Management Practice Reversion
RCTClinical Trial
Intensive, personalized management consulting temporarily increases the adoption of formal business practices among microenterprises. However, microentrepreneurs gradually abandon these routines once active advisory support ends if the administrative effort does not yield measurable financial gains.
Picture this
Imagine an athlete hiring a personal coach who teaches them to log every calorie in a notebook. While the coach visits every week, the athlete logs their meals. Once the coaching stops and the daily effort yields no noticeable performance gain, the athlete stops logging and returns to previous habits.
What the evidence says
Record-keeping adoption among consulting recipients surged by 45 percentage points at 6 months (Round 3, p < 0.01) and remained 26 percentage points higher at 12 months (Round 7, p < 0.05), but declined to a statistically insignificant 12 percentage point difference (with only 28% maintaining records) by 24 months (Round 8), 11 months after consulting ceased.
- Who was studied
- N = 160 urban tailors and seamstresses in Accra, Ghana.
- How
- Randomized field experiment evaluating one-on-one consulting from Ernst & Young (averaging 10 contact hours per tailor over one year) against a control group across 8 survey waves over 24 months.
What to do
Audit microenterprise management practice retention at 12 and 24 months post-intervention to confirm whether operational changes persist after active advisory support concludes.
From the source
"Record keeping in the consulting group declined from a high of 63% of consulting tailors in round 3 to only 28% in round 8, so this impact is caused by consulting tailors abandoning record keeping, not control tailors catching up."
8dfcee5c-2a63-4460-a220-837509002b85-Consulting and Capital Experiments with Microenterprise Tailors in Ghana.pdf