes we had made at Stellar Microfinance, and how good they made everyone feel. Phillip continued, “Bottom line: We now pay attention to the details, because our customers do. They notice if someone looks sloppy, if there is a busted bag of chips on the floor, or an empty sachet. All those things tell you we don’t care. That no one’s paying attention. And that creates a reaction, whether they would articulate it or not, with our customers.

“The opposite is also true,” he added, “I’m sure you’ve seen dozens of workers tidying up this or fixing up that every time you’ve walked in. When our customers see our people cleaning things and being particular about tidiness, they are far less likely to add to our work by leaving things on the ground or not picking up after themselves. It’s human nature: people want to keep well-maintained places and things the way they admire it. If we’re going to get customers to prefer us instead of our competitors over the long haul, we need to do a better job all the way around.”

Knowing what we had to do, and realizing we were desperate, over the next three months we addressed many of the issues which Stellar Microfinance had been faced with which our customers, our employees and the marketing agency had identified. The ‘reform committee’ worked hard to put in place best practices. We began to measure and improve, every step of our processes, looking always to help our clients by trying to cut down on possible risks they faced and help them perform better and raise the bar. Every staff seemed to have injected extra dose of energy, ethics, honesty, humility and service. The thing was, most of the improvements didn’t cost a lot of money. The ones that had the biggest impact were achieved by our people looking at how we did things, and finding clever, humane ways to improve them. The people power part of the equation was crucial to helping us make purposeful improvements in all our set targets. We didn’t have the resources to simply throw money about. We all used our heads instead of our wallets to help us make improvements. At the end of this period of whirlwind activity, we found that we had a much improved system.

We met on a Monday, again at Global Microfinance. Upon greeting each other, Phillip asked, “How is your family?” So I told him. Despite the long hours I had worked to turn Stellar Microfinance around, things had never been better at home. I found that some of the same principles of teamwork and interaction for feedback made as much sense at home as they did at Stellar Microfinance. Listening to my wife and daughters, working to improve our time together, paying attention to the little things- like what they learnt at school, and what new idea they came across, make as much of a difference as the more important things that they did their homework, ate their lunch and so on. I think it showed that I cared, in ways that went beyond words.

“I’m delighted to hear that,” Phillip said smiling. Then I told him about the dramatic developments at Stellar Microfinance over the past three months.

Although I had filled him in on some of what we were doing early on, it had been a while, I realized, since we had talked.

“Karikari,” Phillip said when I had finished, “I’ve talked to quite a few people over the years, but I’ve got to say no one has listened more closely and followed through with as much determination and energy as you and your team. I’m impressed.”

“Thanks,” I said gratefully, smiling. “It feels good to hear that. But we still have a long way to go. We haven’t saved our jobs yet.One test coming up next month is to see if our customers will keep faith with us as they did the last; when they increased their savings and old defaulters came forward to make part payments and we sat down and agreed to reschedule their debts.

“Good!” Phillip said, “I remember what my old hockey coach used to say to me, ‘Don’t judge a goalie on his best day, as almost anyone can get hot for a while; judge him on his worst. When he’s not at his sharpest, will he lose you the game; or, can he still play well enough to keep you in it?’ I judge companies the same way: the real measure is not how they function at their best, on the basis of a single product or particularly good service one day, but how they do at their worst.

“Your goal is to instill the virtues of sustained excellence. Everyone has ups and downs. Even Professor Azumah Nelson. But the great one’s worst days are better than the average boxer’s best day, and that’s what makes them great. That is the kind of thinking I want to see every day on the floor at Global Microfinance.”

“The people under you have put in a lot of time and made a significant personal investment to improve your company. Do you think they’ll work as hard to sustain it?” I paused to think, and my answer surprised me. “Yes! After all, they helped made the decisions, and they did the work. Our improvements are the result of them. I think they’d hate to see things slide back to what they were.”

“That’s a huge step forwards,” Philip said. When that’s true, your people are no longer showing up just to receive a paycheque. They are part of a team, striving to achieve excellence. The next

challenge is to instill in your people, and through your system, the tools to sustain what you’ve done, and expand on it. And, as you’ve realized, the way to make sure that happens is to assign people to different tasks, establish deadlines, make those deadlines, and constantly work to raise the bar. In fact, at Global, we call it ‘rebuilding’ rather than ‘maintaining’ because every day we have to fight the forces that would erode what we’ve done and return us to mediocrity. A lot of companies feel that quality and excellence cost money; that’s one of the excuses they offer for not embracing quality in everything they do. But as we’ve both seen, the fact is quality is cheaper in the long run than ‘good enough’.”

Over the next few months performance indicators started to inch upwards gradually. Nana Ato had grumbled incessantly about the additional money he had put out, although I think even he was grudgingly pleased by the changes and outlook of the business. But the real test was to sustain the newfound enthusiasm, commitment, and expectations of our customers. Gradually, our business picked up, and then more rapidly.

There was still a lot of work to do; we were only at the beginning of our journey into the world of letting teamwork and quality, and of course LEVO, lead us to success. But it was clear that we had turned a corner, and that by devoting ourselves to creating a culture of excellence in everything we did, we had potentially saved our jobs and our company. And we did so not by cutting corners or rolling out razzle-dazzle marketing campaigns or laying off people, but by instilling a simple team commitment to improve things.

And in fact, Nana Ato surprised me one morning by sweeping into my office unannounced and informing me that he was so impressed by the way I led our efforts to turn things around that he was making me comparing executive director. He would no longer take an active role in running the company, but would rely on my experience and leadership. It was an extraordinary turn of events. But, as he himself had said, he never would have been able to transform the company in the same way, and my promotion was simply recognition of that. But I knew of course, that my efforts were only a small part of Stellar’s turnaround. The real work, and the majority of the ideas, came from our employees. And their efforts needed to be rewarded as well. So I immediately risked Nana Ato’s ire by deciding, as my first decision as executive director, to create an employee bonus scheme, based on performance, to reward the many people who had contributed to our success. Philip has said to me at one point that actions that are rewarded are the things that get done.

I began to notice more and more potential clients not only coming forward to apply to join our clientele, but talking about Stellar Microfinance to their friends and relatives as one of our region’s godsend undiscovered secrets. But it wasn’t ‘undiscovered’ for long. There was the opening of our first Stellar Microfinance branch in another part of the metropolis which was an immediate hit of public interest.

We still had a long way to go.

Everyone needs a mentor. In an emerging economy as ours, it appears that everyone (especially company bosses and academicians) is so busy and occupied (with official engagements) they seem to have very little time to help others with just a little of their time and offer suggestions based on their knowledge and experience.

But thanks to Phillip, and all the hard work everyone at Stellar Microfinance put in. I am grateful to God. I am, I have, I can. I felt we were cruising on our way along the success runway.

THE BUSINESS PROMOTER

ABOUT THIS BOOK

A creative diversion from the ‘normal’ presentation of academic facts, Yaidoo uses the art of storytelling to share practical experiences and insights with readers.

In the Business Promoter, he illustrates essential and universal lessons about what businesses must do to get on the success runway for a smooth “take off”.

“Excellence isn’t a task or chore we perform to get something done. It is a passion to help others that restores us in the process. Until you understand that you’ll never change your thinking or provide the best services in order to get the desired results out.” 

                                                                      (Subir Chowdhury: “The Ice Cream Maker”)

“You cannot attain actualization if you are in the position to help others improve their conditions but you’re not.”

          (Pastor Matther Ashimolowo)

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^[1] Source: Presentation by Mrs. Gladys Ghartey (Head of Microfinance: Min. of Finance & Economic Planning, Ghana) Jan.2006 Microfinance Summit UCC.