Charlotte's Web - A New Adventure (Dec 2002)

(Caution: This tale contains some technical talk. Just skip it if you don't understand it.)

Last February, Hugo (my Belizean partner in Consultants North) got tired of people asking him "Where's your office" and started looking for a place. He found a nice space on the south end of Fifth Avenue - one of the two main streets that bracket the plaza - and, over Charlotte's objections, we rented it and fixed it up as a space where we could do some consulting and eventually put in a programmers bay. At the time, Charlotte emphatically said,

"If you don't have some consulting business by June, we're doing something else with that space."

The months rolled by as we waited for BSSB (Belize Social Security Board) to respond to our proposal and looked for local consulting to pay the rent. Finally, in July, Charlotte and I started thinking about something else. An "Internet Café" had opened in town, selling time for 6$ an hour.

"Crazy," I said. "You can't make any money buying an hour from BTL for $3, and selling it for $6. It doesn't cover replacement of modems and other equipment." I set out to prove this by building an Excel model. Low and behold, I discovered that a Cyber Café could be "a bird nest on the ground."

The key, obvious to any good modeler, is that you are selling the same hour to several people at once. Because of the "think time" between each user's interactions with the Internet, you can service five or six users with a single telephone line. (Even a BTL line.)

My model used five machines, because that's how much room we had. I included debt service to buy parts and build five new machines. However, Charlotte hates debt.

"You don't even know whether there's a market. Why don't you do it with the machines you can scrounge up? Run your model with three machines!" I did, and the café looked marginally profitable, even with three machines. We started campaigning to get Hugo to contribute the machine that he had given his son last fall. It turned out to be a very old Gateway 133, but the monitor was handsome and it looks good in our current line up.

While I was modeling and scheming for the Café, Charlotte was starting to think about a book exchange to take advantage of the books that we have been accumulating since we got here. Fortune was with us, in the form of a family that was packing up and leaving Belize. They had a distress sale, and we picked up three tall bookcases, another coffee maker and grinder, and a little table to set them on. We bought one of their two nice big refrigerators and moved it into the house, and took our smaller one and moved it into the Café. It holds a case-and-a-half of soft drinks, a case of agua litres, and a case of fruit drinks. In the freezer, we keep "Ideals," a frozen bag of strawberry slush kinda like a Popsicle.

With the office, we had inherited a big (8 ft long, 4 ft high) counter, which looked like a white elephant in the consulting office. It turned out to be a great place for Charlotte to put a display of her jewelry and other crafts. We also added some additional local crafts from the Quan sisters (Lisa's sisters) and a display of local maps.

Along the south wall, I built a 16-foot desk similar to those we built in rooms of the Delta Sig Fraternity house at Arizona -- plywood top, 1x2 frame and legs - room for five or six computers without crowding. After I spilled some brown stain on the top, we stained it all black with shoe dye. (Don't knock it until you've tried it. It's a lot cheaper than wood stain. An old trick I learned from my first mother-in-law.)

We had painted the office in February before we moved in - white walls and gray floor. The floor needed painting again, so we did that. It really needs tile, but that certainly isn't in the budget for a while. Our competitor put in Air Conditioning - expensive to buy, and even more expensive to run (probably $200-300US a month) but we have a back door that ventilates the place. By the time we opened in September, the days were cool enough that we got buy with a couple of good fans. Now, most of the time, we don't need a fan at all. Of course, we're only running three desktops and a laptop - not a big heat source, yet. Come next summer, we will need to seal the windows, put in an air-tight see-thru front door, and a heavy-duty A/C to handle six machines and the crowd that (we hope) they attract.

For now, we have a simple little network. Originally, I used the same BNC hookup I used in Colorado. However, BNC in the tropics is problematical, The connections corrode and go bad even as you speak ("rust never sleeps") and parts of the network are continually breaking down. Finally, last month, I had accumulated an 8-node hub and enough Category-5 cables to connect all the machines.

When I was setting up the machines, I thought I would use Windows NT 4.0 and proxy server as my server. However, when I installed NT on my would-be server, a Celeron 333Mhz with 64Meg of RAM, it was appallingly slow. I fell back to "Internet Connection Sharing" (ICS) -- an enhancement to Windows 98 Second Edition which I couldn't get to work when I first tried it at our house. There were a lot of detailed instructions in my MSDN Database (thanks to Lane Rowland) and so I fell back to Windows 98SE on all machines, and installed ICS on the server. The instructions for setting up a client were very explicit, and we had the network running right away, with the server automatically dialing the Internet whenever anyone brought up a browser. However, the server instructions were much more vague, and we couldn't always connect to the printers spread out over the network. We really didn't get the whole lash-up working absolutely right until last week, Eric suggested that I installed NetBui on top of the TCP/IP network. We did that, and everything is working. The network:

CN1: Server: Celeron 333, 64Mb RAM, HP640C Printer, HP-9500 CD-Writer.

CN2: Client: Gateway Pentium 133, 160Mb RAM, HP722 Printer, HP-9100 CD-Writer.

CN3: Client: Celeron 333, 192 MB RAM.

RIXLAPTOP: Client, Dell 133, 40 MB RAM, Windows 95.

Kinda lightweight, by US standards, but what-the-heck, this is the third world!!

We opened the first week in September. That month we made enough to pay the rent, and half of the Internet bill. The next month, we made enough to pay all of the bills.

This month, we may show a double-digit profit. <grin> Maybe not. The key is utilization. Our competitor has a full house; we have the tourists and the left-over Belizeans. However, the place is pretty different, and we think that will help us as time goes by.

Today, we can already count a series of accomplishments:

1. We moved all of our computer operations out of our house, where we couldn't really charge for them very easily because they didn't really look formal.

2. We began to establish a "computer presence" in Corozal. Although I did some computer repair before, I am gaining a reputation as someone who has a way with laptops and software. I don't stock parts, so I usually decline desktop repair.

3. We began to develop a clientele of readers, who come in regularly and exchange two books for one. (Most of them started by bringing in a group of books and building up a credit.)

4. I have a little crowd of cronies and tourists who come by to drink a coke or coffee and chat about the day.

5. Charlotte has an expanded place for her group of crafters. Many times, she gets out her paints and works on her shells and bamboo paintings right in the cafe.

6. Because we help the students who come in (they get a special reduced rate) we are getting a reputation for being a good way to get an A on a research paper.

7. We figured out how to use the espresso machine that Peggy gave us. That promises to be the biggest advance in Belizean Cyber Cafes! Espresso! Latte!! Cappuccino!!!

8. We meet lots of new people in a very neutral setting; no obligations to be friends or even sit and talk at length. We're getting a better sense of just how the Gringo population is growing in Corozal.

Not too bad for four months. We'll just have to see if the Lord really wants us to prosper.

Best,

Sr. ric

New:  (Nov 2005)  Charlotte now owns Charlotte's Web:  You can chat with her on her own website here. 

Newest:  (Jun 2006)  Well, I just heard that Charlotte has closed Charlotte's Web.  I don't know why, because it was the only bookstore of its kind in Belize.  There were lots and lots of copykat internet cafes, tho, and that could have been the problem.  If you have any input, please write me. 

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