The Beginning
It’s interesting that as life progresses you realise that family is not just relatable by blood. Sometimes people will come along your path and you end up creating a lifetime bond. Just as the Marines or Navy Seals enroll as recruits and end up creating a bond of having each other’s backs as brothers and sisters in the battle field, that’s exactly what happened with the Co-Founders of Shujaa Consulting.
The 3 Co-Founders began their journey working for an organization called Grameen Foundation, which is an international non-profit organization. We were based in 3 different continents and countries.
Sarah Miller based in Seattle Washington in the United States was the Director of Information Technology, Carlos Ardila based in Medellin Colombia was the Lead Software Developer and Brian Kiago based in Nairobi Kenya was the Lead I.T specialist. Our journey to empower the poor at Grameen Foundation, was just the beginning of our passion for supporting NGOs. Why we would do anything else without our work? Sarah Miller was our team leader, and working together is where we discovered where the magic happened.
In the team meetings we realized how much we had in common despite being split by different continents and having huge oceans in between us. Our values brought us closer together. We are of different races, cultures and can also speak different languages but we felt like family. Our individual characteristics made the team stronger and very efficient to get work done and done well. We all had different skill sets that complement each other and always had the hunger to learn from each other. We had fun doing what we loved and the best part is that we always had each other’s backs and from there we called ourselves the A-TEAM!
As we continued working together, we would periodically throw hints at each other “we have the skill sets, why don’t we run our own show” and in 2019 the idea of running our own show started to come to life. Carlos and Brian got laid off and Sarah eventually quit. We began looking for a company name and at first landed at GSD consulting meaning Getting Stuff Done because we believed we got work done well and efficiently. Lucky for us the name was already taken so we had to go back and think of another company name. The mind is a very powerful tool and you might be surprised by what you could accomplish when focused towards a goal. We started to see our 3 different skill sets as superpowers and with the ability to also have different native languages we started to think what would a superhero be called in either Spanish or Swahili and hence SHUJAA came to life! Shujaa means hero or warrior in Swhali.
Shujaa is built on different cultures and we are working towards using our superpowers to help other non-profit organizations become the best version of themselves in the salesforce realm as they try to make the world a better place. We look forward to a time where we can have more Shujaans join us on this journey to learn from each other and better ourselves.