Cranking Out The Work

 While it may seem that all I have been doing here in Ghana this trip is eating, that is far from the truth. The purpose of this trip has been to get all of the input required to create the case for social impact investment for Theodora. So I have been meeting with various members of team getting them focused on the information I need and then collecting that information. For those of you who might not have tried to grow a business before or who have not had to pitch an investment to investors, here are some of the types of information we are collecting.

• The cost of recruiting new participants
• The time it takes to recruit a new participant
• What initial training will a new participant need?
• How will that be delivered?
• What will that cost per participant?
• Once a new participant has been given basic training, how much job specific training will they need?
• How long will it take for a new addition to the virtual assistant business to become fully billable?
• What utilization rate (hours billed compared to total hours worked) can we expect?
• What effective billing rate (the price per hour for services to clients) can we expect?
• As we grow, how much space will we need?
• Where will we find that and how much will it cost?
• What will be the cost of critical services (power, internet)?
• How many managers do we need to oversee the projected growth in work?
• How do we create a sales/marketing system that will produce the volume of new clients we require for growth and what will it cost?
• What other indirect costs will we have?
• What payroll burden (think social security and unemployment taxes) do we need to use?

I don't think that was everything but you get the idea. I am ecstatic to say, I am coming home with the vast majority of this information. This will lead to using that information to build a growth plan and a set of financial projections. 

While I was here we also secured a significant new client that offers Theodora the chance to learn skills that could be sold to a host of similar businesses. 

So all in all a very productive trip.