Meet Nkeiru Okeke

Initially, I was interested to do the Global Business Challenge because I have a friend that did it. And she talked endlessly about it. I was keen and interested and I wanted to have the same experience as she did. But as I applied for it and started to find out more about it, I started to think, I've never done a business strategy, I've never done the market analysis for a real company. So that became my reason. I wanted to do this. I want to learn this. I want to have that knowledge and experience which can be transferable. Who knows where I will find myself professionally?

So we worked on a project for a company doing 3d online viewer, it's a 3d model that helps you view 3d images online. They wanted to scale up so they were looking for ways to learn how they can drive their business growth, their customer retention and all that stuff. We had a lot of international students from Ecuador, Finland and America and our project was to find tools and ways to analyse the business’s current situation and find ways they can improve.

What I worked on

I was on a sub team in charge of the market analysis. We were finding out more about the business’s current situation, where they are in the market so that was what we did on the business challenge. We started with our research. What can this business do differently to actually scale up? We looked at their competitors to find out what they're doing, especially the big ones to put them at that level. Then we did a presentation to the company about our findings. Based on the market analysis and the market strategy, we gave our business analysis report to the clients; were able to say, you can think of doing this and this to help your business scale up.

I’ve learned a lot of transferable skills like negotiation skills. Because of different time zones, there was a lot of negotiation. In terms of presentation styles as well, how to play around with images, keeping the presentation very short but conveying a lot of information. And finally, the research side of how you can actually do the processes to use to scale the business in real life.

The best bit was the people!

What I enjoyed best about the challenge was the people because they were so cooperative and you see that it was really a team, everybody wanted to get the job done. So having such a cooperative set of people makes the work really easy, even with the time difference. I really learned a lot, I worked with co-operative people and I still keep in touch with some so I've made friends, and it’s given me a platform to network as well.

Shortly after the GBC, I got involved in the university boot camp organised by Baker Hughes, a global energy technology company. The whole process just reminded me of the Global Business Challenge; you're in a team to find out ways about a situation. So more of a case study base, about how can you scale up this business. When you have done this sort of thing before, you find yourself taking the lead. I said to the team, we need to do this this way. Even the resources that I used in the business challenge or I got from people that were in my team on the business challenge, I brought them.

Don’t think twice about getting involved in the Global Business Challenge. Go ahead and do it. There’s a lot to be learned, transferable skills to be gained, there’s a networking platform there. So it's just a check, check, check, check.