My son came home today with an assignment from his teacher: doing a report on businesses in other countries.  Now, you might think that this is an easy assignment, but there was a twist: they couldn’t have offices in our country.

Wow.  Now that was something a little different.  It is one thing to write about businesses that you are familiar with, but it is another to write about something that you know nothing about.  We did a little brainstorming and came up with two industries we had some knowledge about: real estate and finance.

Living in in Canada we decided to pick a country around the world from us: Africa.  We fired up our computer and looked online for real estate and finance companies in Africa - there were quite a few.  What we were looking for was two companies that were in the same part of the country.  After about an hour we found two that fit the bill.

The first company we found was a real estate company that is very popular in South Africa.  The company is Pam Golding International and they employ over 1600 people in over 140 branches.

The second company we found was a finance company that was founded by the lawyer Ian Slot.  Seef Homeloans works with their staff to find financing for people looking to buy property in South Africa.  Established in 2000, his company is widely recognized for outstanding service.

We are going to have to collect a lot of information to write this report.  We are going to use what we found and what we find when we go to the library to write it.  He has to get it done by next Friday, so we are going to the library tonight.