The Business Plan Seminar

About 25 volunteers and their community counterparts from all over the country met in Cocle for the Business Plan Seminar. The ideas for the plans were as diverse as the regions represented. Mario, the president of the cooperative came with me and we began to put together a plan to sell the café produced by the members to other Ngabes in the Comerca. Once completed, the document will be presented to a variety of Government Agencies including the Ngabe-Bugle Project, which has over $3 million to spend within the next two years.

The idea is to provide Bahia Ballena (our community) and other indigenous communities in the region with a coffee that is locally grown and processed. Everyone here drinks coffee but it is exclusively provided by latino producers in Chiriqui. After some market research, we realized that no one offers an indigenous brand of coffee here on the Bocas del Toro side of the Comerca. The coffee that is grown here is sold to Chiriqui producers who then process and sell it (back). So, every time a Ngabe buys coffee, the money is leaving the region. A local brand would utilize the available labor, land and resources to promote a sustainable industry based on providing local resources and having the earnings stay in the region.

My role in this process has been to facilitate discussions and to organize their thoughts and ideas. Then we organize the information and I write it down, type it and include it in our business plan. While they have had experience growing and in some cases, small-scale production of their coffee, they lack the means to leave the community and do serious market investigation and look for outside resources. I have been gathering prices, quotes, technical support and advice for various materials needed for the operation. I am going to print out the document, which includes our ideas as well as a financial analysis complete with sales projections, projected cash flow, depreciation rates for the machinery, variable and unit costs.

While some of these parts may be a little too complicated for many of the cooperative members, I have found that this will be an opportunity to demonstrate the process of formally presenting an idea, utilizing local recourses and establishing a relationship with the regional institutions. The process is very, very important. It would be a lot faster for me to make a business plan and give turn it into the office myself. However, that’s not the point – nor why I am here. I am including them in as much as I possibly can in this process. All of the ideas are theirs. However for some of the more technical and financial analysis I have done to help with getting the money and showing the feasibility.

We have shared these ideas with local agencies and are scheduled to present them next month.

In other news, the strikes have ended (for now) and life has returned to normal. All volunteers are safe and the roads have opened back up.

Also, I created some new photo albums with pictures from the AgBiz and BizPlan seminars.


Mario and I hammering out the details