Finding meaning behind the numbers

I’ve dipped my toes in the waters of Excel over the years, but the waves can get a bit large. When I wade too deep into it, I tend to get swamped. Yet I do admire a well-built model where the cells spin out their numbers like a slot machine in response to my toggling a single scenario. I just don’t entirely understand how it got to be like that. But as my accounting professor Tomo Suzuki likes to remark, the poets are necessary to interpret what the boffins create.

I’ve trudged through Excel when I worked in a bank to check a company's financials, grumbled as I’ve used Excel to inventory cases of wine (long story), and muddled through Excel when balancing my own budget. But I’ve never put numbers into one end of the Excel machine and had the impact on people’s lives be spit out the other side.

Two months into my six-month placement at ToughStuff, I’ve discovered the opportunity to do exactly that. Not all on my own from scratch, mind you. Let’s not get carried away. That would be the domain of the former consultants in our On Purpose year. But with some handholding from the CFO at ToughStuff, I think I might get my head around this.

ToughStuff is a social enterprise that sells affordable energy solutions in the developing world, mostly targeted at customers who live off the electrical grid. We provide flexible solar panels, solar lamps, mobile phone chargers, and radio battery systems starting at US$10. These replace expensive, smelly, and dangerous kerosene lanterns and candles, as well as removing the need to buy D-cell batteries for a radio.

So far, so good. I like what I’m hearing…

The benefits of this are huge, and we do have the stats to prove it. Generally, customers start saving on energy spending 2-3 months after buying ToughStuff products and save at least US$100 on their annual energy expenditure. Health risks like pulmonary diseases, burns, and poor eyesight are reduced. And it keeps carbon and batteries out of the environment – each lamp saves 24 litres of kerosene per year, and used batteries aren’t dumped into the soil. The people who sell the products for us also benefit; we’ve found that each solar entrepreneur can earn an additional US$450 by selling our products to their friends and neighbours.

These stats are averages from our existing programmes, and they are good to know. But let’s say a funding partner wants to kick-start a solar entrepreneur programme with US$100,000 of working capital and wants to know what the bang they are getting for their buck. After all, impact is the point of their investment. When they ask how many tons of carbon their money will save, there should be an answer for them. But what sensitive factors are specific to this situation that might influence the answer to their question? What scenario do I choose from the drop down menu in Excel? Ooops, they have yet to be built.

Cue the On Purpose Associate, who arrives on the scene to think strategically about what factors make or break a successful programme and to discover which inputs impact the outputs. Two months ago, it seemed that everyone here knew more about clean energy and distribution channels and carbon than I did. In fact, that’s still likely true. But I’ve discovered that my value lies in the places between specific roles. I found my footing by looking at the links between the work that people undertake across the company and the impact it has in the field on people’s lives. Essentially, I've found myself translating many people's opinions into the key variables that influence the outcome of a sales programme. Having an outsiders’ viewpoint to interview people across the company and ask “Why?” dozens of times and propose new explanations can translate the Big Picture into the direct impact. We know we are doing good overall, but we wanted to know how much good we are doing in each community.

So how was this poet-minded associate finally won over by the power of Excel? By knowing that the yearly savings per household in cell CD289 mean that these families can afford to send their daughters to school. By seeing how the average mother in cell AF36 can increase her family’s income annual by $450 just by charging her neighbours mobile phones through her fleet of solar panels. And by realising that removing the carbon from 24 litres of kerosene multiplied by the thousands of lamps per year in cell BH57 starts to clear the air.

I just have to figure out what inputs go into the boxes – but I’ll leave the formulas to the boffins.