Archive for June, 2011

by Emily Winans

Over the past two weeks, each of us has met with about eight women entrepreneurs in various neighborhoods throughout Lima.  While each woman is quite unique in terms of her business, personal characteristics, and family composition, there are certain factors that I see are common to most of the women.  My experience has been that each of the women work very hard.  And typically for what most Americans would consider a very small amount of money.  Their motivation is not usually just a desire to have a business, but the dream of providing a better future for their family. 

One woman I work with, Luz, is 37 years old and the eldest of eight siblings.  She loves to learn and has always wanted to go to college, but because she is the eldest of so many, she went to technical school and then dedicated her efforts to supporting her large family.  Luz is currently running two businesses.  One is a costume shop with very seasonal demand.  In order to have a constant flow of income, she also sews school uniforms and everyday clothing like polo shirts.  Luz has mentioned to me numerous times that she wants to study business in order to better manage her two businesses, but that she hasn’t had the money to do so.  Luz told me that if she is never able to marry and have children, her business will be like her child.  I would say that she certainly treats it that way now.   Luz works very hard!  When demand is high she works from 5 a.m. in the morning through the night until 2 a.m. 

In addition to being hard workers who are dedicated to their family, the women entrepreneurs that I have worked with also have to worry about security and sexism.  Some women have been suspicious of us during the first visit.  Due to the fact that there are scams and a lot of crime in Peru, one woman was incredibly fearful when I arrived at her door.  She was concerned that we were coming to assault her.  Once she saw a very petite American woman on her doorstep she felt better, but I spent the first few minutes with her trying to calm her concerns.

The women in Peru also have to deal with sexism.   An outside observer of the culture can easily notice that men and women are still treated differently in some cases.  We have noticed that our male taxi drivers always ask men for directions.  The one time our driver asked a 12 year old girl after being lost for about 20 minutes, I knew he was getting really desperate.  One of the entrepreneurs I work with owns two buses.  The transportation industry is dominated by men.  It took this entrepreneur a while before she could convince her husband to allow her to work on the bus collecting fares; however, she did inform me that the number of female bus drivers is beginning to grow.  Additionally, we have seen many women police officers and even women construction workers around Lima.  It is great to see that women are gaining access to professions that at onetime were probably reserved for men. 

The women I am working with are incredibly motivated to provide for their families and ensure that their children have better opportunities than they did.  I am enjoying the opportunity to support their efforts through one-on-one mentoring.

By Amanda Roberson
MBA Candidate, 2012

Alina Castillo’s corner store in San Juan de Lurigancho, Lima is as tiny and humble as she is. The rickety shelves hold an assortment of typical bodega fare; bags of plantain chips and crackers mingle with shampoo sachets and boxes of matches. The floor is covered with two-liter bottles of soda, her best seller. A window serves as both Alina’s point of sale and her customers’ means of communicating with her. Several people tapped on the pane eager to make a purchase during our three-hour meeting this past Thursday.

During my second week at Proyecto Salta, Alina stood out among the seven women I am working with as one of the star entrepreneurs in terms of effort and will to improve her business. In between visits from customers, she told me about her trade.

The bodega business is tough. These small stores are a dime a dozen in every part of the city, so shoppers can take their pick with no switching cost. Major distributors essentially have monopolies, making for slim margins when bodega owners are forced to buy items at a high price and make the equivalent of just pennies in profit. Overhead costs aren’t too high since many bodegas are part of the owners’ homes, eliminating the need for an additional rent payment. However, investing in equipment that can boost profits significantly, such as a large refrigerator or display case for cheese and meat, remains out of reach for many like Alina.

On top of the bodega owners’ lack of power against distributors, clients and competitors, the work itself can be tiring, or even “enslaving,” as I have heard a few Peruvians describe it. Though it may seem that having a business inside the home would save time, the opposite is usually true. In Alina’s case, her customers know that she can hear their window taps from her living area, so they don’t hesitate to tap at any hour of the day or night, even if it is 8 a.m. and she closed for the day just five hours ago.

Despite all of these challenges, Alina takes great pride in her business and is eager to learn how she can better manage it. Last week, we discussed the possibility of shortening her workday to focus on the evening hours, when she suspects that she makes the bulk of her sales. To assess the feasibility of this schedule change, we developed a small study of sales per hour for her to do throughout the week. The idea was for Alina to pick one day and record all of her sales in hour blocks, something she had not done before.

 When I arrived this week, I was happy to see that she had gone above and beyond completing this project. Her small cursive handwriting had filled five pages of a notebook as she recorded every sale and its amount for the entire week. As we examined her records together, our suspicions were confirmed that most of her sales were made between 3 a.m. and 3 p.m. She is now leaning toward closing the bodega during the morning hours. The trick will be getting her customers to respect her new hours and stop their early morning window tapping, but she thinks that with time they will adapt. She would also like to introduce some new products to capitalize on the lucrative evening hours. We brainstormed items that her nighttime customers, mostly neighbors on their way to a party or taxi drivers looking for something to keep them awake, would buy. She decided to try selling coffee to please the taxi drivers and crackers with tuna for the partygoers.

As we wrapped up our session, Alina scoured my folder of lessons on Cash Flow, Marketing, Creating a Mission and Vision and other topics. She told me she always wanted to study at a university, but economic and family circumstances prevented her from continuing after high school. She is excited to dive further into the Proyecto Salta materials and use them to come out ahead in the bodega game.