This month VisionSpring welcomes Sean Mayberry as Chief Operating Officer.

Mr. Mayberry will be responsible for providing leadership to the Senior Management Team and driving the organization’s global growth. He comes to VisionSpring from Population Services International (PSI), a leading global health and social marketing organization where he has served as Managing Director for India since 2007. In this position he directed a 1,500 person, $35 million social marketing program with field presence throughout the Indian sub-continent.

On Decemember 9th, two weeks after relocating his family from India, Sean Mayberry’s arrival was celebrated by the VisionSpring community at a special reception held at the Rockefeller Foundation.

In the evening’s opening comments Antony Bugg-Levine, Director of the Rockefeller Foundation, compared Mr. Mayberry’s decision to join VisionSpring a comment made by hockey legend Wayne Gretzky: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” In joining VisionSpring, Bugg-Levine explained, Mr. Mayberry shared his own belief in the bright future of the organization.

Speaking to members of VisionSpring’s board, staff and friends Sean said he was “humbled at the vote of confidence” and assured he would “exceed expectations.” He also praised Graham Macmillan, who is moving on after six years of dedicated service to VisionSpring, for his critical role growing the organization to where it is today.

The team is delighted to have Sean on board. Welcome, Sean!

Peter Eliassen, Vice President of Sales and Operations, discusses the challenges VisionSpring faced working with BRAC in 2009 and the pay-offs for the organization moving forward .

In October 2008, two months after I joined VisionSpring, I went to BRAC’s offices in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The eyeglass pilot we launched with BRAC’s network of Shasto Shebikas had proven successful, and this visit’s purpose was to discuss future expansion.

Immediately upon sitting down to speak with the Chief Procurement Officer, a key player in senior management, I was told “VisionSpring cannot deliver. I do not believe that you can provide products to us on time without the hassle that has arisen in previous orders.”

Gulp. A jumble of thoughts ran through my head: we just recently hired a logistics expert in Shanghai to help us manage the finer details of an extremely thorough Letter of Credit importation process, we were planning on upgrading suppliers, is it hot in here? I hoped he would break into a smile with “just kidding, you guys are great”. Nope, didn’t happen. I expressed my confidence in our abilities to deliver, and promised that the next few orders would be smooth and on-time.

In the first few months of a job, a moment like this can really help you prioritize. In this case, our biggest partner, the one who could take us to a new level of scale, doubted VisionSpring’s ability to execute on our orders.

Over the following months, we made serious investments of both time and financial resources:

1) hiring a logistics manager to help with order execution and factory liaison work
2) visiting and upgrading to two new suppliers who had the capacity to produce at our projected levels for BRAC and other partners
3) reducing costs (thus speeding up the path to sustainability) by changing to shipment by sea
4) placing a priority on understanding and executing the Line of Credit importation process
5) setting clear quality and lead-time expectations with our manufacturers to ensure that we could exceed the expectations of our biggest partner

On December 10th a shipment of 112,000 pairs of reading glasses will land in Bangladesh, kicking off our expansion from 4 to 15 of BRAC’s operating districts in the next 4 months. I am proud to say the order was delivered in less than 90 days. By the end of 2010, we will expand to 30 districts, at which point monthly sales will require a nearly quarterly inventory infusion. We will be ready.

The supply side is only the tip of the iceberg. Our focus in the next few years of expansion is to ensure that BRAC’s 80,000 rural health workers feel sufficiently trained and have the correct inventory to provide screenings and reading glasses to those in need. Improving the Vision Entrepreneur experience will require frequent analysis of our sales metrics and a continuous feedback loop.

As VisionSpring’s partnership with BRAC continues to expand – both wider to new districts and deeper within existing districts – we plan to utilize this analysis and feedback to introduce new products, services, and marketing strategies in rural Bangladeshi markets. In being the best partner possible to BRAC, we are accumulating invaluable operational learnings for VisionSpring’s whole global network of partners.

Turns out a challenge from BRAC is a pretty great welcome gift.