Interns in the Animal House

Sep, 2011



L-R: Neil Wood, with Patty, an eight-month chihuahua-pomeranian cross, Lort Smith CEO Liz Walker with Max, a cavalier King Charles spaniel, and Moh Rahman.

Rosters, fundraising, bad debts... they’re the stuff of nightmares for non-profit organisations, which tend to be strapped for time, cash and people. And they are the very things MBA students are trained to get their teeth into.

This year, Lort Smith Animal Hospital took on two MBA interns from the MBS class of 2012, Mohammed “Moh” Mushfiqur Rahman, and Neil Wood. The hospital, founded in North Melbourne in the 1930s by animal welfare advocate Louisa Lort Smith, is Australia’s largest not-for-profit animal hospital. It provides low-cost animal health services, especially to people with limited incomes, and an animal adoption service.

It’s a change of pace for Neil who, pre-MBA, was a senior associate at PwC in Germany, performing company valuations, financial due diligence and audits. “In non-profits you’ve typically got limited resources and value-based goals. It increases the challenges. It’s more of a challenge than traditional consulting.”

Wood got started on client credit processes, examining existing processes and payment plans. With a low-income client base, many debts are simply unrecoverable. “You’ve got lots of people on low incomes. We’ve designed some improved lean processes, new internal controls and approval requirements as well as a hardship consideration program.”

From finance, he moved to operations, working on animal shelter and fostering processes. As Lort Smith CEO Dr Liz Walker observes, MBAs have no fear of spreadsheets. “They’re not scared of a task, especially rosters. It’s really lovely to talk to someone who sees a problem as a challenge or opportunity and not as a nightmare.”

She got Neil working on rosters, designing a new template to ease personnel planning and increase efficiency (labour costs are traditionally Lort Smith’s single biggest area of expenditure). “It was a little bit of Excel VBA programming just to keep Neil’s brain alive,” she says. 

The hospital faces the enormous challenge of fundraising in a competitive market, and over-reliance on bequests. Liz Walker wanted to supplement this with more predictable and stable forms of philanthropy.

In recent years, branding had been neglected, resulting in brand confusion and ambiguity - the Lost Dogs Home is another North Melbourne icon often confused with Lort Smith.

Mohammed Rahman, a former brand manager with a telecommunications company in Bangladesh and president of the MBS Consulting Club, devised a new brand strategy entailing new marketing materials and changes to the logo.

He also got to work on a fundraising model not seen before in Australia, heeding the advice of his mentor, Alison Hardacre (MBA 2002 and former Australian of the Year) who says “There are real opportunities to do fundraising differently in Australia (in ways that) that only an MBA can give”. 
 
For both projects, Moh drew together his knowledge from subjects like Financial Accounting, Data and Decisions, Business Strategy, Product Management and Brand Management. “Some of the work I had the opportunity to do here I would not have got at all if I’d gone for a big firm.”

Walker adds, “I think Moh’s work on this fundraising concept for us is very exciting and is something we’ll definitely launch”.

Neil, who will travel to Hyderabad on exchange once his placement ends, says the experience will have taken him closer to his goal of working in developing countries – “possibly as a development consultant or working in microfinance – in any case, improving processes and increasing the efficiency of non-profits”. 

Walker says of the placements: “It’s a wonderful way to get high-calibre people, and they have great access to academics. They offer really contemporary thinking and great new ideas. They’re really on the cutting edge.”