The Birth of the Fargreen Academy: Our Inside-out Growth Strategy
An internal farmer training at Fargreen Thai Binh farm office © Fargreen.,JSC
By: Trang Tran
As many of you probably know, I started Fargreen during my time at the Impact MBA program at Colorado State University. In the beginning, I didn’t have any high hope and/or aspiration for it except using it as a learning vessel to navigate my way through the heavy flow of all new and complicated business concepts and at the same time deepening my understanding of the problem that had long been bothering me. Little that I knew at the time, the completion of my MBA study didn’t put the end to my rowing journey with Fargreen. In fact, it’s the very start of it.
Now that Fargreen has been formally formed, it carries more than just myself on it. As of today, we’ve got a total of ten of us working fulltime on it and a few dozen farmer families joined the ride. We grew our activities from just me working on the business plan back in the day at school to all imaginable works as a normal business and more. However, only three of us in the team got university degrees, out of that only one had background training and experience that is relevant to the job that she/he is doing at Fargreen and only one could communicate in English fluently - in another word: we’re having 90% starters at Fargreen if not 100% if you’ve taken into the fact that I myself is also a starter with no previous venture-starting/growing experience before.
Learn-as-we-go has become our motto for growth and development. In fact, we’ve been furiously exhausting every source of support that comes to Fargreen doorstep to help educate our team in any way imaginable: internal training, formal and informal exchange learning workshops with volunteers and partners and more.
Yes, it’s fun and exciting to have a company full of starters as we are the team of fearless and always saying yes to all things that come our way. It made a great START of the venture - but, how about the UP part?
We’ve been struggling with recruiting real talents with good relevant experience that can help uptake our growth. As being a startup, it’s already unattractive in a country that just started to recover and grow itself into a new chapter after the war, where the majority of the population’s focus is still on having a good job and a stable life. Being a startup in agriculture and working with the farmers- the sector that has long been regarded as the most stagnant and not-so-cool is unimaginably difficult.
I have shared this challenge to the students participating in a case competition featured Fargreen at the Brigham Young University in 2018. That was also when the idea of building the Fargreen Academy came to my mind as suggested by the group of bright business students who studied extensively on the case. We’ve realized that it’s impossible to wait until the day that we would have enough capital to be able to hire the brightest and most experienced people in our team to help us scale. We have to put priority in growing our current human capital so that together we can all grow Fargreen, not the other way around, even at the cost of slowing down and tailing our venture a few more years till the day we achieve our national and international scaling dream. It is especially important as the central work of what we do is to grow communities and a community starts with its local leader.
The central work of building the community is building its local leaders.
So after the case competition, luck was granted our way when in 2019, Brennan Burnett - one of the BYU students in the winning team at the case competition who now graduated, told me that he and his wife Taran really wanted to join us in building the Fargreen Academy - our internal capacity training program for all Fargreen members and in the near future, including our farmers. This is a great mindful step entering our new era of growth and development.
So, without further ado, please meet with Brennan and Taran - our Fargreen Academy project founders and managers:
Here’s a sample lesson on the Fargreen Academy Google classroom. If you have any ideas and/or have a free hand to help us develop it further, please contact us at fargreenacademy@gmail.com. Thank you so much!