An Entrepreneur Now Empowered

Mihiri and her husband, Pastor Nilan, have served together for more than 10 years in a small town in central Sri Lanka. A gifted musician since her youth, Mihiri has been a music teacher for over 20 years, teaching both piano and guitar to young students. While developing her skills as a music teacher, Mihiri never studied any form of business management. As a result, Mihiri and her husband would face financial shortages frequently despite earning a reasonable revenue from both her music classes.

After attending the five sessions of the Partners Worldwide Small to Medium Enterprise training over five weeks, Mihiri says there is already a huge impact: she now finds that she is able to save so much money while managing her household expenses as well. In addition Mihiri and her husband have been able to sponsor a deserving child in their church for her educational expenses. All in less than two months! Mihiri says this is a result of learning proper financial management from a biblical perspective.

The training also helped her to identify her spending priorities which has helped her managed her household expenses more accurately. She says that learning to manage her expenses this way with the salary allocated from the piano classes, has helped her to save her entire salary from her guitar classes

Mihiri also says that she has learnt to factor all the costs accurately when calculating the fees she charges from her students. Earlier she would estimate her expenses on an ad hoc basis and assume that the rest was all profit. But the training helped her to factor the cost of her time as a teacher for each session as well as the depreciation cost of her piano and guitar from each student fee received. She says that for 10 year she had never been able to make provision for repairs or save for upgrading or replacing her musical instruments, but now she is already well on the way to saving enough money to buy better equipment.

As a pastor's wife, Mihiri is now keen to learn more about business management so that she can take her business to the next level as well as empower the families in their church congregation, most of whom are always facing financial difficulties. Mihiri says that all these years the only financial principle they taught the believers was the tithe and they would fervently pray for God to bless their endeavors. She says that now she knows that in addition to faith and prayer, practical biblical principles of business management and financial management must be taught to the believers as well, specially those with their own businesses.