A group of young finance professionals – including two CIMA members - have taken part in a fascinating leadership development programme at Barclays involving a real life project to sell art from the Kalahari Bushmen of Botswana. This is the first of a two part article on their experiences. By Tim Cooper, editor, e-magazines, CIMA.
‘I wasn’t really into maths at school,’ claims Mark Thain ACMA, finance business partner, Barclays, with a grin. ‘When looking at careers, I was much more interested in the project and management side of business rather than technical accounting, which is why I chose CIMA.’
After entering the profession via the graduate scheme at BAE Systems, he later moved to Barclays where he joined the Finance Leadership Development Network.
As part of the programme, he was given the opportunity to take part in a fascinating project which would see him and other participants taken completely out of their day jobs and asked to sell traditional artwork and crafts created by a bushman community in Botswana.
The aim of the task – which continues with new teams handing over to each other each year - is to generate short-term sales and a longer-term business plan with a sustainable income stream from the artwork. By giving team members real-life projects with such a broad scope, such as the bushman art project, Barclays hopes they will learn things about business and about themselves that they never could in a classroom.
Thain’s team was made up of himself and two others - Ashley Head ACMA and Katie Sweeting. These three competed against two other teams on the bushman task last year. By making the most short-term sales, working towards the best sustainable plan and showing how much they had learnt during the project, Thain's team were judged by a panel to have won the task and rewarded with a trip to Botswana.
Striking artwork
So how does the project work? 2008 was the second year of the bushman project. In order to achieve the second objective of a sustainable business plan, the project is passed to new leadership team members each year, while those from the previous year's projects act as mentors. Last year it officially ran for six weeks between September and mid October. But Thain said his team got cracking as soon as the introductory period in May was over as they knew it would be difficult to fit it all into six weeks.
The Bushman Art Project aims to make a real and sustainable contribution to the threatened San (bushman) community in Botswana through establishing an international market for its unique and striking artwork.
All profits from the bushman art project go back to the San through NGOs owned by the communities themselves. This project is run in the UK by Ambur Associates, through the charity Accounting for Africa, to provide the San with a viable future while maintaining their traditional lifestyle.
Early success
How could a group of banking finance professionals create a sustainable business selling Kalahari art in just six weeks? Thain said starting the project with a blank canvas was tough. 'We had a scattergun approach of using our contacts to get some initial leads that we could follow up on. Through that approach we made some sales straight away, which was great. We decided that we couldn’t sell this as charity - it had to be credible art work, which it is. Australian aboriginal art sells for thousands of pounds. It is really high profile. The San art can be marketed as a similar product. We realised early on that it is about getting people to buy in to the story.'
Though the San is a high profile culture, its art has had very little exposure - therein lies the challenge. Later the team narrowed its approach to two or three opportunities with long-term potential. One of them was in conjunction with the Redbush Tea Company whose ethical business culture identified with the project. Redbush already does a lot of work in Namibia and Botswana, so straightaway there were parallels to work with.
The company agreed to use the artwork as part of a prize draw in a series of magazine promotions. Due to the success of these they are now looking to run a full scale on-pack promotion later in 2009.
CIMA skills
Thain said: 'It is great for us and it will involve many of the major supermarkets. Over 350,000 packets of Redbush tea bags will have our paintings on them this year. We also approached university African studies departments and a contact at Cambridge, who also works for De Beers, and had done a lot of work with the San people. He was very interested in what we were doing and led us to another contact who wanted to get involved in selling San jewellery here in the UK.
'There had already been a small level of success and with some items selling for around £500 each in Dover Street Market, central London. So our second long-term option was to increase the market for the jewellery here in the UK where it is not widely known. The plan is for our contact to look after the marketing and sales, while we provide the business background, and handle the back office and strategy.
'This was where our CIMA skills came in because the three of us took this away as a project, applied all our own experience and put together a credible business plan which we are sharing with our new sales contact. The strategy is to utilise all her contacts in the jewellery industry, jewellery fairs, buyers and fashion houses and grow the market in the coming year. She also has contacts in boutiques in places such as New York, Tokyo and Paris so this really is a great opportunity to make something happen.
‘The challenge now is for the 2009 Barclays bushman art project teams to take the next steps, get this business plan off the ground and setup a new company, with employees, to go out and start making some sales. It is all real stuff!'
Next month, find out more about the highs and lows of selling bushman art and what the teams learnt from their experiences.
January 2009