Our challenges: key insights
Finding ‘good people’ to sustain business development
STARTING a company from scratch is a time-consuming process that needs the focus and attention of the founding directors to actualise a business entity from paper to reality.
But growing and sustaining a business requires a collaborative team effort by professionals highly skilled in particular service provisions. Providing the right services, therefore, entails having the right personnel with a targeted approach of achieving specific goals and objectives within a given time frame.
Choosing the right people to perform the right tasks is a key challenge facing various companies in the Zambian economy. What may sound relatively simple is actually a common problematic feature for businesses looking to professionalise their operations by having systems in place. Having systems in place increases customer satisfaction because the chosen professionals know what they are doing, which in-turn boosts sales volumes.
Agova, the business consultant firm, is one company that faced challenges in finding the right personnel following its transformation from a donor-funded business entity. Born from an NGO called Engineers Without Borders Canada, Agova is today a thriving, self-sustaining company whose operations have helped local Zambian companies grow their sales volumes by assisting them create and implement shared value business strategies.
Agova Managing Director, Indianna Baseden, explained how challenging finding good people was to help grow the business.
“…This is a bit of an ongoing challenge, but it was hard finding good people. At first, because it was a Canadian NGO structure that was made up of volunteers, it was just Canadians, which was obviously not sustainable. So, the whole point was, let’s recruit local Zambians, which we are now 80 or 90% locals, which is great and that’s what we want. But because our service is people providing good consulting services, it is quite hard to find good people who are reliable, loyal and deliver very good quality consulting to our clients. I would say that was definitely a challenge early on, and something that we are much better at now,” says Baseden in an interview.
“Business development has been a challenge for us, and particularly, what I would say is the function of business development; what I mean is finding people that know how to do that well. So, we’ve definitely struggled to find people who can sell our services well. We’ve had a very good year in terms of business development this past year. But overall, we’ve always struggled from the beginning.”
