Gary Mutz, an international sales consultant and a recipient of the 2007 VEGA Service Impact Award and the Presidential Service Award has volunteered with VEGA programs in Morocco, Bahrain and recently in West Africa. As a volunteer, Gary brings Sales and Marketing expertise and in-depth knowledge of Total Quality Management (TQM). After working at IBM for twenty five years, Gary honed his skills and also developed an interest in working abroad. As an IBM employee, he worked for six years in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. From this experience, he found that he had improved his capacity to be successful in diverse settings and decided to pass that skill on to others. He began working as an intercultural trainer, coaching people on how to flourish while working abroad and how to understand a new culture and work within it.

After he retired, Gary embraced his passion for working overseas and realized that his IT sector skills were also applicable in other sectors. He served as an International Executive Service Corps (IESC) volunteer in Peru, and also went on to volunteer in Macedonia, Serbia and Bahrain. Interestingly, while vacationing in southern France, he received a call from IESC asking if he would be interested in volunteering in the VEGA West Africa program, as a trainer for export ready companies (ERCs). He threw himself into the task and spent the month of July and part of August researching and developing training sessions that would prepare these companies to better understand how to put together a business plan and build better relationships with potential business partners.

The three day training module was called “Understanding your Business and Knowing your Partners.” According to Gary, “the objective was to improve partnerships between selected export ready companies and Ecobank Ghana in order for the ERCs to obtain pre-shipment, post-shipment and investment financing.”

The training took place in Accra, Ghana and Gary found that it was one of the best environments for this kind of training due to the interaction with people, who were smart, warm and appreciative. He coached the leaders of the ERCs on the importance of:

• quality, price competitiveness, acceptable working conditions,
• market access speed and a focused marketing plan.

He guided the participants through the steps of developing a business plan and effectively using it, as well as how to properly assess a pricing and costing plan by comprehending transactional risks, responsibility, cost factors and ways to increase profit. He even included a module that emphasized the value of understanding culture when doing business with customers in other countries. This module used great examples and was eye opening for many of the ERC participants.

He discovered that the methods which worked best in this workshop were the utilization of group participation and the review of case studies and experiences. He not only shared his own experiences from working with IBM and other developing countries but also gave the participants a chance to talk about their own lessons learned including contract negotiations gone wrong, horrifying shipping charges and the consequences of incorrect paperwork. The participants benefited the most from the instruction on quality and process management along with business plan creation. Many participants confirmed that at the end of the training they felt comfortable and confident enough to approach a bank to request financing for their business.

Gary acknowledges the benefits of those with private sector experience engaging themselves as volunteers and stepping outside their comfort zones, “You get an instant reward, each session is unique. Private sector can become routine, but here you are trying to do as good of a job as you can with the unexpected and very challenging. Go with an open mind, share everything you know, don’t go as an expert, go as a team leader.”

The USAID officials who were present affirmed that Gary had a winning formula for delivering this kind of presentation.