If you caught the news this week, you probably heard about the riots in Haiti. To read the reports, you'd think the country was at war with itself. I don't want to down play the genuine frustration of the people. They have much to protest. But for those who are thinking of doing business in Haiti, it's important to understand a great deal of what you see on TV is politics as usual.

If the situation weren't so dire it would almost be comical. One "protest" this week looked quite serious on TV. The reality was they set the tires up the night before. Assembled at the appointed time. Made a lot of noise, stunk up the palace area and departed in time to catch the football game. At this stage of the electoral calendar, much of what you see is designed to influence the vote.

I traveled around Haiti this week with few problems in spite of the protests and cholera. Meetings ran on time. Everyone showed at the appointed hour. Restaurants were filled to the brim with humanitarians and election observers. Our project even made huge leaps forward.

There is no denying that much must change in Haiti. The one year anniversary of the earthquake will be upon us in just over 50 days and little progress has been made toward rebuilding. There are many many reasons for that. It's easy to blame it all on the government. The hard truth is the donor community is as much, if not more to blame, than the government.

Rather than get up on my soap box and bloviate about good intentions gone very wrong, I offer a challenge to private enterprise. Shrug off your "Haiti fatigue" and invest in a population with tremendous potential. Drive the streets of Haiti and it's clear this is a culture of entrepreneurs. There is an abundance of desire and talent waiting to be harnessed. Yes, the government makes it very difficult and the IHRC approval process is confusing. But it's not all that much easier to do business with the US government. There is also corruption, but have you looked at our headlines lately?

Haiti isn't for every business, but for are those who raced to Haiti to help immediately after the earthquake, hoping too that there would be opportunity, know that there is! Pursuing those opportunities feels like a long hard slog sometimes, but the Haitians are full of pleasant surprises. Give them a chance.

This entry was posted on November 20, 2011 at 7:03 PM and has received 46 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

First cholera and now Tomas. It is a difficult time for Haiti. It's heart-wrenching as it finally seemed like the clean-up and reconstruction was gaining traction. Last week there was a dramatic improvement in many of the streets. Rubble was gone. Many streets were clean. Even some of the more cynical people I met were tentatively starting to say, "maybe this time it will be different."

Now Tomas. Pray the worst of the storm misses Haiti.

This entry was posted on November 2, 2011 at 7:04 PM and has received 36 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Nothing in Haiti is easy. Simple tasks like driving to a meeting can be a test of patience and an act of endurance. Taking a project like ours from concept to close, at times, feels like running a marathon...every day...sometimes twice a day. Angela made sure we all understood this going in, but I know, in the back of my head, I took her warning with a grain of salt. Every big deal runs the risk of deal fatigue. The companies who win, win because they push through it.

The reality is our project has moved quite fast, for its size (~$70M), since we found a sponsor. When you create, instead of respond to, opportunities, there is always a start up phase. Ours was 3-4 months. As reviewed in earlier posts, we made a lot of mistakes. In late July, we finally found our sponsor. Our first course of action was to craft a project concept that met the needs of our sponsor, which took a couple of weeks. Then we went on quest for approvals and funding.

Our original goal had been to present the plan to the IHRC in August. Unfortunately, a poor translation caused us to miss the deadline. However, we were able to secure approvals from the Ministry of Planning, which was a critical step. We spent the balance of August working in partnership with the Ministry's staff to create a very detailed scope of work that could be used to lobby for funding. At the same time we were working with the Ministry, we were also independently socialized the project and sought support from: Ambassadors, IHRC members, MINUSTAH, Haitian businesses and subject matter experts.

This was the fun part! Without exception, every single person we spoke to declared this project to be essential to Haiti. It must be a priority, they declared pounding the table! All offered their support. All went forth and evangelized the project. We also sought advice on securing funding. We were advised the Minister simply needed to call a meeting and ask.

The Minister convoked a donor meeting. He declared it a success and announced that he would present our project to the IHRC for final approval October 6th. At the last minute, the project was pulled from the IHRC Agenda because it was not yet fully funded.

This is where patience and endurance kick in. I still find it mind-boggling that this project is not fully funded. This project will establish the foundation for the cadastre (land titling), the criminal justice system and the financial system to name just a few. It addresses a dozen systemic weaknesses in Haiti's government. How is it not funded?

Next post we'll explore the challenges of securing funding.

This entry was posted on November 1, 2011 at 7:06 PM and has received 37 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

We initially approached the Haiti the way everyone else did. We lobbied the donor community. We sought out connections to President Clinton. We pitched multilaterals and NGOs. We networked with leading members of the Haitian Diaspora. Our client engaged with local partners and put together a plan to donate goods and services to demonstrate their capabilities and be on the ground in Haiti.

After almost four months of hard work and several trips our client had spent a lot of money and had nothing to show for it. Even with a large donation on the table, we were unable to get the attention of Haitian decisions makers. Haiti was feeling like a dead end, worse a deep money pit.

At AZtech, we don't take well to failure. We shared an unshakeable belief that our client had a solution set that could truly make a difference in the lives of Haitians. We simply couldn't accept this project was going nowhere. In mid- June we stepped back to re-evaluate our extended team and our approach.

It was clear our approach had been too "American." We thought, with over $1B in aid and President Clinton co-chairing the IHRC we had an edge. We were wrong. We also thought we could treat Haiti like any market and parachute in for a day or two at a time. Wrong again. We thought our solution was so clearly what Haiti needed that the Haitian government would be receptive to our solicitations. Yet again, wrong.

First we changed out our strategic partners. As hard as it can be to admit the team is wrong, it's critical to constantly re-evaluate in any strategic development opportunity. We evaluated several different potential partners before finding the perfect match, CSAS, LLC and its President, Angela Chainer. As her profile clearly indicates, Angela knows Haiti and, more important, has been successful completing projects in partnership with the State of Haiti. Second, we admitted we didn't know what we didn't know. We went to Haiti.

That first trip was meant to last 6 days, we stayed 10. The initial warmness of our welcome was entirely due to affection of the Haitians for Angela. The subsequent referrals and opened doors was the result of our new sales strategy.

This time our sales strategy was not to sell at all. Instead, we approached each meeting as students. We respected the fact that much has changed in Haiti since the earthquake. Instead of immediately going to see senior government officials, we invested over a week gaining insight into the new political and business landscape by meeting with private business people, advisors to policy makers, former ministers, members of the opposition, sitting senators and members of the IHRC. With each we shared our thought leadership, rather than their products; how other countries similar to Haiti leveraged this thought leadership and best practices to modernize their countries and asked the Haitians if and where they saw a fit.

By then end of our first trip, the strategy paid off on multiple levels. First, we learned we were trying to solve the wrong problem. There was a far more critical problem our solution set addressed. It is a problem so systemic that every single Haitian we met, regardless of their political point of view, passionately agreed it must be solved. More important, with every meeting the solution became more Haitian. No longer was a foreign company/government, NGO or humanitarian group telling the Haitians what they must do and how they must do it. Instead, the Haitians were developing a solid vision to create the cornerstone upon which to re-found the country.

We returned to the States confident we had a winning project; we just had to convince our client.

Our next post is will explore how we developed a win strategy for Haiti.

This entry was posted on October 11, 2011 at 7:06 PM and has received 37 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.