Dechets a l’Or started as a waste management business with a mission to become the premier waste management service provider in West Africa, a region where a significant percentage of the waste goes uncollected. After five years of operations in Guinea, Dechets a l’Or founder and CEO realized that he could increase the impact he generates by creating a product that could benefit not only him but also other waste operators in the region. Therefore, my project was to assist Dechets a l’Or (now DalO Systems) leadership team in becoming a tech company with a SaaS platform that helps waste operators to manage different aspects of their businesses: customer registration, real time field asset monitoring, and payment collection, among others.

I worked directly with the CEO/founder and the COO of the business in three main workstreams: (1) business development – I was responsible for creating a model with financial projections for the company in the next five years. In order to do so, I had to analyze and make strategic decisions related to the pricing model, target cities, organizational structure and other aspects of the business; (2) product development – I helped the leadership team develop their product roadmap by creating users and customer journeys and identifying what the biggest pain points of their customers were and how our platform could address them. We created a list of features/functionalities needed for every step of every journey that will serve as input to the UX/UI and dev team to create the platform; and (3) fundraising materials – I spent a reasonable amount of time supporting the leadership team in creating content to be used in their investment pitch deck. All of these activities allowed me to apply skills that I’d learned in different classes during my MBA and made my business school experience even more meaningful.

The first and more obvious challenge was getting used to working in the COVID-19 era. It was my first time working 100 percent remotely and having the discipline of thinking about my house as my working place was a true challenge. In addition to that, I was working with people that I had never met in person and, even though they were great co-workers, it took a few weeks to get used to this dynamic. Another significant challenge was to help DalO’s leadership team to build a business in an industry that I was not familiar with. I had to work really hard to try to close the knowledge gap that I had (or at least make it smaller) and start to make meaningful contributions when we were discussing strategy-related topics that would impact the company’s future. Lastly, the lack of available data about the industry and the region was also challenging, especially when I was building the financial projections for the business. It pushed me to find creative solutions to may roadblocks that I eventually faced, which I will take as one of the main takeaways from this internship.

I honestly cannot think of a better way I could have spent my summer than working with Ayo and Ebi at DalO. What made me select them over other potential internships was the opportunity to be part of the first stages in creating a new business and face all the challenges that an entrepreneur faces – and I can safely say this was 100 percent fulfilled. As a management consultant, I’m used to working with larger and more structured companies, and this summer internship exposed me to situations and challenges that I would never face in my full-time job. By the end of this experience, I feel that I’ve developed both my personal and my professional toolkits more than I was expecting in the beginning of the summer.