One of the potential clients I met with in Malawi was a very energetic and entrepreneurial business man who enjoyed the cut and thrust of acquiring new businesses. By his own admission, however, he was not a manager – this was not a fun area for him. He was one of those guys who has a phone in either hand and was either horribly early for meetings or horribly late – a real maverick.
He already had a diverse portfolio of businesses – a design agency, a printing company and a hotel – or Lodge as they are called in Malawi – usually because they are single story buildings.
In addition to wanting Business Plans completed for each of the Businesses he wanted us to put together a Management Framework for him. Interestingly, when I did my internet research – every consultant starts there of course – although I got women in bathing costumes I could find no simple authoritative Management Framework.
So it was time for the drawing board and this is what I came up with:
Particular issues here were the fact that the client was the sole shareholder and he was currently running the businesses single handed. A positive was that he had travelled abroad and was keen to develop world class business.
I was not in Malawi long enough to see this through but it was clear that there would be a number of challenges not the least of which on present evidence it would call for a massive behavioural shift by the client. So the outcome was unproven although I would like to think the basic framework shown here is essentially sound.
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