My Experience
Sustainable Health Enterprises (SHE) works to serve girls and women in East Africa by providing access to affordable menstrual hygiene education and products. Currently, this lack of access in developing countries inhibits girls and women from attending school and work. SHE is currently three years old as an organization, and is evaluating next steps for sustainable growth. By providing a comprehensive analysis of SHE’s competition, internal capabilities, and potential revenue, we made a recommendation on how the organization can reach more vulnerable girls and women in developing countries
With my partner, Christina Shim, we created a business scenario that will help the organization raise funding for strategic initiatives, growth and expansion. We researched and identified potential business development opportunities, conducted primary market research, provided a competitive analysis, constructed a strategic plan, and identified potential private stakeholders to partner with SHE to ensure long-term sustainability. All of our strategic research and final recommendations were presented to the Founder/CEO in the final week of the internship.
SHE’s business case was tackled using basic lessons we learned in Accounting, Operations, Marketing, and Strategy. For our recommendation, we had to project capital investment and project revenue and expenses for ten years, keeping in mind increasing costs and inflation. To determine project costs, we interviewed manufacturers, shippers, and retailers and estimated product expenses. The six focus groups of potential customers we administered enabled us to determine purchasing behavior, price sensitivity, brand loyalty, and response to advertisements and media messages. In addition, we also analyzed survey results and gleaned overarching conclusions from a broader set of potential customers. Finally, through interviews with socially-driven companies (startups and veteran organizations), we were able to learn about different business models, customer relations techniques, and how to evaluate and market social mission and impact.
The project was challenging due to the nature of the assignment – building a recommendation and plan for strategic growth. There were a lot of unknown variables, and there was difficulty in gaining industry information or details about competitors. We did manage to gather valuable details that critically affected our recommendation, but the relationships between unknown and known variables were quite complex. In addition to this, it took us some time to get our heads around the operational and business landscape of menstrual hygiene products.
Secondly, the focus groups we administered were crucial to understanding the competitive landscape and customer attitudes and preferences. We were successful in administering focus groups for a broad age range of females, but diversity in income level or geographic location could have been more helpful. The internship was only six weeks in length, and while we immediately began to organize focus groups in our first week, the scheduling took some time to arrange, and we wanted enough time at the end of the internship to digest and analyze the focus group data.
We were taken aback by the magnitude of details we had to evaluate and analyze in order to make a comprehensive strategic recommendation. We also realized that financial considerations have a major a bearing on mission and strategic growth for an organization, despite what the founder may want to achieve. We had originally viewed each part of our business plan in separate divisions, but in fact were surprised how intertwined all business areas can be – marketing, operations, finance, mission, customer relations, human talent, etc. Through our interviews with socially driven organizations, we learned how difficult is to straddle the line between doing well and doing good, and how small decisions made every day are about this issue. Finally, there are a lot of interesting business models, marketing tools, and creative solutions being done in a wide range of industries that gave us a lot of optimism and inspiration about the field of social enterprise.
