TransRio en Ingles

Today I added this to the FAQ page:

What’s your motivation?

I’m excited to be starting up Transrio for two reasons, each separate and distinct:

It’s what I really, really want to be doing. I love every aspect of it — the opportunity to be working with other smart business people, the challenges (for me) of transacting business across borders and in Spanish, the steep learning curve. Already I’m making connections in Argentina, learning web design, assembling translation tools, studying online payment options, reading about interesting companies. It’s 100% stuff that pulls me along, and (more…)

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Natalia wrote me a quick e-mail encouraging me to look into potential opportunities in franchising, there’s a lot of activity right now in Argentina. This is premature of course — I need my website first — but today I digressed for a quick side trip to read up on the subject. When Transrio finally gets rolling I won’t be surprised if there’s some kind of franchising connection.

Below I reproduce our little conversation; included are some links to franchise organizations in Argentina. (more…)

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I’m gradually cranking through these FAQs. Here’s the latest:

Why Argentina?

I hope to have this job for the next 20 years. I knew at the start that I would need to specialize in one country, because Transrio is small, and has to keep its focus. The countries I know best are the United States, Bolivia, Mexico, and Argentina. Of the three Latin American countries Argentina has by far the best feeling for me overall, based on what I’m hoping to do with Transrio.

I love Bolivia, but establishing a business there right now feels like fighting somebody else’s battle. I love Mexico, and it would be almost the opposite of Bolivia — very easy to do business there. It’s cheap to get to, and as a country it’s officially Open for Business. But it feels to me like there is so much happening cross-border with the United States that Transrio would maybe get drowned out in the confusion. Mexican business people already know how to get what they need from the United States. I’m thinking Transrio wouldn’t have as many opportunities to be uniquely useful.

Argentina, on the other hand, is a whole different case. It (more…)

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Today I added this to the FAQ page:

What does the GC stand for?

Transrio GC is the formal name of the business. GC is Spanish for KM, which is short for Knowledge Management, or Gestion de Conocimiento.

Neither KM nor GC are part of daily business vocabulary, in fact many good business people don’t even know what they mean. But there are KM trade journals and big KM conventions in the United States, with smaller GC conventions in Spain and Latin America. People working in the field get together to compare notes, and vendors show up with expensive KM solutions for sale. Most true KM/GC practitioners work in very-large-enterprise settings, like multinationals or government. This is where a large population of far-flung knowledge workers need to collaborate in a messy complexity of projects, coordinating production and customer relationships, and so knowledge management turns into its own department, with its own lingo and theories.

Formal KM, the kind seen in KM magazines and conventions, doesn’t actually apply well to small-enterprise problems. In smaller businesses KM just happens. It’s either done well, or it’s done poorly, but people don’t think of it much because it’s an integral part of their work. (more…)

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Today I posted the beginnings of an FAQ page — click the link in the sidebar under “About.” I’m planning to keep chipping away on this, so stay tuned.

Transrio isn’t in the dictionary (English or Spanish) but it is easily understandable as something about crossing a river. There’s actually a story behind it.

Right after selling Great Harvest we celebrated — or rather, decompressed — by taking a really long road trip around the United States. One of our favorite parts was when we followed the US-Mexican border (more…)

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Check out the latest new page if you want, it’s my current best-effort at explaining the Transrio idea. The ideas in this essay will also serve as the starting point for the all-important intro I intend to write for translation into Spanish. Here’s the text:

About Transrio

Whenever possible, it makes sense to grow a new business by beginning at the beginning — small — making little mistakes and enjoying little successes. That way you can learn along the way, building piece by piece. Transrio is starting as just me, working part time. Long-term I see potential for something a lot bigger, quite profitable, and much more interesting. But the starting point is unglamorous and ordinary. At this stage — the first five years perhaps — Transrio will (more…)

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I haven’t been posting anything because I’ve been working on the “About…” pages — click the links over on the sidebar, you’ll see I added a description of what the blog is for, as well as a short biographical of myself and some photos. Next I’m planning to do “About Transrio.”

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TransRio’s most important domain is now registered in Argentina, and successfully pointed at the website:

www.transrio.com.ar

This “.com.ar” version of TransRio is the one I’m intending to use for everything, at least at first. In addition though, I’ve registered Bolivia & Mexico, along with the regular .com & .org:

transrio.bo
transrio.com
transrio.org
transrio.com.mx
transrio.org.mx

Any one of these should click through (more…)

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Today I signed an initial four-month contract with Natalia Belén Novillo, she’s agreed to provide Transrio with a local address and contact in Córdoba so that I can get the Argentina domain registration finished. She has her own business providing all sorts of services as a Virtual Assistant; her website is www.conectar-c.com.ar. I feel I was lucky to find her, and I’ll likely be using her services for lots of other projects in the near future, as Transrio rolls along.

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TransRio is still working its way toward a Web presence, but so far all of the work has been in the background, there’s nothing really to look at yet. Right now I’m trying to reserve my Argentine domain, which I hope will be www.Transrio.com.ar. This requires TransRio to get a local mailing address in Argentina first; I think I’m close to having that solved. (more…)

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