Jessica Laporte
May 28, 2015
Since the start of 2015, Kouzin Dlo successfully launched 3 new sites in Port-au-Prince.
These new sites have continued our learning process and helped to refine our model and evaluate inefficiencies. Through the new sites we have been able to gain better estimates of project expenses for A) Manager and Sales Agent training B) Community marketing 3) Partner and staff recruitment and 3) Site management.
By considering both expenses and time cost of activities we’ve worked on adding efficiency to our overall expansion and management approaches. For example, we have consolidated Sales Agent training to 1 full day instead of 3 half days to reduce transportation for the Director and Training Leaders as well as reduce time lost to late arrivals. Similarly, monthly manager meetings now serve as a time to touch base, submit forms, receive new forms and receive new stock. This consolidation us from handling these activities separately for each site and reduces last minute meetings that disrupt our managers time and plans.
Launching these three sites has also helped to build better community partnerships and improve communications to ensure clear expectations. To this end we have created a site visit rubric, in order to evaluate all sites on the same criteria before Kouzin Dlo enters into a community. We now also give all new partners a ‘Partnership Activity Guide’ to layout the action steps they will take in the process of helping Kouzin Dlo launch a new site in their community.
Sometimes these changes - new documents, set schedules and revised systems – seem small, but we can already see they’re making a BIG difference. Our ultimate success as a social enterprise is just as much about what we do as how we do it.
