Need to get paid? Be prepared for hassles, waiting, and often, responses lacking in kindness or warmth, to your inquiries. If you can’t adjust to this form of doing business, don’t bother starting a business in Ecuador.

Companies will usually ask for 15 to 30 days credit. No one uses credit cards as the bank commission fees are ridiculously high. If you’re fortunate enough to have a unique product that people really want, and you are well established, you can ask for cash on the spot. Still, some businesses will balk. This is our strategy after 5 years. We may lose some business because of this policy, but I’d lose more sleep at night and have more stress all day trying to collect from deadbeat accounts.

Or, as some of our purveyors do, you can make the process for requesting credit so onerous that it is well nigh impossible. Bank references, commercial references, last three months of tax filings, financial statements-you can ask for all of these. It’s a polite way of simply not extending credit, though you might lose business, or you might find yourself reviewing a lot of paperwork and having no good reason to deny credit-though arbitrary decisions are usually not questioned here.

It’s a fine line to walk when it comes to collecting. The Ecuadorian way is to use cutesy, kind phrases as if you’re asking for a favor when collecting on invoice. “No seas malito, ayúdeme con esta factura,¨which translates roughly to “Please, lend me hand, help me out by paying this invoice.” If you’re straightforward about it, you may find yourself being stonewalled, delayed, and just basically ignored. If the pay date comes and goes and the company is behind on payments, and requests more product or services, there’s only one safe way to play it. Politely tell them they have an outstanding invoice and that the account is suspended until it’s paid in full. Don’t extend credit for multiple invoices for large amounts of money.

Never ever be rude or threatening, it will get you nowhere. In general, be prepared to be treated by your clients as if they were doing you a favor buying your goods or service and an even bigger favor by paying you. Respond only with courtesy, patience, compassion and humility, and cut your losses early when necessary.

There are a couple of options for mobile Internet service in Ecuador.

If you’re here just a few weeks or months and not permanently setting up house somewhere, I’d recommend the USB dongle for wireless service from Movistar, the country’s main cell phone provider. I haven’t tried Claro’s service, but many say the cellphone service is better than Movistar’s, so my guess is their wireless Internet service can’t be too bad.

I had my first experience with it just a few weeks ago on our trip to the beach. It’ll get reception anywhere there’s cell phone service. We even carry the dongle in the car now when going and coming from Quito. Stuck in traffic and you need to work-especially handy when someone else is driving. Pull out the laptop and work away!

You can pick one up at just about any of the Movistar or Claro stores throughout Quito and the country. They are not hard to find. Service is pretty efficient.

Paid $69 for the 3.5G modem-they also have 4G for $110, which is even faster and has 500 MB thrown in free at the start, but the 3.5G was more than adequate for my needs and worked great for email and general web surfing. I think it’s $3 for 1 GB of downloading, and you can fill up your assigned cell number for the SIM card at just about any pharmacy, grocery store, or mom and pop shop in under a minute.

Without a plan, your download limit of 1 GB is good for 30 days, if I understood correctly. So you can refill for just $3, and 1GB can easily last several days or weeks if you only login when needed. I later realized I could have bought the $30 modem online-but here they won’t sell you just the SIM card for the modem as far as I know, so there’s no cheaper alternative but to pay the one time fee and buy the Movistar or Claro branded USB modem.

They tell you the software preinstalled on the modem only works on a Mac pre-Lion, suggesting that the dongle won’t work on a newer Mac. This much is true-the software does not work on a Mac. But I plugged the modem into my MacBook Pro, opened up Network Preferences and added a new service using the “default” configuration, it recognized the modem and I was good to go. On a late 2006 white Macbook, it would not recognize the modem and it woudn’t work.

Later on we’ll discuss fixed line Internet services in Ecuador for home or office-CNT, the national phone company’s service, and TV Cable, the cable company’s internet service.

We considered giving it up and leaving back to the US-again. We canned the idea for another year.

Things are still tough, but improving. I’m finally almost convinced this is going to work. The income is good enough to keep us going for now, and there are lots of opportunities on the horizon.

Hope to be back with more news soon. Stay tuned!

When using just one computer, Sugarsync was a decent service. But as soon as I added multiple computers, I began getting improperly synced files, backups of backups all over the place, and it soon became unmanageable. For lack of a better solution, I stuck with it for some time, and used backup drives. Ultimately though, I was unsatisfied with these solutions.

Dropbox came around a few years ago and I began to play with their free plan. I finally subscribed to a 50 GB plan a few months ago, and it has worked flawlessly since then. If you’re looking for an online storage solution that’s easy to use, reasonably priced, and will work across all your devices and operating systems, I recommend Dropbox.

Fortunately, here in Ecuador there is no evidence of child labor or slavery being used in cacao production, though there are many, many families who make a subsistence living, if only that, by growing and harvesting cacao beans, banans, rice, and other tropical crops. Small farmers with small plots of land, usually five hectares or less, make up the bulk of Ecuador’s cacao production. If you are buying single origin Ecuadorian chocolate, you can be comfortable in the knowledge that it was not produced under duress.

If you are buying an everyday chocolate or a blend, it was probably made with beans from the West African countries of the Ivory Coast or Ghana. You may be buying a product whose ingredients were produced in less than ideal conditions. While Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance, and other certifications may add a “feel-good” stamp for the consumer, the issues are much more complex than advertised. A good source to read more about Fair Trade labeling is on thechocolatelife.com here. In Ecuador we are now producing gourmet, fine chocolates for export, and they will be available in the US in the coming months. The chocolate is made from pure Nacional beans and we know it’s produced under excellent conditions, as we have visited the farm where the beans are growing. Stay tuned, and make sure your Valentine’s Chocolate is made under conditions you’d be happy working under!

From today’s LA Times…Ecuador’s war on the media.

I came across this article the other day, and I’m still not convinced Ecuador is really the “most radical place on Earth.”

The article starts out  ”Just 10 years ago, Ecuador was more or less a basket case, a quintessential “banana republic” (it happens to be the world’s largest exporter of bananas), characterized by political instability, inequality, a poorly-performing economy, and the ever-looming impact of the US on its domestic politics.” Is that to say Ecuador now has little political instability,  a strong economy, and little or no impact by the US on domestic politics? While the administration has brought a semblance of political stability to the country, one must ask at what cost?

No organized opposition even comes close in numbers or political power to Correa’s organized base, but not just because he is so popular. Current polls recently gave him a 55% approval rating after five years in power, in contrast to the 70% rating asserted by the article. But he has taken draconian measures to squash the voice of opposing views, taking especially harsh measures against the press that have been internationally condemned-just look up the TeleAmazonas and El Universo cases. In five years here in Ecuador, the only real change I have witnessed in the economy is a continuing boom in construction; in all likelihood another bubble, some of it likely funded by dubious means (i.e. money laundering), and most of it not accessible price wise to the majority of Ecuador’s citizens. There is certainly no economic boom going on here, nor is there a flood of foreign investment as the country continues a number of policies that scare off foreign direct investment. And last year, Ecuador let the APTDEA lapse for a brief period, seriously damaging Ecuador’s ability to export to the US, and only recently restarted diplomatic relations with the US, posting a new Ambassador to the US just weeks ago. Finally, there is no mention of the increasing insecurity and violent crime, especially in Quito and Guayaquil.

While, as the article states, Ecuador has favorably renegotiated many of the oil contracts with multinational companies, the bonanza from these new revenues are being used to support the system of bonuses and welfare the government of Ecuador is providing to the masses, in turn serving Correa’s popularity, not for long term critical investment. While social spending has increased, quality of service in many areas has not. Healthcare and education still have a long way to go, and public services such as business start-up, registration and licensing are still extremely onerous, time-consuming, and a heavy burden to business operators. “Expanding direct public employment,” in what is an already bloated and overstaffed bureaucracy is difficult to imagine as a radical, forward step.

Anyone who was in Ecuador and was able to read the Referundum questions and understand them clearly deserves an applause. The questions were so lengthy, verbose, and convoluted that even well-educated Spanish speakers couldn’t clearly understand the issues being addressed.  Just because many of the policies that were put through by vote doesn’t mean they were truly approved with a clear understanding. It’s a sweeping generalization to assert that because the policies were approved, there is a clear and popular understanding and approval of them. Rather, I would assert that the questions were written to obfuscate from the public the proposed changes.

There is little to be said for radical in Ecuador, except for the mistakenly inward looking policies being practiced. Many of these policies, such as import-substitution and high tariffs on imported goods only drive up the cost and drive down the quality of good for local residents. When Ecuador joins the rest of the world by offering a stable judicial framework for foreign investment, a freer trade regime, and less onerous business regulations, only then will we be able to say Ecuador is Radical!

I can now better appreciate the frustration, pissy attitudes, and short-tempers of chefs who want things done right, want them done NOW, and want them done to some exacting standard that no one else can define and that can’t be explained in words. They want all these things because their job, their income, and often their business depends on numerous things being done right and regularly to specific, exacting standards. That’s where I stand right now. But I’m trying not to be the short-tempered management nightmare that so many chefs can be. I think it’s a good challenge, one that will help me grow and be a better teacher/chocolatier/instructor.

This broken leg thing has laid bare just how much the business depends on me, and while that’s a nice feeling, it would be even better to know that the business can run, in nearly its entirety, without me around at all. So that’s where I’m headed. I will still have to help prioritize, manage orders, and other administrative stuff, as well as set the pace in the kitchen. But when these 8 weeks or so are up, I expect to have increased my employee’s knowledge of chocolate making to the level that she can carry out 95% of the production without my assistance.