Rollercoaster rides: EBF has been following the fortunes of dot-com businesses in Germany, the Netherlands, France and Sweden. What news from the four founding entrepreneurs?(Entrepreneurs)(European Business Forum)

Finally, a breakthrough!

SamSari Education is an e-learning business based in Sweden.

A handful of weeks during September and October 2001 proved to be the most important in SamSari's history. Firstly we won Sweden's largest e-learning contract by partnering with a competitor. Following that, we signed two large contracts, one with Ericsson and one with Telia (Sweden's main telecom operator). Within a few weeks, we had signed contracts worth more than all our sales up to that point. So you can really call it a breakthrough. Now we feel confident of monthly profits over at least the next six months.

In my last contribution to EBF, I said it was time to join ranks with competitors and look at innovative partnerships. We achieved this, and it has helped us win orders. Up until now, SamSari has been too small in scale and weak financially to win the more lucrative contracts. But in cooperation with other e-learning companies we have managed to build a winning team. We believe that our competitive advantage lies in the fact that:

* the customers need our knowledge and content within managerial finance and business processes, and

* the customers want our pedagogy based on e-moderators, communication and blended learning.

With the first two to three contracts signed in such a short space of time, we found ourselves unprepared and now have much more work than we can handle. We are recruiting and looking at how we can manage our new success. It is important not to get bogged down in operations and delivery, which is what we have been doing up until now. …