| Author | Message | ||
     cathy mcniven New member Username: Cathnniv Post Number: 6 Registered: 3-2008 |
I am looking to possibly start a small business in Argentina with the goal of helping my penpal of 20yrs and her family become more financially stable along with helping myself also. I am wondering what types of small business would be suited to the country? My penpals father sells imitation perfumes on the street at the moment for a few dollars would it be possible to find a product i could possible purchase from Australia and send to Argentina for them to sell that would be better? Just an idea at this stage i will research more when i visit in Nov. Any ideas would be great. Another is the family can all paint and i thought i could sell small paintings here in Oz as real Argentinian art.??? | ||
| Roberto Board Administrator Username: Admin Post Number: 1585 Registered: 12-2004 |
These are rough waters. Anything you try to send to Argentina -specially objects of commercial value- will be stopped at customs and all of a sudden your "help" will turn into a headache. At times, a major one. The best way to consider this -as there are a lot of imports coming in at present- is to follow a more official route and see, provided you find an item that may sell, if your local friends can set up some kind of import/export firm. It can be done on the cheap. | ||
| cathy mcniven New member Username: Cathnniv Post Number: 9 Registered: 3-2008 |
What about in reverse? My Argentine friends all paint, what if they made hand painted art works i could sell on this end and pay them for these? My other worry is how do i get $ to them as they say they have no bank acoount? Is it easy enough to set one up? | ||
| Roberto Board Administrator Username: Admin Post Number: 1592 Registered: 12-2004 |
In reverse it will work better, I think. Western Union may eat into their profits. In this case, you can always buy their monthly production -an example- and mail them a check they can discount locally for cash. | ||
| Benco Junior Member Username: Benco Post Number: 45 Registered: 4-2007 |
I also think it will work better in reverse. When you compare prices and wages it should be much easier to produce in Argentina and sell in Australia. However legally exporting and importing things is probably a pain and you will need the service of specialized agencies. So my proposal would be rather than selling things you could try to offer a service. You would be the sales person that talks to Australian/American clients and the actual work is done back in Argentina. As an example consider setting up a small company for Logo-Design. You would do the correspondence with the clients, listen to what kind of logo they want etc. Your friends in Argentina then do the actual art work (an old computer and free drawing program will do) and then send it to you per email. You present it to the client and receive his feedback, and after a couple of iterations the sale is complete. Some companies I know charge around 100-200 US-Dollars per Logo, which is a lot of money here in Argentina. This is just an example to illustrate the idea: you work the magic as salesperson (spanish and broken english just dont do the trick, so you would really need to help your friends), and they do the time-consuming work in Argentina. And there is no trouble with customs and so on for sending an email with attachment. Your clients would not even need to know that you have "outsourced" some of the work. In fact this sort of business model works well for information technology, programming, webdesign, and so on. I am not telling secrets here, countries like India have built a whole industry around this model. And it works also on the small scale. So if your 20yr old friend is interested in computers just encourage her to learn as much about information technology as possible. You can become a complete expert for free, there are lots of great tutorials available on the internet, e.g. about webdesign (HTML, Javascript, CSS, PHP, MySQL...). With your help she could then sell her service to customers in the first world, and build up a career that goes beyond what you can achieve as a street vendor. And if there is no money for an old computer, she can still start in an internet-cafe. Just an idea. I know in reality it is not as easy as it sounds. And doing all the learning and working in addition to the long hours of a normal job in Argentina requires a lot of energy. But any driven and skilled person nowadays has more opportunities than ever, and you might be able to provide important initial support for your friend and her family. |
