‘Paunch Corps’ Travels World Aiding Business Retires U.S. Executives Give Egyptian Comopanies A Boost
Five years ago, Mohammed Nofal’s small electrical wiring company was doing fine with a handful of workers and $500,000 a year in sales.
But the Egyptian businessman wanted to expand and wasn’t sure how to do it.
Enter the “paunch corps,” a volunteer group of retired U.S. businessmen who, like Peace Corps workers, travel the globe to share their expertise with people in developing countries.
The paunch corps - officially the International Executive Service Corps of Stamford, Conn. - has its largest program in Egypt, with 1,400 projects completed in the past 20 years.
In Nofal’s case, the corps dispatched Russ Hale, the retired chief executive of Marathon Oil.
“He told me I had to stop trying to be a one-man show and to develop a proper management system,” Nofal said. “He said I also needed yearly forecasts. So, together, we started to work.”
It was the first of several assists from the paunch corps - the volunteers’ own jocular label for themselves. Nofal also got help from a personnel manager, a management information systems expert, a technical trainer and a quality control analyst.
His firm High Technology Systems now employs 32 people, has $9 million in annual sales and is building a new factory outside Cairo.
It’s the kind of success story badly needed in a country like Egypt, which must get its small and mid-sized businesses growing if it is going to create 500,000 jobs a year needed for its expanding population of 61.5 million.
The corps Egypt director Peter Cross, 62, a retired wood engineer from Dallas, Texas, calls the volunteers “shirt-sleeve ambassadors” who promote ideals dear to most Americans - privatization and free market economics.
Cross says Egyptians are “very entrepreneurial” but need guidance to make their companies more efficient and competitive.
“Many have state-of-the art equipment but don’t have the organizational structure or know-how to take advantage of it,” Cross said. He said Egypt also has a problem common to many developing nations: “It lacks middle-level managers. There’s no one between the boss and the workers.”
The International Executive Service Corps was founded in 1964 by the American financier David Rockefeller and former General Dynamics Chairman Frank Pace Jr.
A not-for-profit organization, it relies on 13,000 retired U.S. executives who donate their time - usually six weeks to three months - to work on assignments in some 50 countries, including the former Soviet republics. The agency picks up airfare and expenses for volunteers.
In Egypt, the corps has financial support from the U.S. Agency for International Development so that the charge to the Egyptian businessmen is based on their ability to pay, often as little as 1,000 Egyptian pounds, about $300.
In special cases, the volunteers help the government. When Egypt was revamping its stock market, the corps brought in a former president of the New York Stock Exchange to give advice. Before the Cairo Opera House opened, a retired Walt Disney executive came to assist.
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