Income Generating Activities (Actividades que Generan Ingresos AGI)

This is going to be a long post, but it's a pretty cool one. One of the activities that the Academy does to teach salesmanship, confidence, and creativity is an activity where the students are divided into groups, given an object with very little value (if any) and told to go out and make money.  For this generation of students, each group was given 1/4 of a piece of 8x11 copy paper. Each group left the campus at 4:30 pm and had until 8:30 pm to earn as much as possible from their piece of paper. The rules were that they had to make 5 trades before they could sell anything, and that each person in the group had to do a trade before anyone could make a second trade. One more rule was that the MBAs (me, Ben and Nate) couldn't help, and they couldn't use their own money in any way.

Yesterday, I was assigned to go out with one of the groups and document their experience. The following is a photo journal of their journey from a piece of paper worth less than a peso to about 90 pesos.

Here the group is strategizing.

They decided to make a little paper box out of part of the paper, and use the tiny piece that was leftover to write a little saying on that they could sell. (The interesting thing is they weren't able to ever trade or sell the box...)

This is the leftover piece of paper.

Their first trade attempt - they almost got it, but put too much pressure on the girls.

They ended up splitting the leftover piece of paper into 4 pieces (ending up in pieces less than 1 square inch).

Here's one of the guys inside a paper store trying to trade the paper box.

You can't see him very well, but here Gabriel (with glasses, facing this way) is trying to trade one of those tiny squares of paper. He succeeded, and ended up with a little bracelet.

Gabriel at it again, but without success this time.

They were able to trade the bracelet for a pink baseball cap.

Another unsuccessful trade attempt.

More strategizing.

Yet another unsuccessful attempt.

And another...

They were able to trade the hat for a bag of chips here.

The bag of potato chips.

Here is one of the students really working his magic.

He traded the bag of chips for two packages of cupcakes/muffins (mantecadas).

This is a mobile locksmith.

He traded the mantecadas for a keychain (with the name Erick).

Trying to trade the keychain.

I think he managed to sell the keychain here.

Nefi traded the mantecadas for a cheese slicer.

Another unsuccessful attempt to sell the cheese slicer.

They wanted something they could easily resell, so they went to a florist.

They had to work hard to convince this guy to trade them flowers for the cheese slicer, but they made their case.

The trade.

Demonstrating the end use of the product...

Gabriel had traded for this health calendar (Jenni will like that it was a Splenda calendar...) and here he is trying to sell or trade it - Gabriel was a force to contend with - he had no fear of trying to sell to anyone.

Trying to sell the flowers.

Trying to sell in the street.

Maybe another face would work...

Gabriel had traded his calendar for a stick of deodorant, and he was trying to get rid of it for over an hour.

He never lost faith...

The money from the sale of the flower.

With their money, they decided to buy something small they could easily resell and make a good profit. Candy seemed like a good idea, so they negotiated with the candy store to get a good deal.

These are mango candies (with chili powder).

Gabriel ended up selling his deodorant for 20 pesos.

Here's Nefi selling candy to the taxi drivers at a stoplight.

We all ended the day tired, but like I said at the beginning of the post, they started with almost nothing, and had 90 pesos by the end of the day. Today they went out again, and I will post their earnings in another post.