Thursday 9/15
Had an early morning meeting with the official who serves as our liaison at the Rwanda Development Board. RDB is the government department that is charged with business and economic development. We are working together to put on a customer service seminar in October. We also discussed our graduation ceremony and other matters. The meeting went well.
Our visiting executives are busy with mentoring meetings morning and afternoon. We had a nice lunch meeting at Shokola, a safari themed café in downtown Kigali. The Shultz's and I head back to meet learners and Dale remains downtown for a mentoring meeting with a graduate who is also a banker.
People ask us how we have been able to attract such high potential entrepreneurs to our program.
1. God’s blessing.
2. Effective Approaches to Marketing. One of these is Open House. Each Thursday evening when class is in session we have Open House – this is an opportunity for the entrepreneurs to invite their friends. The turn out tonight was great as we had 15 open house guests, all of which seemed very interested in our training. I talked with them during our break, give them a couple of brochures and we will follow up on them by email and phone calls.
Friday 9/16
Got out bright and early to visit several large local businesses. We are inviting them to our Customer Service and Leadership training in October. The training is for the top leaders of the top companies in Rwanda. The response has been encouraging. There seems to be a real hunger for this kind of training here, and I know that this seminar will be great.
It is a shame I will miss it. Dr. Mulford and I tag team as facilitators for our training here and it’s his turn in October. I am excited by the prospect of training other facilitators, however. I see a day in the future when we will have a great pool of people who do what we do. This will allow us to expand this program beyond Rwanda – 100 BDCs around the world.
I am encouraged by how well our VEs are doing with facilitation. All our VEs this week are also facilitators in training. 90% of the class was led by Dale Fenwick tonight. Good stuff – SWOT, the 4Ps, etc.
Saturday 9/17
We had a special Open House in our offices today from 9-12 AM for our graduates. It was great seeing them, and our little office was a beehive of energy. From the beginning we have wanted to find eMentors for our graduates. Several are asking for mentors now. I think of Théoneste in particular. His business is creating online database driven applications for the B2B market. His most successful product is a SAS for Rwandan schools. He would love to have a mentor with some background in IT and web technology. I just know that the Lord has someone who would be willing to email and occasionally Skype with Théoneste.
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