During the first summer of the war, when Ukrainian companies had absorbed the first chock and were rethinking their business resilience, many of them understood that export is one of the few ways to keep the companies operating and being able to support Ukraine economy during the war. The need for export support was enormous. At the same time, we resumed our Export consultants training program and had a chance to adapt. To increase the efficiency and capacity, we piloted the export support for groups of companies from the same sector. Thanks to GIZ, a year later, we had a chance to roll out a full program that is polishing and streamlining the very powerful approach.
On October 20, 2023 Visionest Institute partnered with the #EU4Business program, which is funded by the EU and the German government and managed by the German federal company Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, to implement the Trade Up: Export Coaching Program. This program aims to help Ukrainian small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) expand into the global market. We are thrilled by the level of interest shown by Ukrainian companies in our program: we have received 5 times more applications than the number of seats available. Our approach in this program is based on an innovative sprints approach – firstly, we started with the division of the companies into 7 sectors – furniture, snacks, wedding, berries, packaging, cosmetics and cereals with the defined export market to each sector.
After that during 3 sprints consultants actively worked in teams, digging deeply into the situation of each SME, motivating them to share info on the competition, make inputs, and validate ideas. Several months of collaboration helped to develop deep market knowledge of each sector with the individual peculiarities of each company. And now, we are already in the final stage of the program, when our 21 consultants are ready to produce individual export plans for 40+ companies.
Contact project manager Maxim Chechelev (maxim.chechelev@visionest.institute) for more information about the program.