Helping advance Angola

fro the Journal Sentinel Online

Consultant builds African client base
By RICK ROMELL

It's one of those things that started with college students talking earnestly over coffee.

They were in Iowa, but their interest was the Third World and how best to help develop it economically. Someday, they said, they'd go into business together and do just that.

That was nearly 20 years ago, but the ocean-spanning friendships those conversations forged explain how a key piece of the development efforts of the African nation of Angola came to be handled from a small suite of offices in the YWCA building on N. King Drive.

Those would be the offices of Pinnacle XL Inc., an eight-employee management consulting firm that, improbably, draws about half its sales from Angola, a country that for decades was crippled by civil war but now is booming on the strength of its oil riches.

"It's really blossomed for us," Pinnacle founder and president KeleMarie Lyons said of the firm's business in Angola, where the economy has grown at double-digit rates each year since 2004. Originally from Dubuque, Lyons, 39, studied at Iowa State University and after graduating came to Milwaukee, eventually became a partner in a marketing firm and, about seven years ago, started Pinnacle.

Coincidentally, the long, bitter war in Angola was nearing its end. When peace came in 2002, one of Lyons' friends from her college days, a native of the country, returned home and became an investment banker.

He got in touch with Lyons and suggested she visit Angola and check out the business opportunities there. Her parents and many friends here had one word for her: Don't.

"They were scared for me," Lyons said. "They think of Angola as a war-torn country . . . but I knew it was something I had to do."

So she did. Before long, Pinnacle was involved in a joint venture halfway around the world, and one deal led to another. Lyons found herself flying into Luanda, Angola's capital, almost every other month.

At first, she expected to be overwhelmed by poverty and misery, but it didn't turn out that way.

"People were very happy and they're very thankful for the opportunities that they have, and even in business they're absolutely thrilled to get new input, new ideas," Lyons said.

Among clients Lyons has worked with in Angola are a food distributor, an airport services firm and one of the country's larger banks, where she helped reorganize the marketing department and created internal systems to monitor ongoing projects.

Most prominent, though, is Pinnacle's work for the National Private Investment Agency, the arm of the government that seeks to foster foreign investment in Angola. Pinnacle and Lyons publish an agency magazine that promotes the country and send out an electronic newsletter on business developments.

Lyons is learning Portuguese, the primary business language in Angola, and has picked up other lessons as well, such as to make sure you have a local partner to help you with cultural and bureaucratic intricacies.

Compared with the United States, she said, business relationships in Angola are much more hierarchical and formal. Titles are always used with names, she said. Because she's a college graduate, she's "Doctora Lyons" or, as she prefers, "Doctora KeleMarie."

"It's kind of the way I imagine the United States was maybe in the '70s or '60s," she said. "Remember, you see in these older movies where there's a man in a big executive office and the secretary's outside (and the boss says,) 'Rose, get me some coffee.' It's a lot like that."

Some things feel familiar, too. Angola has much fertile land, with lots of room for agricultural growth, and among Lyons' clients was a farming operation near the city of Waku Kungo that she visited.

"It felt like home," she said. "It felt like Iowa - miles and miles of cornfields."

Angola faces huge problems. Landmines litter the countryside and have injured or killed more than 400 people since 2004, according to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.

Once a major agricultural exporter, the country imports more than half its food and ranks in the lowest 10% of world nations on most socioeconomic measures, according to the U.S. State Department.