entrepreneurs

What are entrepreneurs called and why?
What is the entrepreneur vetting process?
How is training conducted?
How are entrepreneurs supported?
What does the entrepreneur do?
What is the risk for entrepreneurs?
What are the typical characteristics of an entrepreneur?
Do entrepreneurs get robbed?
Why are the majority of entrepreneurs women?
Why do entrepreneurs work in teams of two primarily?
What happens if an entrepreneur loses her partner for some reason?
How do husbands respond to the woman working?
What motivates entrepreneurs?
How often do entrepreneurs quit and why do they quit?
Do entrepreneurs shift to a credit model after a while?
Who is responsible if an entrepreneur loses or breaks a product?
What are the skills that an entrepreneur gains?
Do entrepreneurs “walk away” with the consigned products sometimes?
How much do entrepreneurs earn?
What are other ways in which entrepreneurs benefit?
How is a “sense of ownership” created for entrepreneurs?
Isn’t debt important for entrepreneurs to be motivated?
Does having women work as entrepreneurs cause any type of cultural or societal disruption?
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What are entrepreneurs called and why?
What is the entrepreneur vetting process?
MCM entrepreneurs put in sweat equity to earn the opportunity they are given; that ongoing process begins with the training, a course of roughly eight weeks. Four “classroom” sessions are followed by three field-training sessions. When training new entrepreneurs in a new territory, we begin with up to eight women, knowing that fewer will attend each subsequent meeting. Attrition is actually desirable and is built in. By the time the women who remain are consigned their products and begin their field work, they have proven they are willing to put in the necessary effort and that they share our vision. In effect, the training works as a mutual vetting process.
How is training conducted?
  • RC identifies a group of eight women who can serve a targeted region by talking to local NGO’s, Peace Corps Volunteers, etc.
  • They have an initial meeting where the RC explains the opportunity and says that no investment or credit is needed. If the potential CA’s want to learn more and try the opportunity they need to attend three classroom trainings and three field trainings over the course of one and a half months more or less.
    • Note: As the trainings take place there is self- selection and women drop out. This is what we want.  The hope is that there are four or so women by the end of the trainings.
  • Classroom trainings take place
  • First field training campaign takes  place in a village where potential CA’s are taught how to market in a village to a local mayor, priest, pastor etc. and on a day following to set up a table and provide service/sell offerings. RC leads this. Meeting local leaders and marketing is done on a Wed for example (but they continue to support marketing) and the campaign on a Saturday. Marketing is done with local radio, flyers and leadership get the word out efforts.
  • Before this first field training CA’s are contingently consigned shirts, posters, marketing materials, admin forms and their basket of product solutions.
  • After first training best practices are gone over and the CA’s keep their part of the profits. Price and profits are predefined country wide. Inventory is restocked.
  • A second field training campaign is done that is co-led by RC and CA’s. Same process.
  • A third field training campaign takes place led by CA’s and supported by RC. Same process.
  • Those who remain after this are officially RC’s and have a defined territory and goals and objectives. There are monthly meetings, weekly phone calls, a tri monthly planning meeting and an annual meeting with all RC’s and CA’s at headquarters. Cell phone communication and deposits in the bank of SolCom  revenues by the CA’s become a major part of the process. Key is that CA’s come back from campaigns with new product ideas or can test new products. It is a virtuous circle of knowledge sharing.  If a CA drops out at any time she simply returns here inventory and marketing materials.
As you can see, CA’s start earning a profit from the third training. Over time we have calculated they net about $1.50 per hour working mostly part time.  The remainder of the sales revenues goes to SolCom to pay salaries, overhead, marketing, marketing materials and to restock country wide inventory.
CE Solutions originally paid for all but now SolCom is profitable and we provide inventory loans as opposed to donations.
How are entrepreneurs supported?
What does the entrepreneur do?
What is the risk for entrepreneurs?
A key component is that individuals can “test drive” an entrepreneurial opportunity. They get classroom and field training that enables them to make informed decisions and gain the skills they need. Thus, the consignment structure empowers women who have little education and no business experience to invest their time and “sweat equity” in a venture in which they can earn a profit from their first sale. If it doesn’t work out, a woman is not left with burdensome debt and product inventory; ideally she will leave with new skills and knowledge but not a loan obligation.
What are the typical characteristics of an entrepreneur?
Do entrepreneurs get robbed?
Why are the majority of entrepreneurs women?
Why do entrepreneurs work in teams of two primarily?
What happens if an entrepreneur loses her partner for some reason?
How do husbands respond to the woman working?
What motivates entrepreneurs?
How often do entrepreneurs quit and why do they quit?
Do entrepreneurs shift to a credit model after a while?
Who is responsible if an entrepreneur loses or breaks a product?
What are the skills that an entrepreneur gains?
Do entrepreneurs “walk away” with the consigned products sometimes?
How much do entrepreneurs earn?
MCM entrepreneurs work with teammates. While the hourly wage for most Guatemalan men is 50 cents U.S., these women (who typically earn less in Guatemala) earn an average of $1.50 to $2 per hour. Working within the MCM allows women to work part-time to boost the family income while continuing to attend to their household responsibilities.
What are other ways in which entrepreneurs benefit?
MCM entrepreneurs, many of them initially timid and semi-literate women, learn how to manage their own businesses that serve their community members. They convene to discuss challenges, best practices, and new service and product ideas and form their own sense of community. The model empowers everyone, especially the women, to see a lack of access to products and services as an opportunity, not as an insurmountable problem. They start out timid and intimidated but soon become confident self-starters, seeking out more and better ways to provide solutions to other problems, and repeatedly converting the impossible into possibilities.
How is a “sense of ownership” created for entrepreneurs?
The MicroConsignment Model achieves a sense of ownership transition through field trainings that teach budding entrepreneurs how to conduct a village campaign. The first campaign is led by regional coordinators with support from the budding entrepreneurs, the second is co-led, and the third is led by the entrepreneurs with much diminished support from the coordinators. As training progresses, the entrepreneurs learn through both their successes and failures. When they are allowed to make mistakes, they also see the need to improve. When first training entrepreneurs, I often went on village campaigns where they set up their product display tables inside a town hall or school. In theory these were natural places to set up, especially because the space had been offered. But they were invisible.  The familiar real estate mantra also applies in developing countries:  location, location, location.  The best place to set up, of course, is outside, where everyone walks by. So for the first hour few people would come and I would stay quiet. I could see the worry and anxiety on the women’s faces. Then I asked them why no one was coming. They nearly always replied that no one knew they were there and then decided to move their tables outside. Invariably more people came. It was painful to do but necessary to help them take ownership of their learning and see that they needed to make their own decisions to succeed.
Isn’t debt important for entrepreneurs to be motivated?
Certainly one school of thought considers debt necessary to give entrepreneurs a sense of ownership and to motivate them. I agree with this on some level: having a loan obligation can definitely focus the mind on one’s work. But both our own experience and broader evidence contradict this idea.  First, the MCM entrepreneurs working in our infrastructure in Guatemala and Ecuador have already sold over 36,000 products and we have only scratched the surface from a geographic scale perspective. And VisionSpring, which adopted the MCM in 2004, has sold thousands of pairs of glasses using the model. So clearly, an upfront debt obligation is not the sole motivator. Second, this belief contradicts the very premise behind the origins of the micro-credit: before it was implemented in micro-franchising schemes, the idea was that women entrepreneurs had ongoing concerns, and simply needed access to capital through credit to grow their businesses. They needed to be able to buy more stuff to sell more stuff. Therefore it makes no sense to state that the loan obligation is what creates a sense of ownership and drives entrepreneurism. [OK?]  What successful entrepreneur would say that debt created a sense of ownership and was a primary motivator?  Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak didn’t start Apple in a garage because they had a loan. Apple exists because they believed in themselves and in what they were doing.
Does having women work as entrepreneurs cause any type of cultural or societal disruption?