Over its six years of operation, the organisation has written the playbook for youth hiring; Misan’s leadership and mantra, “Hire for attitude and train for skills” which has enabled WAVE to successfully upskill youths into the labour market and positively reoriented the attitudes and hiring practices of many Nigerian employers.
Let’s start with the customer value proposition. How does a founder developing a new business model create a unique value proposition for their non-profit organisation?What value do you or does your organisation add to society? A person comes to WAVE because they need to skills-train and find work—that’s our functional job. They need a steady and secure source of income for a secure livelihood—that’s our social job. We are helping them become what they imagine and helping them realise their dreams—that’s our emotional job. The social and emotional jobs give you a bigger sense of humility and stewardship.
Exactly. Also, consider what will be performed in-house versus outsourced. In the beginning, a lot of our training was outsourced. We didn’t have these instructors on payroll because we didn’t want to take on that risk and we couldn’t even afford to put them on the payroll. We were very clear with them from the start that this was a one-year arrangement during which we would try to learn from them to develop the capacity to do it ourselves. So we thought about what these terms would entail.
Will you charge customers fixed or variable pricing? Variable pricing might mean taking a percentage of their first month’s salary. WAVE’s training fee is no longer a fixed fee; whatever monthly salary you land when you complete the programme becomes your one-time training fee. Will you do tiered pricing? Some charge on a sliding scale based on the customer’s income.
Are there opportunities during your go-to-market for collaboration with other organisations? Is it advisable? You also need to identify your Total Addressable Market. We used to have this argument all the time at WAVE: what’s the size of the market? We thought hey, we’re in a country of 200 million people, so why are we struggling to get 500 people to graduate from our programme every year? Well, we have people who would want our product and people who don’t want our product because they don’t know they need it.