Here in Puebla we are currently conducting the first follow-up survey for an impact evaluation studying a state-sponsored program that aims to spur growth among small businesses. We have spent the past five weeks contacting all the firms in the sample and asking them to participate in a forty-five minute survey to measure the growth, or lack thereof, of the business since the program started 12 months ago. Easier said than done.

Our survey covers 431 firms, divided randomly into a treatment group that receives heavily subsidized business consulting services, and a control group that does not receive the consulting services.  Perhaps the biggest challenge is convincing the several hundred businessmen and women who were not randomly selected to receive subsidies to agree to do the survey, give us an appointment, and then - here´s the catch - show up to said appointment. We´ve hired a team of nine surveyors (mostly recently or soon-to-be graduated university students) and although they are a generally very competent team, they are not magicians, nor hypnotists, and so scheduling and keeping appointments remains the biggest challenge we face.

Apart from the general problems of tracking down the participants and securing a time commitment, we´ve encountered some unforeseen snags, not a new concept to anyone familiar with field work. One gentleman, after hearing the first few questions, decided that the survey was too ´boring´ and that there were other, more fun things he could do with the forty-five minutes. That was technically our fault because we usually spice up each appointment with  cute animals that can do math and guess your weight , but that time we forgot.

The most frustrating cases, however, often turn out to be the most interesting. My favorite story is of a man who lives in tiny, completely unremarkable village far outside the city of Puebla. This pueblito has only one payphone and no internet access. Every time we tried to contact the man - we´ll call him Miguel - to schedule an appointment we rang the town payphone and whoever happened to be strolling by at that moment would answer our call and then enlist another passerby to go see if the man was home. He never was. Finally, after three weeks of calling nearly every day, we got in touch with the señor and scheduled an appointment. As it turns out, his story was worth the wait.

After five years of working as a migrant worker in California, Miguel realized that if he was going to be doing back-breaking work for no money, he might as well be contributing to the growth of his community at the same time. So he came back.

It is important to note here that farms in his part of the state are dedicated almost without exception to growing two things: beans and corn. So when Miguel returned from the States and declared he was going to grow oranges they asked him what he had been smoking in America. But Miguel had figured out that unlike the volatile weather in the orange-growing regions of Mexico, the climate in Puebla was relatively mild year-round.  Even if he started out with a small yield (and low economies of scale), he would still be able to make a profit selling at market prices because he wouldn´t have to invest in all of the protective equipment that other orange growers use to shield their harvests from intense heat, storms and the like. So he recruited several other farmers who were sick of being taken advantage of by middlemen in the corn and bean industries and started an orange-growing cooperative. Today it is  a thriving business and the sight of thousands of orange trees bursting out of the ground, slowly beating back the millions of acres of corn and bean fields is truly something to behold.

It is our hope that this project will yield results that will help the government to remove obstacles for and provide support to small businessmen and women in Mexico, but we must accept as fact that policymakers will never be able to bottle up and replicate the ingenuity of true entrepreneurs. Plus, even if they could pull off that trick, they would first have to find these guys.