Greetings. My name is Craig Doescher and I am Tegu’s Grease Man. The fun part of my job is that I get to interact with every aspect of the business from sourcing raw materials to customer service and everything in between. Basically my role is to ensure that Tegu’s operations run smoothly. No small task I might add!
A series of circumstances and learnings, some might say divine intervention, over the past several years conspired to bring me onto the Tegu team at a very early stage. While I have been working with Tegu since the fall of 2007, my relationship with Will reaches back to 2003 when we met through mutual friends at the LSE and interned together at Goldman Sachs. During our summer together at Goldman we often chatted about our entrepreneurial ideas, always thinking beyond a Wall Street career even before we were really started on Wall Street.
During the intervening years I spent with Ralco Industries I learned about running a manufacturing business, while pursuing my personal passion for serving the poor in low-income countries. I devoted vacation time to short-term service projects in places like the slums of Chennai, India, as I tried to work out how I might be able to help the poor in a more serious fashion. It was during this period that I came across CK Prahalad’s The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid and Muhammad Yunus’s Banker to the Poor. These books contain practical case studies of how business principles are empowering the poorest people in the world to lift themselves out of poverty. Both books convinced me that most often the most charitable thing one can do for the poor is provide an opportunity to participate in the marketplace, not traditional charity.
It was also during this time I was invited by a friend, Pastor John Thomas to Cape Town, South Africa to help apply some of these market based principles to grass roots development initiative he had envisioned. The result was our co-creation of a non-traditional, non-profit called Living Way.
During the past two years I have been at the MIT Sloan School of Management studying entrepreneurship and operations. While I have explored many options at school, the bottom line is that I could not pass up the opportunity to work with this team on this project. Tegu combines my passion for improving the lives of the poor with my business skills into one. It is my dream to build a business that will be an example to others wrestling with the same desire to reconcile their charitable motives with their business sense.
Checking out a Honduran wood shop in June 2008.
