Today's the day where everything comes together. The day where after months of learning at school and working hard to get ahead in class... we finally realize everything that we've learned. And the best thing is, is that it adds real value to local businesses here.
I sat in the advanced seminar with a group of 15 dedicated business owners who have been to our seminars since we started 3 years ago. They started when we began with an initial seminar and began learning how to figure out brainstorming, fixed and variable costs for their business, and how to network with new clients. It's amazing how much more productive a business can be when it figures out what it's fixed and variable costs are- it can learn when to take on a new client, how many products it needs to sell to meet costs, and how to come up with innovative product ideas. Rob Nash and Rick Harris's classes finally came in handy!
In this group, we had some very outstanding businesses. A few made bread, others made clothes, some were involved in advertising, and others dabbled in a few general areas. Regardless of what area they chose, they were confident to speak their mind and were very proud of the businesses they had each built from scratch themselves.
Our first session today was a review of 5 mini cases. Chris Yuko and Cameron Carter taught a mix of breakeven analysis, operations (flow charting for their business), and beginning marketing. The business owners not only sat captivated by our seminars, but also seemed to remember a lot of what we had taught them before.
The next was negotiations, taught by Lynsey Hathcock. Thanks to a class by Bill Davis, Lynsey taught the class how to negotiate against each other and pitted one team against the other in a battle to see who could win the best negotiation. It's funny how all this works in a different cultural setting- they look at business more as maintaining relationships rather than making cut-throat deals. Perhaps this is something the US could use more of.
After, Bentsen taught some more financial concepts, helping business owners figure out the time-value of money. It as as if Rob Nash was teaching himself. The business owners took real life examples if they were to get a loan today, how much they would have to earn in the future to pay it back given the fact that money is worth less over time. What seems like a good deal up front, might not actually be profitable once you spread it out over time.
Finally, we ended the seminar with a consulting session where we each broke out into small teams and worked on an individual business. It was great to really walk through a business from start to finish, helping them identify which products were the most profitable, what their target market was, why people bought their product, and how they could actually expand what they did in a scaleable way.
After everyone packed up, we headed up to Wake Forest's new property to toast the trip off to a great start while overlooking volcanos and the lake in Managua. Watching the sun set, sipping some flor de cana, and talking about vision's for the future...couldn't get much better than that!
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