Day 9

If I were president of Nicaragua, I would implement an address system. It would be pretty simple, every street would have a name and every house would have a number. That's it. One of our biggest challenges is knowing where people are and finding them. Hopefully we'll figure it out in the next couple days.

I think we are getting to the point where we beginning to understand how things work down here and some of the challenges we are up against. As we were told, for the most part we are working with businesses that are pretty basic. They have a product or service and they try to sell it. There isn't a whole lot of record keeping or complex business practices. That is to be expected. We are seeing ways to make things better such as keeping records of inventory, tracking what items sell, at least thinking about fixed costs, etc. There are many ways to make things better, but they start getting a little more complicated than some of these people may be willing to do long term, especially by hand. It is interesting to me to think how much we rely on computers, especially in the business world I come from. They are an integral part, and when people can't afford them or know how to use them it can be very limiting.

We talked with a guy today who sells used tires, car oil, and lubricants. He knows how much his inventory costs and what he sells things for and what his competition charges, but the only records he keeps is of how many bottles of oil he sells. Not necessarily which ones and the margins. There is a lot of room to keep better track of his inventory, but I have to ask myself if I would really want to write everything down by hand and then not have a good way to review it or make calculations. Probably not and that is why I really do love EXCEL. The key is going to be helping these people make some of these principles habits.

Tonight we decided we needed pizza for dinner so we went to "Pizza Hot." I think it is pretty clever play on words.