Avi Bridgett
My Jumpstart Training
Comfort Titus
About the Owner
Comfort Titus is a determined salon owner from Plateau State, Nigeria, whose life has been shaped by perseverance and resilience. After violence forced her family to relocate during her childhood, she learned to adapt to new challenges while remaining focused on building a better future. As a devoted wife and mother, Comfort has dedicated herself to creating opportunities through entrepreneurship, using her skills in cosmetology to provide for her family while serving the women and girls in her community.
Through years of training and practical experience, Comfort has developed a reputation for professionalism, kindness, and quality service. Her commitment to making every client feel valued has helped her establish lasting relationships built on trust, consistency, and exceptional customer care.
Comfort dreams of expanding her salon into a modern beauty center where women can receive professional services in a welcoming environment. She remains committed to growing her business while creating greater financial stability for her family and making a positive impact within her community.
Comfort Titus
About the Business
Comfort owns a salon business that provides professional hairstyling, braiding, hair treatments, and beauty services for women and girls throughout her community. She is dedicated to delivering affordable, high quality services while creating a clean and welcoming environment where every client feels comfortable and appreciated.
Her business has grown through consistent customer satisfaction, personalized attention, and dependable service. Clients continue returning because they trust her skills, appreciate her friendly personality, and value the care she takes to ensure every hairstyle meets their expectations and reflects their individual preferences.
Comfort hopes to expand her salon with modern beauty equipment, improved workstations, and additional styling products that allow her to serve more customers each day. Her vision is to build a respected beauty business recognized for professionalism, quality service, and outstanding customer care.
Comfort Titus
Business Challenges
Although Comfort has established a loyal customer base, several challenges continue to limit the growth of her salon business. Limited equipment and beauty supplies reduce the number of services she can provide and make it difficult to keep up with increasing customer demand while maintaining efficient daily operations.
Unreliable electricity and financial constraints also affect her ability to operate consistently and invest in the improvements needed to expand her business. These obstacles reduce productivity, limit revenue, and prevent her from creating the modern salon experience she envisions for her customers.
Despite these challenges, Comfort remains committed to growing her business and serving her community. With additional resources and support, she is prepared to strengthen her operations and continue building a successful salon that provides dependable beauty services.
Comfort Titus
Opportunities
Leadership Initiatives has the opportunity to help Comfort strengthen her salon business by providing modern salon equipment, reliable power solutions, improved workstations, and essential beauty supplies. These investments would allow her to improve efficiency, expand the services she offers, and create a more comfortable experience for every client.
With upgraded resources, Comfort could serve more customers, reduce wait times, and continue building the professional reputation she has earned within her community. Improved facilities would increase business revenue while allowing her to better support her family and invest in the future of her business.
This partnership would help Comfort achieve long term financial stability while strengthening a valuable local business. By supporting her vision, Leadership Initiatives can empower her to provide exceptional beauty services while creating lasting opportunities for herself, her family, and the women she proudly serves.
My Jumpstart Proposal
During the Jumpstart Program, I worked directly with some of the world’s leading developmental experts in order to expand my partner’s business and brand identity.
At the conclusion of this internship, our team pitched the final proposal to Marc Zavarro, Leadership Initiatives Director of Program Development, and Jenna Sackter, Leadership Initiatives Director of Legal Programming. This formal pitch allowed our team to practice our skills and utilize our entrepreneurial toolkit, all while showcasing our efforts to transform the business we partnered with.
At the end of the pitch, we were able to receive feedback on our proposal for our business partner. Over the next year, Comfort Titus will utilize our proposal to propel sustainable growth of their business.
My Jumpstart Proposal Presentation
Throughout the program, we worked closely with Comfort Titus to gain a clear understanding of their business goals. Though Comfort Titus has leveraged their skills and years of experience to create their business, they face obstacles hindering the expansion of their work.
Guided by their vision, we crafted a proposal detailing the infrastructure and marketing materials that would support the growth of their business. We devised a plan that would allow Comfort Titus to optimize their business through a new budget, financial tracking systems, and a logo.
This new budget enables Comfort Titus to allocate funds toward essential materials and equipment, supporting the optimization of their services. Effective financial tracking will be crucial for managing growing profits and preserving assets, ensuring the business’s long-term growth and stability. Investments in a logo and marketing materials, such as signs and flyers, are also vital for establishing a strong brand identity and expanding the customer base.
Internship Highlights
Our team began the business development process by having a one-on-one Zoom call directly with our business partner, Comfort Titus, and our Nigerian project coordinator to ensure productive collaboration.
After discussing important considerations for our marketing materials, including local populations, family situations, and prior experience, we began our exploration of the business industry.
We received briefings on marketing and branding tactics from Professor Luc Wathieu.
Outside of the classroom, we received a personalized tour of the Embassy of Austria, where we learned about Austrian culture, US/Austria relations, and international business.
We received hands-on training in a variety of medical skills. Through a model dissection, DNA extraction lab, and water purification lab, we gained critical insights into the possibilities within the scientific and medical fields.
We also got hands-on training for building plaster casts. After receiving this training, we had the opportunity to build model casts and practice assessing damage and breaks.
At the end of the week, we got to put our medical skills to the test through a demo EMT scene where we used triage and emergency response.
To explore the legal field, we got the opportunity to learn about forensic work through a model crime scene. In this scene, we conducted a fingerprint analysis, hair analysis, and used microscopic analysis tools.
I also got to meet esteemed DC Judge Adam Hunter. Judge Hunter taught us about questioning, data analysis, and evidence collection.
Outside of the classroom, we took a tour of the International Spy Museum. Throughout this tour, we learned about intelligence and counterintelligence equipment. We also got the opportunity to participate in a covert mission through the Spy Museum, where we learned about intelligence operations, historical advances, and even put our skills to the test through training simulations.
We also got the opportunity to discuss topics related to global affairs and government relations through our meetings with the Austrian Embassy officials, government officials from the NSA and DoD, and through collaborations with representatives of universities including Johns Hopkins University, Georgetown University, American University, and more.