60 local entrepreneurs to benefit from free online courses from Vimentis |07 April 2020
Amid COVID-19, Vimentis had its first online training for Seychellois entrepreneurs yesterday.
Vimentis is a sales and marketing company based in Sweden, with Michel Laporte Godorn as its founder and chief executive. Vimentis Seychelles branch opened in 2015, with Mr Laporte Godorn as founder and Christopher Lespoir, a Seychellois entrepreneur himself, as country manager. This partnership is another beautiful example of Seychellois from abroad and in Seychelles connecting and making it happen for Seychelles and the people of Seychelles.
Seychelles NATION caught up with its country manager, Christopher Lespoir, for more details.
“We have now managed to offer this for the first time to Seychellois entrepreneurs. As a sign of solidarity and support to the local entrepreneurs in this difficult time, Vimentis is offering a free course for six months as we are now offering free training for ten local entrepreneurs each month for six months. So a total of 60 entrepreneurs will benefit from these online training. The course is being run on real time from Sweden,” stated Mr Lespoir.
Mr Lespoir added that the entrepreneurs will have weekly webinar (a seminar conducted over the Internet) where they will tease the brain of entrepreneurs on the issues they are facing. “Entrepreneurs will have a one-on-one contact once a week with the tutor and receive 24 sessions training of one hour each. This will be followed by online mentorship, and resources tools. The programme costs around R45,000 per person in Sweden. This is Vimentis’ contribution towards the country. Once they complete the six months they will have enough baggage to launch themselves in any business they want to do,” he added.
Still according to Mr Lespoir, Vimentis has teamed up with The Guy Morel Institute and the Enterprise Seychelles Agency (Esa) to help offer solutions during this difficult time and beyond. “We have been working on it for the past two years. Only now with the new challenges we are able to implement the online training. This is a big change and a complete change of mindset! Vimentis was introduced in Seychelles in 2015. The chief executive contacted me online to set up a branch in Seychelles. I only met him physically on the day Vimentis was launched in 2015 in a business and sales marketing seminar,” explained Mr Lespoir, who is a pilot by profession.
On April 24 and 25, 2020, the organisation was going to organise its fifth seminar. “Unfortunately with COVID-19, we have to cancel it. But this gave rise to another approach which is the online approach to things. The culture in Seychelles and around the world also is to do business face to face. We all have accessibility to internet and we do use it intensely also, but not for our business. With the application zoom, we can run meetings with people driving in two different countries. With that flexibility we change the need,” added Mr Lespoir.
He also stressed on the fact that after overcoming the coronavirus pandemic, there are certain ways we should not go back to.
“There will be another dilemma. The mindset is that we need to see the people for meetings. We spend lots of time on technology to be on social media but we do not use it for business. You have less distraction and flexibility of work. New words like flexi hours, working from home should prevail. We have to relook at everything in order to maximise the output we get from our people. We are having this kind of conversation so that we can change the policies around to meet the current and future demands. We work when there is work to be done. We do not rely on our office hours. We are not coming with a magic formula but we are getting people ready to survive the COVID-19 and be ready to bounce back. We get people to think beyond the time the coronavirus pandemic will last,” said Mr Lespoir.
The last appeal Mr Lespoir made was towards the internet service providers. “They have to make sure they are doing their best to ensure more access to internet and faster access too. We know that they can do more.”
COVID-19 is really showing us different ways to work and also to be more responsible.
Vidya Gappy