THE PROJECT OUTCOME

The last few weeks have been extremely political, stressful, and a number of behind the scenes power plays were brought to our attention. I pulled 3 all nighters this week trying to get stuff ready, but in the end we just could not get past some internal conflicts the client needs to work out. Here’s a synopsis we provided our advisor:

Last we left off, we were trying to sell the client a better approach of bundling their projects and setting up a ‘conservation’ fund to essentially collect donations for un-investable projects. We faced some significant push back because essentially our immediate clients (The Core Team), was insufficiently prepared to get into the detail of our work and complicated things by selectively filtering much of our work from the shareholder executive team (the SET). The result is frustration by the SET for not even knowing the nature of the problems that were being encountered and frustration by us for not even being allowed to have direct interaction with the senior clients. Our client contact, has repeatedly given us insight to the internal power plays and communication problems that have plagued the region. She even mentioned one of the three, effectively controls the channel to the CEO and doesn’t even like the other 2 to approach him directly…

Another repeated request of ours was to have an internal finance contact to work with to help out with the project and sell the messages of the fund. They finally decided on the last day of the project (yesterday) that it would be good for us to share the model with the CFO of Australia. It will now be in good hands, but disappointing this wasn’t done early.

The end result is that they realise they cannot go further until the sort out their internal issues and get everyone all together. Much of this doesn’t come as a surprise. We have left them with a very robust model upon which they can then design the right fund. We left them with a draft prospectus that was very useful for them, but incomplete until the final model is agreed upon and external administration identified. We also left them with detailed slides on the approach we took, tradeoffs made, and key risks they need to address.

We’ve been told that we gave them what they need and this was a highly useful exercise. In sum, the CEO of the region did not take an active role and let three marketers essentially be the sole input into our work, which at time was inherently complex and required serious decisions to be made and tradeoffs to be addressed. It was a great learning experience for both sides. We told them we will be available for any further questions, etc, should they be able to sit down and agree on the way forward. They appreciated the work we did and I think only at the end realised they were in over their head with the technical aspects of the fund and did not seek sufficient help.

As much as we were disappointed for the project not working (at least we had one recommendation that would make it work), we were told by the client that the point wasn’t to solve the problem as much as it was to do some further analysis, which we did. The CEO of Australia called my model the “Rolls Royce” of financial models, which made me feel good too. I think I can walk away knowing we did well, and I’m certain that the client will call us if their needs change in the future.