Boom Boom

Whit presenting the vision for Burro's future

Many of you may be asking, “Why are you back in Ghana after being home so long?”  For me, the answer has many sides.  The business in Ghana is growing rapidly with many new products (see www.burrobrand.biz), lots of customers, and increasing sales.  We have also started selling our products in the US, on Amazon. My contribution over the last couple of years has been limited to launching the US business on Amazon.



Burro team members

One of our first employees, Rose Aba Dodd, who eventually became branch manager of the pilot branch, left Burro in August to pursue an MBA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Although the balance of the team (Branch Manager, two category marketing managers, two account managers, two delivery drivers, two battery and inventory clerks) is also very strong, I offered Whit, around the time Rose was leaving, to help out with anything he might need during the transition.  He took me up on the offer and we scheduled this 7 week period while he is also here. 

Burro now provides vision!

As it turns out, there is plenty to do, particularly as we get our books ready to send to potential investors.  The processes I put in place after the monster audit / clean-up and QuickBooks implementation in 2010 provided a good structure, but there have been a few instances where the accountant “went her own way” and a bit of clean-up is required.  Even that effort was put on hold, however, the first week I was here when I learned the VAT (Value Added Tax) examiner had been here a month earlier to audit our sales tax submissions for 2010 and 2011.  Our current accountant had been putting him off mostly because he wasn’t sure how to answer all the open questions.  So, I spent about a week and a half pulling together all sorts of reports and evidence that we had, in fact, paid the taxes we were supposed to pay.

Crowding around a new product -
Sorry, if I showed you I'd have to kill you.

Another thing I’m working on is converting our inventory to Standard Costing.  There are now too many items to manually manage Average Costing in Excel and the QuickBooks inventory functionality is insufficient for our needs, so we’re just going to go to Standard Costing and incorporate it into our operations management database, called Fodder – named in Whit’s oddball-humoresque way of making a joke out of his seat-of-the-pants Access Database tools.  At Cranium we had two such tools, the first was called Kludge (kl-oo-dj) and it was replaced by Augur.  If you look any of those words up, I think you’ll see the tongue-in-cheek humor.

Award for the best new Reseller

Today was our annual Reseller Meeting.  We have hundreds of resellers now, in a radius of 100km from Koforidua and even a few beyond that who are running stand-alone enterprises.   Not all of them can attend the annual meeting, but there were presentations, awards, new product introductions and lunch.  There was really good discussion and participation and the new products were well received by the resellers, so I think it was a success.  We met at a Methodist church since churches are now about the only places large enough to fit us all!  Yay, Burro – Do More!

XO