Max Alexander

by No City: An African Adventure Bright Lights

  Nkansah, twenty-five, had a broad smile and the easy manner of a natural salesman. He was comfortable with himself, and when he spoke he drew you in with mannered gestures and broad sweeps of his long fingers. There was something actorly about him, but it didn’t seem put on or exaggerated. He grew up near a busy market town about twenty kilometers north of Koforidua. His father was an English teacher; his mother owned a small shop—nothing more than a shack selling dry goods, hard-boiled eggs, and a few groceries. Every day after school, Nkansah’s mother gave him money to buy bread at the market in town for the shop. He quickly learned how to leverage his mother’s cash: by buying directly from the bakery at a discount (instead of from the resellers in the market), he could sell the bread at a profit in town, then turn around and buy more bread for his mother—getting home in time to do his homework, with spare change in his pocket. “I have always known how to make money,” he told me. “I sold bread until secondary school, but then I stopped because the other kids would laugh at me.”

  After graduating from high school, Nkansah moved to Accra and found a job as a receptionist at a restaurant. “There was a Big Man who always came in, a regular,” said Nkansah. “One night he put a note in the suggestion box. Nobody ever read the notes except me. I read them all. In his note he said he didn’t like it when his tilapia soup took too long, and he complained that no one ever brought him hot water and lemon to wash his hands after a meal. So the next time he came in, I served him myself. I went to the kitchen and made sure his soup was ready in two minutes. I brought him his hot water and lemon. That night he put another note in the box. It said, ‘Tell whoever served me to call me.’ And there was a number. I called and he offered me a job as his houseboy. He lived in a big house with his wife, and I did everything—folding laundry, cooking, cleaning. But then Kufuor became president and the man was appointed ambassador to Liberia, so they had to move there.”

  Nkansah wants desperately to go to college, preferably in America. “I shall go to Brigham Young University,” he told me confidently. Clearly he had been spending a lot of time with the Mormon interns.

  “Really?” I said.

  “Yes. I know I can go there because I don’t smoke, I don’t take alcohol, and I can stay away from women.”

  “So you are familiar with the school’s honor code?”

  “Oh yes, I have been on the website. I am hoping to impress your brother so that he will help me get in.”

  “Well, I’m sure Whit would be happy to help you get in to any school.”

  To save money, Nkansah was living with his parents in the distant town of Somanya. (His family had moved when his father took a job as headmaster of a Presbyterian school.) The arrangement made Whit and Jan uncomfortable because Nkansah was commuting an hour each way in unreliable tro-tros and was often late. Typically Whit advanced new employees rent money, payable directly to the landlord, so they could get situated in Koforidua. (Most came from Accra.) But Nkansah convinced Whit to loan him money directly—fifteen hundred cedis, the equivalent of almost four months’ pay—so he could buy a motorcycle and continue living with his parents. On a motorcycle, he reasoned, he could zip into Kof-town fast. And by living at home he could save more money for college. Whit agreed, but after several weeks the motorcycle had still not materialized. Nkansah said it was being repaired in Accra, but when asked to produce a bill of sale, he stalled.

  Despite this distracting sideshow, Nkansah continued to rack up phenomenal sales. Nobody could work a crowd like him. He understood that the best salesmen don’t simply talk about their products; they ask questions designed to make their prospects aware of their own wants and needs.

  “How many people here would like to save money on batteries?” he often began.

  I know I would!

  “If you could save money on batteries, when would be a good time to start?”

  Umm, now?

  I tagged along on one of Nkansah’s gong-gongs in a village called Aframase. Only about fifty people showed up because someone had died and many villagers had left for the funeral; the chief said he had tried calling Nkansah, but the village had poor mobile coverage and he couldn’t get through. So the show went on, and Nkansah had them in the palm of his hand. Knowing that customers who handle the merchandise are far more likely to buy it, Nkansah made sure everyone got to hold a battery and adapter. He called for villagers to bring up their flashlights and radios, then removed their rusty Tiger Heads—handling them with dramatic disdain—and replaced them with the bright green cells. You didn’t need to speak Krobo to know he was regaling the villagers with how bright, and how loud, the Burro batteries were. At one point he said something that made the whole audience roll with laughter.

  I turned to James, our driver, who was also working the crowd as Nkansah’s assistant. “What did he say?”

  “He was explaining the credit policy,” said James. “He told them, ‘We will come back next Friday to collect the payment. If you cannot pay then, we will come back the next Friday. If you still cannot pay, we will paint our truck black and it will say police on the side.’”

  Nkansah was a model salesman for the agents and other employees, but other basic job skills were lacking, especially when it came to managing his territory. One morning Whit called him into the office. “Nkansah, what do we need to do to get to the point where you are filling out receipts in a way that can be entered by Adam into the books? Because we’ve been through this before, and Adam has trained you, but there are still issues.”

  “I can explain,” said Nkansah.

  “Well, it isn’t about explaining it to me, it’s about doing it.”

  “It will be done.”

  “Remember it’s not just about bookkeeping,” said Whit. “This information will help you grow your business. For example, we’re really trying to get the resellers to focus on exchanges over the last two weeks, because that’s something they can really impact.* One week is too short—maybe they’ve traveled, maybe someone is sick—but two weeks is a good measure. You see what I mean?”

  “I do,” said Nkansah.

  “So let’s look at Daniel Larweh.” He was one of Nkansah’s resellers in Adenya. “He went from two hundred and seventy-four exchanges to a hundred and fifty. So his numbers are down forty-five percent. That’s troubling because he is one of our biggest resellers. Why is he down so far? Are his clients sick, or angry with him? This is something to watch.”

  “I understand,” said Nkansah.

  “You should also be paying close attention to phone chargers,” Whit continued. “Chargers I believe are one of the biggest things driving exchanges and thus revenue, so someone with low exchanges, it could mean they have not sold many chargers. That’s why we are tracking charger sales. So if a reseller has one hundred clients and sold one hundred chargers, the number in this column is one hundred percent. If he has one hundred clients and has sold fifty chargers, what would the number be?”

  “Fifty percent.”

  “Right.”

  4. Whit Is My Angel

  I went out one day with James on his route, a broad loop up to the Akwapim Ridge and back down through the junction town of Nkurakan. James, a youthful forty-two, navigated this treacherous mountain circuit with one hand on the wheel and the other on the horn all the way, in approximately half the time it would have taken me. It may be possible that he clocked more miles in the oncoming-traffic lane than his own, but I had my eyes closed for much of the trip. Unlike Whit’s other employees, at least James was an experienced crazy driver.

  In fact he had spent eight years as a delivery driver for Guinness. He and his wife and five children (including Burro’s new office administrator) had been living in Guinness company housing—a one-room apartment—when he met Whit at the local car wash.* “Guinness was very tough,” said James. “They would never loan me money for my children’s school fees. Burro pays more, and I can borrow for school fees. When I resigned from Guinness to work for Whit, they of
fered me more money, but I said it was too late.” With his increase in salary he was able to move his family into a more spacious two-room house in Koforidua.

  “Whit is my angel,” he said. “I pray for Whit to have everlasting life.”

  His gratitude extends to Whit also hiring his daughter, who had been staying with an uncle in Accra, attending college, but things didn’t work out and she came home. “She will return to university, maybe next year,” said James. He drove on. “I wanted to go to university,” he continued, “but my father died and I had to go to work.”

  “He died young?”

  “Poisoned by a friend.”

  “Some friend.”

  “He was working in Lagos, and he had a car. His friend wanted the car. One night they went out drinking; the next day my father got very sick, and he died. His friend disappeared with the car.”

  5. Adventures in Bookkeeping

  I took Debi and her son David to the bead market one afternoon. Since arriving several days earlier, they had been holed up in the office, poring over QuickBooks reports and bank statements on their laptops. David worked nonstop all day with earphones firmly implanted, listening to sports podcasts; Debi just worked. They needed a break. Besides, I wanted to learn why Debi, at age fifty, would pay her own way to Ghana to help Whit straighten out his books. I got the impression she had a pretty nice life in Seattle; she was talking about buying a boat, and the boat she had in mind (I happened to know) was not exactly a dinghy. Okay, she was a divorced empty-nester, but that could describe lots of middle-aged women who satisfy their wanderlust by going to yoga retreats in Costa Rica; how many set off to the world’s poorest countries and volunteer their professional services for a month?

  “I just get bored,” said Debi as we walked over to the market grounds. “I like adventure. I mean, lots of people say they’d like to do stuff like this, but they never do.”

  Sorting through Burro’s books didn’t seem all that adventurous—I was glad when Debi and David took some time off to see the country—but there were plenty of issues for them to resolve. For a modest start-up, Whit’s business was complicated from an accounting standpoint because it involved rental inventory (which depreciated), security deposits (which could not be counted as regular income), and coupons that functioned a lot like gift certificates but cost different amounts depending on how many you bought. “You definitely can’t count coupons as revenue until they’re exchanged,” Debi told Whit over a poolside lunch, also attended by David, one Sunday at a new hotel in Aburi.

  “The problem is, some of them will never get used,” said Whit. “They get lost, or whatever. So at some point I need to move unexchanged coupons into the revenue column. And to do that, we need to get a weighted average value of coupons, which means tracking how many are bought at each price point.” Whit was no accounting savant, but he knew enough to understand the issues.

  “Right,” said Debi. “I’m starting to look at depreciations and values this week—what can be counted as what. So far we’ve just been getting up to speed on Adam.”

  David looked up from his menu. “It’s scary.”

  “Adam doesn’t know how to balance the checking account,” said Debi, “and he’s never balanced the cash account. He just plugs the accounts every month to make everything reconcile.”

  “Great,” said Whit.

  6. Stays Strong

  Thirteen of us gathered in the Burro conference room one morning to hear two of the BYU interns, Jennia and Tara, deliver their final presentation after three weeks of field research. The pair’s assignment had been to come up with recommendations in two areas: marketing and human resources—that is, hiring, training, and retaining good resellers. “To compile our data we interviewed eighteen agents in the field,” said Tara, “nine high performers and nine low performers. That was the qualitative research. We also interviewed forty clients, mainly to look at brand perception. That was a relatively small quantitative study, but we feel it was valid, as you’ll see.” The pair had put together a PowerPoint show that we all loaded onto our laptops and followed along with.

  “We wanted to get a handle on why some agents are exchanging hundreds of batteries every month and others are only exchanging ten,” said Tara. “The idea is that Burro can apply those best practices to hiring and training. One interesting thing we found was that both high-performing agents and low-performing agents face similar issues in their villages—people have little money, people are farming and busy, it’s a lot of walking, and so on. That tells us the discrepancies between high and low sellers are not based on market forces; it’s about the sales abilities of the individual. When asked why people don’t buy Burro batteries, low sellers often cited strangely negative social pressure: ‘They think I’m selling to make money for myself’ was one response. Another was ‘They are jealous because I’m making money from it.’

  “On the other end, we found that high sellers had several things in common. They typically go house to house instead of waiting for customers to come to them. People who sell other things seem to do better with Burro. My guess is they love business and have sales skill. And the top sellers have an understanding that Burro is a service, not just a product. They’re selling energy.”

  “I’m wondering,” said Whit, “since there is not a rich range of potential resellers to choose from, what hiring practices are we doing that you think are good, and what do you think we could be doing better?”

  “Well, your policy of meeting with chiefs about potential agents seems to be working well,” Tara said. “Perhaps the interview process could be more codified: pick five candidates with the chief, then interview them with a point system for possible answers. So the answer ‘I plan to make customers come to me’ would be worth zero points. Then select a candidate based on that process.”

  “One problem I see,” said Rose, “is that the chief could pick five people and they could all be his sons. We use them for two months and it’s a waste of time; then we just have to find someone else.”

  “The chief is often too simple,” agreed Nkansah.

  “Still,” said Rose, “at the end of the day the chief has to know the reseller and respect him. But he doesn’t necessarily have to pick the person.”

  “However they end up being chosen,” said Tara, “I think Burro should promote the perception that this job is important and the person has been selected for their skill. They need to be made to feel serious about it.”

  She moved on to the issue of agent training—arguably even more important than the initial hire, since even natural-born salespeople would be unfamiliar with Burro’s business model. The challenge, she noted diplomatically, “is training people who have very different cultural values. We recommend Burro move to a hierarchical system of divisions within each branch, where top sellers become division leaders who can reach out to other sellers and help them reach their sales goals. The division leaders in turn would be trained by a specialized training staff—trainers who can train the trainers, basically.”

  “It’s possible these division leaders could also be exchanging batteries for their agents,” said Rose. “We tried getting Dorothy in Bomase to do that for Seth and Victor; it didn’t really work, but then again we weren’t offering her any incentive.”

  “I like the idea of having someone at the village level with training expertise,” said Whit. “Tara, you had mentioned a company in Accra with some experience at this.”

  “Health Keepers,” she said. “They’ve had a number of BYU interns, and they work around here.”

  “I’d love to learn more about their operation.”

  Debi spoke up: “I think you have to be able to have these division leads if you’re going to grow as fast as Whit wants. Rose and Nkansah can’t do it all. It can be really hard to give up control and delegate, but you have to be able to do that, and find people who can do that.”

  “You’re right, Debi,” said Whit. “I mean, right now we have about ninety resell
ers in the pilot branch. To pay a return on investment with net profitability, I figure requires about three hundred and seventy-five resellers per branch. Now, can I see Rose and Nkansah training that many resellers with one or two other people? Yeah, possibly. As effectively or as rapidly as with this division lead structure? Probably not. And I’d like to see us get to the point where we can spool up a new branch in six months, versus eighteen.”

  “Rose, you mentioned incentives,” said Tara. “I’d like to go back to that idea. One challenge we identified is that resellers make very little in commission—currently one pesewa per exchange. That is less incentive than other comparable sales jobs and it could be more competitive.”

  “Well, actually they’re making more like two or three pesewa per exchange when you factor in coupon sales,” said Whit. “And keep in mind that other sales opportunities around here require a buy-in: you need working capital to buy inventory, which is often perishable, so there is risk. With Burro there is no buy-in. Having said that, it would be interesting to explore more ways to incentivize and reward high performers. We especially need to rethink the mix in compensation for registering a new battery versus exchanging a battery for an existing client. We’ve favored the former at the expense of incenting exchanges, and we need to flip that.”

  Next came Jennia’s presentation. “Our objective in the marketing research was to better understand Burro customers and why they consistently use Burro over other brands,” she said, “then to apply what we learned to a marketing and brand-awareness plan. The most consistent positive comment about Burro we heard was that the battery ‘doesn’t rot in machines.’ Virtually everyone knew someone whose device had been ruined by a leaking Tiger Head.”