Friday, November 16, 2012

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




Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Growing Up

The older kids have really grown.  Here is Blessed.  When I left, he was 13 and now he is 15.  When he first came to greet me (on the steps, of course), I said good evening first and wasn’t prepared for a baritone response!
But aging has it upsides, too.  The older kids are now able to understand card games so we’ve had some nice evenings playing cards.

XO

Friday, November 9, 2012

One Giant Leap

 
When I left the last time, Precious was 7 and in KG-2 (there are two levels of kindergarten here).  Anyone following the blog at that time knows I had given her family a hard time for about a year before she was finally enrolled in nursery school at age 6.  After a few months in nursery school she moved into Kindergarten.  She progressed rapidly through KG-1, getting the highest marks in her class in Spoken English (I wonder why?).  She was in KG-1 for ½ a year and was promoted into KG-2 in the fall after she turned 7. 

That was two years ago, so I expected that when I returned, she would be at least in Class 2 and perhaps even Class 3.  Imagine my surprise to learn, upon my return, that at age 9 she is currently in Class 1 (First Grade) and is not yet reading.  However, in looking at her exercise books, I see she is getting 10/10 and 9/10 on every homework exercise.  I spoke to her mother who said her teacher in Class 1 (the first year) forgot to schedule her for the exam (an exam to move from first grade to second grade, really?) so she is still in Class 1.  Precious’ mother said the teacher had been sacked. 

So, I’m very happy I brought a LeapPad with me – although I loaded it with content for Grades 2-4, so it is a bit advanced in some areas.  I’m going to download some Grade 1 stuff to get her caught up.  Here are some super cute shots of Precious and Mamakos ‘reading’ the LeapPad version of “Brave” which lets them click on every word and repeat after the voice on the LeapPad says it.
XO 

P.S. The power was out at the time of the video, but the LeapFrog and Burro lamp were going strong on Burro rechargeable batteries!

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Dancin' at the Savoy


The kids were so excited when I first arrived they just couldn’t sit still.  When I brought out my camera the second night, they went crazy and everyone wanted to be in every shot.  It was hard to capture any one kid.  I’ll have to do that on another day.
XO