Day 20 through 22

Day 20
Today I spend some time finishing up a presentation I am going to give to President Donis and Leonel on Friday regarding the proper way to flesh out a good business idea. It is from concepts I learned in my Managing New Ventures class taught by Nathan Furr. Awesome class.

I also spent some time creating a spreadsheet for A&B Fotocopias to use in analyzing their pricing. It included an income statement, a margin analysis, and a sales units to price matrix with profit as the result. When we delivered it to them it went really well. We gave them a copy of the sensitive spreadsheet so they can make adjustments to fixed costs, etc. and it will change the rest of their figures automatically.

I don’t remember what else we did. Should update this every day I guess.


Day 21
Today I spent some time working on our reports and recommendations for CFH and for future interns.

We had to stop by A&B today to use photoshop and they had already implemented our pricing suggestions! They had big signs announcing they lowered their prices from Q.20 to Q.15. It was awesome. They were so happy that we had helped them and so gracious about it.

We also met the owner of Mani Ricas today named Julio. He sells coconut treats as well as flavored peanuts. He was very distressed because another guy has been coming in and stealing all his business. He said the other guy has money from another business, has hired two sales people who are undercutting his prices, and he is going to go out of business.

We started asking him questions about how much he sales at his current price point, what are his variable costs, what are his fixed costs, how much he could sale at various prices, etc. We then ran a demand curve and figured out the optimal price point. Well, it was really interesting because he had refused to drop his prices from Q10 to Q9 because he thought he would not be making enough money. However, we discovered that he would actually be making more income at the Q9 price point. The other big concern though is that the other business will lower its price in an attempt to put him out of business. We strongly encouraged him to work on his branding and gave him some recommendations on how he should do that.

We went to a TAE in Samayak tonight. Afterwards, we had the focus group for La Abuelita. She came with us and prepared the café and then delivered it to the people. Then we kicked her out and held the focus group. We gathered data on each person and then asked if they liked the packing, the taste, would they buy it, for how much, what would they change, etc. It went really well. We have some solid recommendations to give to Norma. Oh, and I bought 2 bags of café de cereales from Norma too.


Day 22
This morning I delivered my Presentation to Donis and Leonel on some concepts learned in my Managing New Ventures class. It went pretty well. The idea is to discover new products the solve market pain instead of just starting “me too” businesses.

We spent most of the day tying up loose ends, working on paper work, and planning follow-up stuff for the office here to take care of.

Going home tomorrow! Can’t wait to see my family!


Other

• We decided if something is cool it is “bien Donis!”
• Grandma Wilson passed away on Wednesday…she was a great lady, I will always have wonderful memories of her and she will be missed greatly but I am glad she is in a better place
• We’ll see if I make another post when I get home…check back...if not, thanks for reading!