Before I blog about the professional side of things, let me say that I truly feel like a princess here. Yes, I am working hard (see below), but it’s wonderful. Ghanaians are so warm and friendly, everyone smiles as soon as we make eye contact. I think something in my head, and they deliver it to me. It’s one thing for our hotel staff to be gracious (you could argue it’s their job to hook me up, but if I told you all they’ve done even YOU would be amazed), but it’s even the company where I worked today: they provided tea, biscuits, water, and soda for snacks; they gave us our own (clean) bathroom; they made our office smell nice before we got there; they treated us to a delicious lunch. Ghanaians just seem to go above and beyond in every way, like Isaac who is working to figure out how (with some long work hours ahead of us) Rosa and I can get some traditional clothing before Friday so we can join the rest of the staff for “Traditional Dress Fridays.” I just love it here, and am so happy. It’s nice to feel appreciated, even favored, and it gives is energy for all the work we have ahead of us.
If you read nothing else in this long blog, you might want to read the part about fufu for lunch.
It was a long day today but very productive and also exciting. I am learning a lot about corporate finance (in developed as well as developing countries), and our core team (Ananda, Rosa, and I) realize that we make a good team and bring very different skills to the table. Ananda is a gifted consultant with a lot of great experience in the financial and insurance markets, and he’s very adept at recognizing challenges in developing countries and emerging markets given his experience 10 years ago in India. He and Rosa both have MBAs and significant experience in corporate finance. Rosa also has pricing management experience, and was able to do some rapid and helpful research to identify key banks in Ghana who offer a variety of business products and services (including invoice discounting and supplier guarantees). She also pulled together a spreadsheet today showing a consolidated balance sheet for the all the sister companies, which we can use when we go meet the banks for negotiation on Thursday.
We started the day with a tour of the manufacturing facility. Ananda and Rosa were touring with Kojo while Kwame-Ando pulled me away (literally, by my hand) for a different version of the tour. Based on our tour guide, our personalities, our education, and our experience, we had very different information to share when we re-grouped. Ananda was business-focused in his observations; Rosa was price- and operations-focused; and I was both technical and personal. So Ananda highlighted the additional information we needed to be successful “Need asset information, need cost information, explore paper bags as alternative to X bags for Y market” while Rosa identified immediate areas for potential cost savings “Potential duplication of effort in quality, too many people doing packaging and handling.” I rattled off the statistics that were bouncing around in my head “Use Z bags of glue per day between the 3 machines; quality control manager tests the viscosity of the glue; 6600 bags per palette because Tuber separates into 30 automatically based on the circumference of the gear” and then made a list of the people we met. I would write the person’s name and tell their relationship, then Ananda would add their role within the company, and I would follow with personal details about them. It was great to see how different the three of us are, and how we truly are better together.
After the factory tour, getting our office set up, meeting the key people in the company, outlining our key goals for this week, and starting some work on a global sourcing initiative, it was lunch time and Caesar drove us pretty much across town so we could go to a place that had really good fufu. I had fufu with groundnut and fish soup, and it was delicious. Fresh pineapple juice, too, in a great outdoor setting. Loved it! For those of you who don’t know fufu, you’re really missing out on some fun! It’s a dough made of boiled plantains and yucca, which is then placed in the bottom of a large bowl and covered with a soup or stew. The dough sticks to the bottom of the bowl, and then you eat it with your right hand. Yes, you read that correctly. I wish I had a photo, but picture 6 of us sitting at an outdoor restaurant in business clothes. And I mean business clothes, it’s probably 100 degrees and very humid, and Caesar has an undershirt, long sleeved button down business shirt, tie, and jacket. Each of us is given a bowl of water, a napkin, and then a bowl with the soup. We roll up our sleeves (literally, if needed), wash our right hand (liquid soap provided), and then dig into the bowl of soup to grab some fufu on the bottom, pull it up, and eat it. My soup was groundnut soup and it had both chicken and fish (both with bones), it’s kind of like a treasure hunt. The fufu feels like play-doh, but it is a lot tastier :) Perhaps my new favorite food in Ghana.
After lunch, we returned for a detailed financial meeting. From ~2pm until after 6pm, we met with the board of directors and pored through financial data, balance sheets, and cash flow before defining a clear negotiation strategy. I was so grateful to have been matched with two MBAs for this project, both with relevant work experience to what we were discussing. I was feeling pretty useless, but I was learning a lot and taking good notes for our team. I also read the people in the room and asked some incredibly loaded and politically-charged questions about their accounting practices, family relationships, and other sticky topics (in a very diplomatic & non-offensive way, so it was tricky but necessary & effective).
After the meeting, our threesome again noted how complementary our skills and approaches are. We’re all surprised that in such a short period of time, we’ve used our business skills, technical skills, and interpersonal skills to cut to the chase in a nonthreatening and collaborative way. Who would have ever thought that you could meet someone for less than two days and then be questioning his immediate family members’ motives and integrity directly without offending him? It’s been refreshing to experience the board’s openness to us, even as we ask very personal, very challenging, and very pointed questions (or as we ask them to agree to uncomfortable directives, as the case may be). They recognize that we are here to help, and because we are addressing the personal side of them to show we care about them as people (that’s my job!), we can also be very frank on the business side of things.
Tomorrow, we drive to the far western area of Ghana’s Western Region (not sure how close to the Ivory Coast, but we have to pack lunches, will have no internet access, etc.) to meet with West West Agro-Processing. Should be very different than today, and I’ll let you know tomorrow.
P.S. Jenise, I had to wield your spiritual weapon today to get my computer working, and I did it aloud. It worked and was a great witness!
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