A Productive Week!

What a productive week we've had. Meeting after meeting, the interview gods have been with us this week! We met with ten different companies and discovered even more. So far we've handed out over fifty letters of introduction and gone through more than 300 business cards. We have completed interviews with 21 different companies plus the Chinese Embassy. Not too shabby!

Friday we hired a taxi for the day and went down to Mombasa Avenue, which is the industrial road on the way to the airport. We knew of several companies located on the road and we just stopped by them one by one. Vision Plaza is host to almost all of the logistics, clearing and forwarding companies and we made a note to visit them at the end of our study to gather data on how many containers each of them receive from China per month.

We were able to go to a clearing and forwarding firm, two car manufacturing firms, a construction equipment firm, a cement pole manufacturing company (see post below), and visited a telecommunications firm twice but were successfully thwarted by the receptionist both times. Our new plan for that one is to go there in the morning and sit until someone meets with us.

Saturday we spent much of the day meeting with Donna, the wife of the director of the SIT program. She is an anthropologist by trade and focuses on design, jewelry, and general Kenyan development. She had so many thoughts about our research and provided us several contacts. I always like talking to her because she is excited about knowledge. I hope I can be that full of life when I'm older. She encouraged us to try and publish a book with our information, so we are now trying to figure out how to aggregate the information we have collected.

Next week we have meetings set up Monday and Wednesday. We are going to try and meet with some of the Kenyan ministries as well, so that should lead to good blog stories :)

Thanks for following us on this adventure. We are learning a lot about the ins and outs of business and how convoluted everything is. Between holding companies, mergers, subsidiaries, and the like, it is a wonder anyone can disentangle the business world at all. But we are trying!