Accreditation file

I had always hated doing the accreditation files, of course it is due next week, so I dragged myself to work on it this week, along with replying to emails, answering calls, attending meetings and of course the famous 1000 dirhams license.  

What I noticed though that whoever had figured out the file had thought of it really well, it is certainly a very clever business start-up, business development model. It makes you remember your mission statement, your objective, how you treat your staff, what is the product offerings, what is your financial health, are you preparing marketing plans, is your statistics showing growth, etc. 

So after thinking about this, I embarked on the folder and started to analyse our work to find out if we are doing well or not or if we had missed on any of the points.  Also it occurred to me that maybe we have to provide some more products to complement what we are providing now.  I re-looked our marketing strategy and decided to make changes on how we had been doing it all along!  I figured that all of these exhibitions that we had been going to are not generating results except awareness, and since our students change every year, and the necessity of promoting ourselves year after year to schools and colleges so they know that we exist, I thought maybe it is best to start working with the students themselves and provide them an incentive by making them part of the company.  For example most of the high school students around the world work part time. Our students spend their time in the shopping centres or on play stations.  So they go to universities without knowing anything about work, nor do they have an out of the box thinking process.  So if they work with us part time, and they are involved in doing what they like to do (all the businesses will have media, business, accounting, finance, statistics, customer service, helping others, graphic design, journalism, IT, computer science and so on and so forth); And since most people are visual and most students prefer to watch tv and movies, and since YouTube and the advent of the internet TV, kids can be involved in corporate videos, in terms of production, editing and uploading it to the Internet.  Then they can work on socialising with their friends while in your office, provided that they use some key words that encourage the search engine optimisation? What heaven to all business people is that? And what heaven to all kids is that? When you call this win-win you are not exaggerating.  So give it a go people, and let the kids work in your office, help them write their CVs and help them find out what they want to do in the future by hands on experience.  On the other hand, we can build a rapport with the students that work with us so they bring their friends, and then we can give them another reward like make an IPhone 5 drew, or a trip to London! And none of these will break the business. 

Thanks to the ministry of higher education to bring this accreditation process, I wouldn't be thinking about this had I not been squeezed to prepare the file.  

On another note, the accreditation folder is a necessity, as numbers talk.  You can never lie in it or tell the ministry something that is invalid, as every paragraph matches with the other and every annex is a check or a balance. It's like those psychometric questionnaires where the reader would detect untruth by cross checking the answers to certain questions? For example they could ask you what type of music do you like, and you would say jazz, then in another part they would present you a case whereby the next door neighbour has a party and the band is playing Jazz music loudly, what would you do, if one said I would open the window and listen, then the person is telling the truth, but if he says I will call noise control then the person is not only a liar he is also anti social. 

So my numbers tell me that we are running a charity organisation!! Yes, as we make enough to cover our costs? And if a business doesn't have a huge surplus then it can never grow!  A surplus is crucial as a business needs to change furniture, equipment, computers and laptops and needs to spend on cars and staff promotions; so we must grew, as we really have to have another office and we must strengthen our Internet. The word growth was used so many times in the accreditation file, in the past I barely thought about it, today I  appreciated the ministry and it's concern for our business and insistence on its success.