Differences in management quality are an important contributor to productivity differences across countries. A key question is how to best improve poor management in developing countries. We test two different approaches to improving management in Colombian auto parts firms. The first uses intensive and expensive one-on-one consulting, while the second draws on agricultural extension approaches to provide consulting to small groups of firms at approximately one-third the cost of the individual approach. Both approaches lead to improvements in management practices of a similar magnitude (8–10 percentage points). The group-based intervention leads to significant increases in firm sales, profits, and labour productivity, while the impacts on firm performance are smaller in magnitude and less robust from the individual consulting. The results point to the potential of group-based approaches as a pathway to scaling up management improvements.

Many small firms lack the finance and marketing skills needed for growth. A standard approach is to train the entrepreneur in these skills. However, rather than requiring entrepreneurs to learn everything, an alternative is to move beyond the boundary of the entrepreneur and link firms to these skills in a marketplace through insourcing workers or outsourcing tasks to professionals. We conducted a randomized experiment in Nigeria to test the relative effectiveness of these different approaches in improving business practices. Insourcing and outsourcing both dominate business training and do at least as well as business consulting at half the cost.