Written by Anushka Ratnayake, Founder & Executive Director
It’s hard to imagine that myAgro’s award-winning technology platform began on a simple Excel spreadsheet back in 2011. As the organization grew, it was clear myAgro needed to transition to a technology platform that could better support a growing customer base.
To keep track of farmer enrollment and payments, myAgro soon transitioned from using Excel to using a much more sophisticated Salesforce technology to create the mobile layaway database. In transitioning to use Salesforce, myAgro designed a platform with an audit program that analyzed every payment made by clients during with the goal of generating a lot of feedback from the field. This ensured that the mobile layaway platform was working effectively. While the program required an auditor—in myAgro’s case, a field agent—for every 500 farmers (which was expensive), it was worthwhile in that year.
The team quickly realized, however, that if the audit team continued to scale in lockstep with the rest of the program, myAgro would end up with an expensive, people-heavy program that would decrease sustainability and/or decrease scale. Added audit costs would be incorporated into the enrollment fee paid by farmers upon joining myAgro, and it would be difficult for farmers to bear the additional cost. To avoid this, myAgro adjusted auditor targets and started building a program to increase the efficiency of audit operations. The team also stress-tested the audit per farmer cost within the myAgro financial model to see if the organization would still be able to reach field sustainability as planned (by 2021).
Scaling Goals per Program
As myAgro scales, we’ve generated some important lessons that influence how we operate:
- Lab v. Factory – In a trial phase, we might over-hire field agents so we can learn as much as possible about how our clients make payments. However, in order to scale we need to think long term about costs and hire efficiently.
- Increasing Efficiency – Each person we add should be more efficient and lower our costs over time. We are aiming to serve over 450 farmers per field agent by 2022, up from 118 farmers in 2013.
- Good Managers – Good field supervisors help field agents do their jobs better and more efficiently. At the same time, field supervisors also need to be increasingly efficient. If they covered 20 villages in year 1, they should cover 25 in year 2 or 3. There are limits to how much efficiency each post can have; at that point we need look at other areas to continuously increase efficiency (for example increasing the revenue that each field supervisor manages).
- Methods – Using technology, we can create a different target (auditing vendors instead of auditing farmers), or invest in supervisors or existing field agents to do additional tasks as a way to create more efficiency in the core program.
- Test First – In doing the above, it’s still important to test – evaluate – modify before scaling to figure out assumptions, incentives, and how to have a high level of excellent execution and control.
