The Family Business

I went to small nearby town yesterday with gentleman I met while looking for a place to live. He's a really nice guy and speaks a bit of English. He has a wife and three kids and is a dentist. He also spends a fair amount of time very inefficiently selling cell phone accessories, which is why we were driving to another town. I was tagging along a sales run. I would think that a dentist should be doing well enough to not need to scramble around selling cell phone accessories, so I started to ask him about his dentistry business. Here is some information he gave me:

- he has four patients right now—all of them friends or relatives.
- he *thinks* he would like more patients.
- all his patients are people he knows, because,
- he's afraid that if he takes on strangers, he might get AIDS from them. (true story), subsequently,
- he has never marketed his business.
- his dentist office is in his home, partly because,
- as long as you don't have an "office" you don't need insurance in Mexico
- there are many other dentists on the same street.

I was pretty anxious to start the questioning at any of a number of topics. But I know enough to know there are many ways we in the U.S. look at business—assumptions that we know almost every one else has in the States—that Mexicans simply do not have. The drive to be profitable is a huge thing in the States, and it's assumed everyone has that drive and if not, well why the hell not? So I've already learned that many, many Mexicans open a business, but not for profit. More for pride, community and probably so they have something to do with themselves. But what I still don't understand is the almost intentional decisions they make that keep their businesses from being profitable. As if being profitable changes the dynamic in such a way to make the business a completely different thing. Is it the effort involved? Is it just a lack of education or knowledge how to operate profitably? Or is it laziness? Mexican have bills to pay, too. Their kids need schoolbooks, the car needs gas. God knows the stucco needs repairing and repainting. Or maybe, just maybe, once their overhead is covered, and they make enough to buy clothes and feed themselves, they're... happy.

Anyway, I was gingerly trying to bring up ideas of easy marketing to see how he would respond. But it seems that without the common ground of the desire of profitability, our conversations simply could not move forward.

So bringing it back to myself (finally, right?) I wondered if people in general here are uncomfortable with the idea of profitability. So that if they chose to go to a dentist, or doctor and the office was well-run and clean and the scheduling tight, would they be turned off? Because of the cultural lack of understanding of profitability in business, would they feel they were treated poorly or with disrespect?

And if so, does that mean that any well-intentioned gringo who comes here and tries to go into business for himself will hit immediate limitations because of how offputting an efficient and thereby profitable business would seem?

Just wondering.

Btw, when we got to Santa Lucia, the guy whos storefront we were supposed to go to wasn't even there, nor was his store open. No phone calls were ever made, or any definite schedule confirmed. See what I mean?

We ended up walking around a bit and I got some shooting in. On the way back, we stopped by a pickup truck and bought these plant roots that looked a lot like ginger pulled right out of the group somewhere nearby. They cut them up and put them in a spicy sauce (in a bag of course, everything goes in just a bag) and you eat them raw. They did not look like they would be good at all, but the were fairly soft and yummy. Now if I can only remember what they were called.