the goose

What does your average voiceover artiste and a leprechaun have in common?

Answer: they both know how to avoid getting found.

If you catch a Leprechaun, he has to give you his pot of gold. As a result, Leprechauns are secretive little fellows.  One was however once caught by a young farmer. The farmer couldn’t believe his luck. Demanding his pot of gold, the Leprechaun reluctantly pointed to a tree in a forest under which the gold could be found. The farmer tied a red ribbon around the tree and headed off to get a shovel so that he could dig up his new found wealth. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been a little nervous about getting out and about in the Buenos Aires business community, especially with my still very naescent command of the langauge. I’m glad I headed over to Areatres last night however to hear Frank Almeida talk about how he turned a hobby into a business that now supplies McDonalds, Carrefour and dozens of other Argentine big name brands.

Sugar and Spice started off 7 years ago as a preserve export business but while jam started to go out of fashion, a sideline cookie business started to pick up. Frank’s background in corporate sales obviously forms the backbone of their success. Having initially supplied a few local providers, when McDonalds approached them they actually had to turn the international behmoth away for lack of production capacity. Interestingly McD’s took an interest in the Chicago born entrepenuer and invited him in to explain his plans for future growth. “They literally saved me from making the biggest mistake of my life” Frank told us as he explained how the management in McDonalds helped to edit the designs for what was to become an 800sq m. production facility in the heart of Bunos Aires.

In the early days it was all about building client lists and calling them weekly to see if he could supply product to grocery stores, supermarkets and local newsagents. As time went buy and demand picked up he had to classify the clients by size as it became too much of a strain to call every single customer. The top clients got a weekly call, while bi-weekly and monthly clients got less attention. Nowadays the clients tend to call him but there is still a lot of face to face meetings to keep the ‘old fashioned’ customers happy. “When I stopped calling around to a few stores, I noticed a dip in sales”.  He took on a sales rep to help keep in touch with customers while he turned more of his attention to keeping things running smoothly back at base.

I was fascinated by the the idea of the cookie business because the third party stores provide such an excellent sales channel. When I first saw Levi Roots receive funding on Dragons Den I began to realise what a wonderful business supplying food to supermarkets could be. The value of each purchase is small but it repeats and creates a beautiful cashflow.  Convincing our clients to upgrade or sign up can feel like a hard won battle, person by person, but in this sector, once you are on the shelves, the product literally sells themselves.

If only there was a way to put a website on a supermarket shelve and have people come along pick up copies. Of course there are drawbacks. Getting paid is getting a little trickier than it was as with all businesses that invoice rather than accept payment upfront. He had no regrets though and when asked if he would sell his product online he made it quiet clear he was happy to let his customers deal with the end customers. A short lived cookie home delivery catalogue soon got the boot when he found himself trapsing the streets of Buenos Aires trying to find the house he was due to deliver 2 packets of cookies too.

Branding seems to be the other key to success. While early on, the supermarkets looked for their own branding, now the Sugar and Spice name has established itself. Supporting a number of local charities that Frank himself is involved with no doubt helps to re-enforce this brand. This brand found its beach head market in the local expat community.  Sponsoring local meetups helped to establish demand and Sugar & Spice still sponsor the sweet table at local events to this day.  For the moment there doesn’t seem to be too much in the way of competition for his ‘premium’ cookie. Consumers seem happy to pay up to three times as much for his slickly packaged product as for the cheaper competition.

What I took most away from the talk was undoubtedly how ‘work a day’ they’re success had been. It was obvious that a lot there had been a wide range of marketing activities used over the years, not all of them successful, but in reality it was all about gradually building up the business day by day rather than coming up with some kind of master plan for world domination.

There is still plenty of room for expansion in Buenos Aires but Frank hopes to expand his line abroad in the coming years.

There are several things that are hard to get used to in Argentina. First up is the fact that you can forget about finding somewhere to eat before 9 in the evening. Secondly it still kind of knocks my socks off when said meal out doesn’t require a mortgage extension. Finally – it is the language.

We’ve been batting away at it with a private tutor, podcasts, online training videos, books and video tutorials for a while and LangaugeBob was something I was keen to give a whirl. It is a great idea and I was kind of surprised to see that the company behind it is actually in Galway. Not that people in Galway don’t have great ideas of course.

LanguageBob is a plugin for your browser that splices Spanish/French/German etc words into the webpages you read.  The idea is that it helps you to build your vocabulary while browsing the web.  You can mostly figure out what the words are by context and in this way you can build up the range of words you know.

Great idea although you are out of luck if you want to use the Plugin on a Mac.

Damn.  Rather than mosey on and do something more profitable I then took it upon myself to right this outragous descrimination against FireFox using Mac users and rolled my own Spanglish script for firefox.  To install the script drag the Spanglish link to the top of your browser and hit it.  You should see a little sea of yellow words pop up where a Spanish word has been interpolated into your browser.  Fun.

This got me thinking. Stephen Downey recently pointed me towards the excellent Software by Ron blog.  Ron proffers a four step process to finding a profitable niche.

1. Market
2. Marketing
3. Aesthetic Third
4. Functionality a Distant Fourth

I’m not so sure how far behind the others functionality comes.  I was able to knock together something not a million miles away from their product in a few hours.  A polished execution can create some barrier to this kind of competition.  He does however emphasise a point that makes a lot of sense to me.  First you gotta find the market – then design your marketing around them.  Typically I spent about 8 hours putting together this Spanglish button but I hadn’t really thought about how you would market something like this.  Then I realised what LanguageBob are doing right.  They are already in a thriving marketplace – namely the FireFox plugin directory from where people can find their product and use it.  Of course is a marketplace is too crowded then this doesn’t help you much.

So who would you sell this product to?  Well – people like me is a good start – newly minted English speakers in foreign countries.  Expat forums might be a good start.  Perhaps directly to Schools?  After that perhaps teaming up with other language product providers?  All in all it is a toughie and perhaps demonstrates to myself how even though the cost of creating products like these (and mine) – the marketing costs seem to be pretty much the same as ever.

It has been an eventful April chez James and Priscilla.  The global economic downturn finally arrived at Sir John Rogerson’s Quay and Priscilla is now no longer working at Ireland’s leading advertising agency.  In typical South African style, she turned the frown upside-down by launching http://www.everydayisasaturday.info.  It is a daily walking club for people how have been ‘retrenched’.

We promoted the site initually via twitter and last weekend we were picked up by RTE’s The Business.  There was about a five minute interview and we were sure it was gonna kick the project into the big time.  As it turns out – twittering seems to have been just as effective at driving traffic to the site as a five minute spot on the national broadcaster.

I’ve always kind of dreamed of having an online business that could be promoted through the national media but would ‘provide value’ online.  This little experiments kind of kicks that theory in the nuts.  I guess when you are listening to the radio it is a long shot that you are going to remember a URL and head to the nearest computer to check it out.  Much better to promote your service online to people who are only a click away. Common sense I guess but this is the first time I’ve seen it first hand.