Sweat your assets!

My “aha moment” on optimisation of assets and talents has a specific date and location. Sweat Your Assets has been my motto since September 2014, when I was attending microfinance training with other practitioners in Mombasa, Kenya.

Uncertain times in a volatile area

Regardless of Mombasa’s welcoming atmosphere, that week, we were all on high alert for recent accidents:

• a significant spread of the Ebola virus across Africa by September 2014 had already caused thousands of victims;
• the terrorist attack in July 2014 in the Kenyan villages of Hindi and Gamba (100 Km from Mombasa), where at least 29 people were killed.

Those were not just terrible news on TV: several colleagues could not attend the event due to new travel and border health measures. Participants were concerned for relatives and friends back home or travelling across outbreaks. We were also on alert for possible security threats from Al Shabaab along the Kenyan coastline. Mombasa was heavily patrolled, and the hotels had already upgraded their security protocols.

In the end, the team’s positive vibes and professional attitudes made the whole week a successful and memorable workshop: it was inspiring to train with dedicated micro-finance practitioners from all over Africa and Asia.

Among several speakers, I was particularly impressed by an Ugandese Microfinance CEO. During a brief chat, I congratulated her on the positive impact achieved by her microfinance Institution. During that conversation, she passionately shared this comment: “Yes, we are good at sweating our assets!”

Call To Action

That business slang was not new to me. Sweating your assets involves: leveraging your existing investments; optimizing and squeezing more productivity out of your assets, processes, people and technology. The message is clear: optimise what you already possess to unlock its full potential and boost the returns. Yet, only during those days in Mombasa, that financial term took a new dimension. Sweat Your Assets became my entrepreneurial Call to Action for boosting Mindset, Money Management, Investing and Entrepreneurship.

I hope it will become yours as well.

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