Five years ON
And thankful for long runways
Next month Opportunities NOW is hitting its five year anniversary. And we’ve only just purchased our first office. I don’t often write blog posts like this, but it has me in a reflective mood.
I remember the birth of the idea of ONOW. In 2009 I was toying with a micro-venture capital solution to poverty for Myanmar. My friend Ryan, who had a particular concern for youth, visited Myanmar and stayed with my family for a few weeks in June 2010. We combined his natural entrepreneurship gifts with my passion for supporting micro-enterprise development.
It took a while to find our niche, and it took adding other valuable teammates. We were a collaborative effort from the beginning, and we did it in the worst-ranked country in the world for Ease of Doing Business.
Thankfully, we had a long runway.
The Runway
ONOW certainly benefited from a flexible approach, patient stakeholders in the early days, and enough bootstrapper mentality to figure where we fit.
We’ve gone from an entrepreneurship training school that officially started in May 2012 in the living room of a founder, to a team of 14 stretched across three regions of Myanmar, with pilots of our innovative program starting in 2 other countries (Thailand and Kenya)!
We tried training programs, a soy milk business, internship components, university partnerships, fellowship programs, and consulted along the way to pay some of the bills. Only in the last couple of years have we found that our lessons learned can translate to valuable contributions to the small-enterprise support industry.
Over the years we’ve helped launch 200 small businesses in Myanmar, we’ve trained 450 Myanmar people in entrepreneurship and small business management, and we consistently design and build our own innovative and entertaining financial education products for the Base of the Pyramid.
A New Workspace
We didn’t just stumble across this impact immediately. We learned and adjusted and constantly iterated.
I’m early in my career, but I can’t help but think that the work culture we have at ONOW is unique. We’re a solid team. We work closely together. We balance the growing demands of an established company, but maintain the constantly creative atmosphere required of entrepreneurship.
When you’re a social enterprise that is trying to scrape by in a challenging pioneer market, how do you choose an office for a team that is as diverse as ONOW? 10–12 teammates with individual work styles and skill sets, who also come from three different countries and eight different ethnicities. We credit our creativity to our diverse background.
After five years of renting in three different locations, the fourth office should stick. We’re on a tight budget, but we finally saved enough to buy a location of our own!
When we designed the new workspace, we needed to create an open floor plan for working together, still have room for escape, but in a tiny place we could afford. The space needed to be flexible enough to facilitate a full staff meeting, an individual worker who needs to be left alone, or a small group meeting with visitors.
A Big Shift
ONOW is really an experiment in how to have a flat structure in a hierarchical society, with a diverse workforce where companies are so often monocultural. Today our work happens in collaboration. It is a reflection of our training style — entrepreneurship cannot be lectured, it must be experienced.
When structured effectively, cross-cultural work can be intensely creative and draw on each person’s critical thinking and problem-solving skills. But this approach isn’t very natural for the Myanmar context, which is culturally very hierarchical.
ONOW is really an experiment in flat management and diversity.
In the early years of ONOW we struggled to find a training methodology that was effective, and attractive to young people in Myanmar. The classes were long, and were more representative of a traditional classroom setting. A lecturer stood at the front of the classroom, with a presentation planned and a stack of curriculum to deliver.
The customer response should have been indicative of the uselessness of this model. We tried everything to recruit students. Events and paid recruiters and incentives. Cohorts were planned, cohorts were delayed, cohorts were canceled…because so few students would come.
The concept was flawed.
But a couple of years ago we decided to revamp it all. We finally realized…
Entrepreneurship can’t be lectured — it must be experienced!
Today ONOW’s training is highly interactive, experiential, and discussion-oriented. No lecture. Just activities, conversation, role plays. And completely based in the real world.
Students responded.
Since making the change, every cohort has been completely full. Students are engaged. They are more prepared to manage the challenges of starting a new business. And they form better post-training peer support groups because they have solved problems together and they know and trust each other.
Creating a training like this requires a constant iterative process of adding and adjusting and creating new activities for our training. And that iterative process happens as a group.
The Next Five Years
We’re developing new products and methodologies through our Innovation Lab. We’re jumping into livelihood creation through agent networks. And perhaps most importantly — we’re taking our message into other organizations:
Interactive learning is hugely impactful.
Lecture is a waste of everyone’s time.
The development industry should do better.
Buying our own place has unleashed a stream of dreaming for the future. Rather than being exposed to the volatility of a pioneer rental and real estate market, a major unknown has been removed.
I can’t wait to see what the ONOW Team does next!
