Wrapping Up Business Here
Photo from the other day. Williams is trying to come up with names for a youtube channel in which we post the videos he's made as we've visited tourist sites this past month. He was thinking names like Will & Kris Adventures or something. I'm thinking, like beloved California documentarian Huell Howser's "California's Gold" something about Ghana's Honey or something but not that. Any ideas are welcome.
Thursday, June 29th, Day 56 - This morning we just had the last topic, "beekeeping as a business." It's my least favorite topic, I am not overly enamored of the business of business. With so many very young trainees this time though it felt particularly useful as it might have been the first time many of them had considered these ideas. It proceeds from the starting question "what is the value of honey?" which usually illicits first an an audience answer in general terms, then I ask for an actual price. Usually I get one. This time I actually got the exact answer I was looking, that I'd have volunteered to them after no one said it -- "well actually it depends on where you're selling it and such."
From there I segue into the idea that there is no "intrinsic" dollar value of honey (or other products), and that it's all about increasing the "perceived value" through good presentation, marketing, and sales location. "Value added" and all that. Going into detail about what makes for good honey presentation (transparent containers!) and labels (more specific information = greater perceived value) I talk about the typical beekeeping business ecoysystem and options for selling (direct to customer, to middlemen, to larger beekeepers / associations), choosing to target high end or middle range customers, etc. The basics of a business plan, with emphasis that it doesn't have to be the 20 page document you see if you google "business plan," but just needs to answer "vision / objective," "plan to get there," "market analysis / competitors," and "what are your target customers / sales venues?" While it may require a little looking around to determine the price of necessary assets (though during the presentation I tell them the local costs of the major things they'll need, via then and there asking the experienced beekeepers in the room), and to figure out what price they think they can sell their honey at, it should all be easily accomplished on one sheet of paper in an afternoon, not the kind of intimidating undertaking you might think needs an office and a week.
I had a budgeting slide made but I find I'm usually always skipping over it.
My last slide of the business presentation is sort of a holdover from Bara my Guinea translator, who had been translator for previous business development projects from people who specialize in the damn thing, and he had harped on "the Four Ps -- Product, Place, Promotion, & Price," which I do find useful as a sort of equation, with one more variable, quantity. The more you improve the first three, the higher price you can charge. And the higher the price you charge, the lower quantity you will sell, but that's absolutely fine as long as the quantity you sell is the quantity you want to be selling. As we as beekeepers don't usually have an infinite amount of product to move, if you don't have a lot of honey, feel free to set a price where it sells very slowly, as long as it does eventually sell. Throughout this I use my own experience as examples, and in my own case while my honey is already selling for a very high price I'm still running out of honey every year so I'm increasing my price by 10% a year until demand will finally equal supply (and in the mean time I have to buy in honey from other beekeepers to make up the shortfall without disappointing customers, which even with my high prices is kind of break even).
I find I'm using almost nothing from the actual business class I took at the community college in California. And in fact, the final note I added this time I felt like was kind of the opposite of the attitude encapsulated by that course and sort of a personal "fuck you" to it: "Now, I'm sure many people talking about business might say you need to 'hustle' and be cold bloodedly aggressive to succeed in business. i want you point out to you that business, beekeeping business but also all business, is about relationships. It's about the relationship between you and your suppliers, you and your customers, you and your employees or landlords. People can certainly tell if you aren't treating them with good faith, sincerity and an attitude of mutual benefit. Do you want to do business with someone you feel is trying to scam you? From my experience businesses that flourish are run by people others love to work with. Who people know if they go to they will look for solutions of mutual benefit. Then people will happily come to you with good deals and with business. So I hope you will undertake your business with this attitude of mutual benefit to everyone you do business with, thank you."
Then we took questions and had our conclusionary speeches, wrapped up, photos were taken. Thus ends my two months of training projects in West Africa for the year.
We hadn't had breakfast. For lunch we were just given wrapped to-go packages of waakye ("watchy"), which as I've noted before, strangely though I don't find it actively gross, my stomach immediately packs up and says "sorry not hungry" as soon as it's put in front of me. Dr Courage (who had arrived yesterday) seemed to have noticed it had this effect on me before I did, on earlier occasions trying to find me an alternative, and he went across the street with me to find if the shops there had anything but they didn't. I said it was alright. I'm not going to die if I don't eat for a few hours. I was given a unit of the waakye but I didn't even open it. Ate my last clif bar, congratulating myself and having just the right amount / rationing them perfectly (I think I'd only brought half a dozen), gave my waakye to Nadia who happily squirreled it away for later.
On the four hour return to Accra we took a slightly different route around the north side of Accra (to avoid traffic? or maybe just because it was more scenic?). This road led us more or less along the ridge of a small mountain range north of Accra, through towns, slopes of corn, bits of forest, fancy looking houses on prime ridgetop real estate and everything in between.
Back at the Ange Hill Hotel. I had previously commented about how the area around the hotel didn't seem very walkable. But I was understandably starving by this point (it being around 16:00 and having only eaten a clif bar all day). The hotel restaurant is pretty good and has decent non-Ghanaian-food options, such as pizza and the pasta I had before was actually quite good. But I was craving KFC again and kind of specifically wanted to venture out and explore the area around the hotel. It was a .8 mile walk to the KFC (for shame, though I still have my phone set to tell me such things in miles because I'm a stubborn American, I found myself thinking to myself "so that's like 1200 meters" to mentally gauge the distance). I found it was mostly along a street that while busy and without sidewalks in most places so one was contending with vehicles passing closely by, it also had a bit of that vibrancy of other pedestrian traffic and people selling things along the side of the road. I'm glad I ventured out and mamde myself a little bit more comfortable with the hotel's surrounds.
Today (Friday, June 30th), my flight leaves at 23:40 bound for Lisbon, Portugal. I'll be there for 10 hours (06:40 to 17:10). I have a friend there I will hopefully catch up with for at least a few hours and otherwise I'm hoping to use the time to see a bit of the city. My friend was previously raving about how nice Lisbon is so now I'm going to see for myself. From Lisbon I fly to JFK, New York. I'm a bit nervous, because I arrive there at 20:05, and then at 22:00 on a separate ticket I have a flight from there to Rochester New York on JetBlue. Normally arriving at the airport two hours before a short domestic flight should be amble time but sometimes getting through customs can be really slow so I'm a bit nervous, especially since I don't think there's another JetBlue flight to Rochester if I miss that one -- in which case I'll find myself suddenly stuck in NYC in the middle of the night, I suppose I'd maybe see about taking an overnight bus to Rochester? I don't know it seems like it will be extremely tedious if I miss that flight.
Will be in Rochester NY for two days with my dad and his dad and other relatives (dad is from Rochester), before traveling onward to California where I'll be for two weeks, but we'll get there when we get there (:
Also from the other day (that day caused me to choke on a backlog of photos for awhile!)