Learning to Grow from Peers: In-Shop Coaching Lifts Profits 35% for Jakarta's Micro-Retailers

Small retail shop owners in Jakarta, Indonesia's capital, know remarkably little about which everyday business practices — record-keeping, stock management, marketing, joint household decision-making — actually move the needle on profit. A 2019 World Bank Policy Research Working Paper by Patricio Dalton, Julius Rüschenpöhler, Burak Uras and Bilal Zia tested whether simply telling shop owners what successful local peers do, in different formats, could close that gap.

To test whether printed materials, video, and in-person coaching — alone or combined — showing shop owners what exemplary local peers do can improve business practices and profits.

Researchers randomly assigned 1,301 shop owners across 29 districts of South, East and West Jakarta to one of four groups: a control group; a free handbook distilling the specific practices of exemplary local shop owners; the handbook plus a 25-minute documentary featuring successful peers; or the handbook plus two 30-minute in-shop coaching visits from an implementation assistant. A fourth arm combined all three elements.

Eighteen months later, the handbook alone changed nothing. Shops that received in-shop coaching saw record-keeping adoption rise 6.5 percentage points (a 33% gain over the 19.6% control-group baseline), monthly profits rise 35% (about USD 310), and sales rise 16.7%. The combined arm (handbook, video and coaching) produced broader practice gains across planning, stocking, marketing and joint decision-making (5-7 percentage points each), with profits up 21% and sales up 16.2%. The video-only arm showed a positive but statistically insignificant 12% profit effect.

The result points to a specific mechanism: shop owners who practised implementing new routines with hands-on assistance ('doing') outperformed those who only watched footage of successful peers ('observing'). The intervention remains a research pilot rather than a citywide programme, and its coaching-visit model is comparatively costly to deliver at scale without further adaptation.