BCaD Consulting Management

Focus and growth for Ethiopian consultancy company
 

About BcaD

BCaD is a well known Ethiopian consultancy firm on small & medium enterprise (SME) support and entrepreneurship development. Assignments given to BcaD are mostly from large international NGOs (like SNV, GTZ and the EU) who hire BCaD's services to support SMEs. The firm has more than 200 SMEs as clients and is still expanding. Therefore BCaD is investing in training new staff. Its vision is to maintain leadership in the empowerment of young entrepreneurs and business managers through building their business competencies. SharePeople sees this kind of capacity building, and the impact on SME development, as a key success factor for poverty eradication in Ethiopia.

Business case

Mr. Afework Yohannes Germamo has 18 employees working with him. His goal for his less experienced co-workers is to get more practical experience. Business education in Ethiopia is of high quality but merely based on theory and lacks input on practice and experience. BCaD asked SharePeople for support in training the less experienced co-workers on:

• performing feasibility studies
• preparing general strategic plans for clients

Together with BCaD, the young professionals were trained in two weeks on these two items. Also, they were coached on actual proposals and feasibility studies or execute a strategic consult on BCaD itself. Per item the training consisted of around 2 days of theory and 5 days of on-the-job training. With the training provided, the young professionals learned to work more independently and to be of better assistance to the SMEs. 

Results

Analysis

BcaD was matched with Bard Dolmans owner of Sherpa Interim Management. Bard is a senior interim manager and management consultant. With his experience he was able to work out a organisational growth strategy, together with BCaD manager Afework Yohannes.

This was done by

a) Making visible what junior, medior and senior staff within BCaD is able to, to strength Human Resource Management by creating development trajectories for staff

b) Working on sales case studies with the staff

c) Working on feasibility studies with staff

d) Working on partnership scenarios with CEO Afework. 

Advice

Some concrete recommendations and actions were planned:

• § To hire senior staff
• § To execute feasibility study on some business cases and some advisory skills
• § Forming and appointing an advisory board
• § Identification (done) and contracting 2 strategic partners

Also, Bard trained BCaD in some technical strategy consultancy tools.

Impact on the partners

BcaD changed the internal roles and responsibilities in strategics and operations.

"This is a programme that really helps people, a country to develop ITSELF." (Bard Dolmans)

Follow up

This is a start of a two-year partnership between SharePeople and BCaD Consultancy. Both organisations will keep in touch and with the experts as well. After this Programme, CEO Afework Yohannes will participate in the SharePeople Exchange Week in June 2010 in the Netherlands.

Within the partnership, an official evaluation takes place every 6 months to see how the Ethiopian company has gained value from the SharePeople Programmes.