Day 5

La Abuelita
We spent some time today working with Norma, the owner of La Abuelita: Cafe de Cereales (see post from yesterday). We stopped by the store where she sells her drink at around 5:30 pm and we were able to observe here while she sells. Tim and I also attempted to sell some of her product to the people passing by. This gave us a good idea of what her sales process is like and where there are dificiencies in her sales and marketing. Prior to stopping by, we visited a store to see how much similar products are selling for. We found a brand called Morcoff that also sales cafe de cereales. They are selling 350 grams (or about .77 lbs for Q11). Norma is selling a pound for Q10 (about $1.25). Since Norma is not established, we think her price point is pretty good. We also found out today that Norma is selling about 30 lbs. per week, which at her revenue and costs gives her a net income of about Q150 (or about $18.75). It is crazy to see someone working so hard all week for $18. It is also sad to think that she is making substantially more now than before. Tomorrow, we are planning to spend some time doing more market research for Norma. More to come on that.

Disory
Today we visited with Disory, a company which does graphic design and makes t-shirts. We spent quite a bit of time asking him questions about his business, how it works, how much he spends on everything, etc. One glaring deficiency in Disory's business is that he does not keep track of his finances. That obviously makes it hard to analyze his business because he is not really sure how he is spending on everything or how much he is bringing in. The plan to help him is to create a spreadsheet that tracks his income and expenses as well as help him better understand his operations and marketing.

Overall Vision
Since we are the first interns to work with this organization, we are having to develop the program and what we are trying to accomplish. The goal of the program is to increase to income and savings of the participants by 50%. The organization is doing an amazing job with this. However, we want to help the businesses continue to increase earnings and hopefully be able to hire more members of the church to work in them. Our ideas are evolving each day but we are planning to do the following things:

1. Create and implement a sales tracking sheet. We have found that most businesses are retail and the focus is on increasing sales (costs are usually pretty low many times consist of only the owner's time). Also, many of the businesses are mobile sales, like a cart. The sales tracking sheet will track what time the sale is made, where, to what gender, of what age group, etc. This will help the business owners understand their market and focus their sales efforts in the correct location and towards the correct market segment.
2. Train President Donis and his assistant Leonel on some strategy (basic 5 forces) and marketing that they will be able to use to train businesses after we are gone.
   
3. We created a sheet with questions to ask each business that we visit. The questions surround sales, marketing, operations, strategy, finance, and accounting. They are mainly fairly basic questions but will allow us to get a pretty good idea of where the business is dificient and where we can help.
   
4. Along with the first three, try to create a program including forms, questionaires, etc. that future interns can use so they don't have to figure this stuff out and can hit the ground running.

Other

• It was really nice to eat at McDonald's today (when was the last time you thought that?)
  
• I saw a Gecko today
• The local members of the chuch only provide 6% of the money needed to support the church here...the other 94% comes from elsewhere
• Heat and humidity make you sleepy!