Archives for December 2009

Simple Business Registration In Kenya

December 8, 2009 by 121 Comments


Following our call for help, we can finally report on how to register a simple business in Kenya. It is our hope that this post will help demystify business registration in Kenya and make it simpler and more accessible to more people.

How To Register A Sole Proprietorship/Partnership In Kenya
The procedure here is pretty easy and should not cost more than Kshs 900/-. Here is what you need to do:

  1. Pick out a business name that you wish to register. Write a simple letter addressed to the “Registrar General”. This letter need only ask the registrar to confirm if your chosen business name is available for registration.
  2. Make your way over to Sheria House, and to the Registrar of Companies within the Sheria House compound.
  3. Go over to counter No 1 and hand in your letter(s). You will need to pay Kshs 100 for every name that you wish to register. This is what is called “business name search”. The process takes three days to a week, max (usually). You will receive a blue receipt.
  4. Three days after handing in your letter, go back to Sheria House and show the attendant your receipt. If your chosen name is available for registration, you will receive a letter from the registrar of companies that, basically, tells you your name search was successful. You will also receive a form, Form BN/2.
  5. What you need to do is fill out Form BN/2 as completely as possible. If you are registering a sole proprietorship, the part where it says “Particulars of proprietor or partners” will bear only one name, otherwise you can put in up to 20 partners (for a partnership).
  6. Go back to Sheria House and hand in your completed Form BN/2. You will need to pay Kshs 800/-. After a week or so, you will have to go back to Sheria House to collect your business registration certificate. Congratulations, you shall then have registered a new business!

Concerning Partnerships
The process of registering a sole-proprietorship and partnership is the same at Sheria house.

However, because of the unique nature of partnerships (the fact that one partner’s actions can make other partners equally liable) it is recommended that one also registers a partnership deed that clearly defines rights, duties and obligations of all partners.

A partnership deed once drawn up is supposed to be registered as a public document at the Ministry of Lands.

We hope that someone, somewhere, finds this article useful. We shall publish one on limited companies shortly.

The map below shows the location of Sheria House in Nairobi. You can also use this link to view the map.


View Larger Map

Please do note that we have no lawyers on the Like Chapaa team. If any of the above is erroneous, kindly help us correct it. If you live outside of Nairobi and you know what the procedure is like in your town/city, please help us incorporate that information in this post.

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With:

Freelancers & SEO – What You Should Know

December 3, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Freelancers mostly get paid for their time and their expertise. You go to a freelancer because you want her to do something for you that you cannot do yourself. SEO, on the other hand is search engine optimisation – it is what you do if you want more visitors to your website getting to your site through the search engines (Google, etc).

Let’s assume that like any other good and forward-looking freelancer, you have a website. Is SEO important to you?? Honestly, search engine traffic is not tremendously useful for freelancers. That’s just the truth. Unless you’re targeting extremely local markets (like “graphic designers in Kisumu”), then SEO is mostly a waste of time and money.

Why? Well, generally, the market is too big to get any appreciable amount of useful web traffic. There’s too much competition – too many logo designers, too many web designers, etc. In my experience, it is hard for freelancers to get search engine traffic that leads to actual paying customers. Believe it or not, most people who are going to visit a freelancer’s website will probably actually type in the site into their web browsers (they already know about you and your site – maybe they read it off your business card) or people who clicked on a link somewhere and got to your site.

So, dear freelancers-reading-this, if I were you, I wouldn’t spend any money hiring anyone to do SEO for you. Of course do not ignore it completely, just don’t focus on it – an online freelancer doesn’t need 1000 visitors a day to make money online. The good thing is that SEO is not the only way to market online.

How do you market your freelancing service?

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: , ,

How To Start An Online Shop

December 2, 2009 by 15 Comments

One of the most common questions we get goes like, “Hey, how do i set up an online shop?” Because we’re all about seeing the Internet come through for people in Kenya, especially financially, I decided to write an article on how to start your own online shop, easy. Enjoy 🙂

Trust me, it is a very daunting task and it involves a hell of a lot. Are you up for all that? I do not know. I do know one thing though, the opportunity to make lots and lots of money is still very much there. In all markets most online stores are, for lack of better words, a complete waste of time.

No joke – there are so many badly designed and structured online shops out there that you’d be surprised. You could choose any market place and still have a very good shot at making a killing. If only you use correct procedure. And guess what? The wealth of tools available for your use is just unbelievable – challenging the Top Dogs in any market is something very do-able.

Where do you start?
As I said earlier, starting an online shop is no easy task. Should you start your own, you are bound to make lots and lots of mistakes. However, I beg you to always work with this in mind: “Customers first, money second“. Got it? Good, you’ll never go wrong. Many, many businesses mess up this simple task.

Before anything else, you need to ask yourself the same questions you’d ask yourself if you were going into business in the offline world. Do you have something to market? Will people buy what you want to sell? Will they pay enough money for you to make a profit?

Next you’ll need to choose a name for your site/shop. Since this will be your identity, it is VERY important. Take time to choose a good and easy-to-remember name. Read more about this, if need be.

Building your website
Unfortunately, if you want the best results there are only two courses of action:

  1. Hire professionals to build you a site. People like us. 🙂
  2. Do it yourself, but only if you have the technical know-how.

That said, here are some things you should keep in mind:

  • How many products do you have? If you have just a few, your site will look bare. (Depending on how it is built)
  • What type of products are you selling? This will affect how you display them – jewellery will be displayed differently from, say, aquariums. :p
  • You must have good quality pictures of your products.
  • Include item descriptions jameni! Of course your customers want to know this.
  • Ensure that your site loads quickly and that it is easy to navigate.
  • As well as making your site the best it can be for customers, make sure it is very easy for you to update it i.e. add new products or change prices.
  • Make the selling process as easy and as fast as possible. You don’t really need to make your customers register at your site, do you? This is an unnecessary step that will cost you sales!

Because I love my readers, I shall suggest a super easy way to build a top-of-the-range online shop. Listen carefully:

  1. Download wordpress
  2. Install wordpress on a server somewhere. How?
  3. Install this wordpress theme. How?
  4. Install this wordpress plugin. How?
  5. You have your very nice online shop!

Other tools you can use: Magento, osCommerce.

Web hosting
One your website is made, it needs to be hosted somewhere. This is so that it is accessible to the whole of the Internet. Learn more.

If you’re going to handle any kind of financial transactions through your website, you need to make sure your web host offers secure servers. This means that they offer SSL encryption. You should find out whether your prospective web host offers SSL encryption as part of its regular package or charges extra for this service.

When your website is your storefront, if your website is down, your store is closed – or worse, effectively nonexistent. So you need a web host that offers at least a 99% uptime guarantee. While asking about a web host’s uptime guarantee, you might also inquire as to its back up systems in case of emergencies.

There are hundreds of good web hosts out there. I recommend that you choose us. 🙂

Marketing your online shop
The key to online retailing is to strive to get as many people visiting your shop as possible. Please, please keep search engine optimisation (SEO) in mind. If need be, hire someone to do your SEO.

There are some helpful articles here and here. Oh and we are also available to help you with SEO.

Dealing with payments
You will need a way to accept payments online, or at the very least accept orders online. Many modern online shop creation systems (like the ones I suggested earlier) do this right out of the box. If you intend to sell to people in Kenya, it would be helpful to be able to receive payments by ZAP and MPESA. Here’s an article we wrote about this topic.

Conclusion
We haven’t covered everything you need to know in this article, but most of it is up there. You can have your shop ready by next week if you follow what the article says.

Good luck 🙂

PS I was thinking of doing a follow-up article on this topic by going step by step through what I did when setting up an existing online shop. Anyone interested?

Image courtesy of Jesse757.

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: , , ,

Form A Kenyan Company

December 1, 2009 by 6 Comments

Last week, I called out for help in making business registration easier in Kenya. I got a lot of responses (thanks!!!). Interestingly, a lot of these responses simply just pointed me to this website: formAKenyanCompany.

The site says this about itself:

formAKenyanCompany.com is an online specialist in limited company formation covering everything necessary to facilitate the formation and/or registration of a company in Kenya . All types of Kenyan company formation can be catered for and everything necessary to set up a limited company in the Kenya, including filing and all required documents, including the memorandum and articles of association are provided. Our automated on-line formation is quick, simple and affordable enabling the immediate check of company names with the Company Registry. All formations are done electronically with our incorporation system and delivered manually to the respective government offices. All costs include all necessary documents and filing fees at Sheria House and the company formation process is usually complete within 7 days.

Nice, isn’t it? Do check it out!

Filed Under: Small Business, Tips Hacking and Reviews Tagged With: