Chuck summarized a major “takeaway” from his time in Kenya as he described a training he is to give here in Denver

…the Cycle of Poverty is a serious problem even for seemingly successful business owners here in the U.S., because once you fund something (in the case of Kenya- micro financing is the most common method, here it is either our own savings or a loan from a bank), that actually doesn’t solve anything.

The business owner then needs very significant training to change their mindset about how successful business happens.  Without that change in mindset, all we do is temporarily raise our standard of living or business position because of the loan.  If we haven’t made the right decisions what to do with the loan, once we pay it back and the loan money runs out, our business reverts to where it was before.  It is HOW we use the loan and how we reinvest the higher net profits possible that is the key to breaking the cycle of poverty.  This is a problem both in Kenya and here – business owners don’t use their loan properly to set themselves up for sustainable business.

To that end, we did our first business training for business owners before I left and I put together two more months of training to get us started helping these business owners make the kind of investments that will create a sustainable business.  After getting back here I realized that the problem is identical here for business owners who are well past subsistence – they still are slaves to their business, can’t leave for a week and expect things to be running well when they get back, and when their loan money runs out, they need to go get another one or their business reverts to where it was before the first loan.

I’m going to use the same exact training I used in Kenya today to make my point.  I think it will be very eye-opening to these seemingly successful business owners to realize they aren’t any farther along except that their “poverty” is lack of time and continuing high risk exposure because they’re not reinvesting regularly in their business.