The Way You Look

It has been a pretty festive weekend, but then again it’s almost always ‘festive’ in Nairobi right? We always have an excuse to have a good time. And by all means we should.

Among the ‘best sellers’ when it comes to kujienjoy in Kenya is  nyama choma – roast meat.

So let’s say that you were going out to get some nyama choma. Would you get it from this guy:

Or, would you get it from this guy:

The first guy looks more experienced right? He’s got his chef hat-thing and that no-nonsense look going on. He actually went to school to learn how to roast your meat just right. That’s right, it’s your meat now, so you have to worry about who’s handling it. But who’s to say that the second guy has no experience? He’s could have been working way longer than the first guy. And who can prove that he does not know how to roast meat? Other than the fact that he’s not looking at it at the moment of course. As long as it’s not burning right? He could probably argue that he just doesn’t have the 3000 shilling jiko that the first guy has.

How would you decide which one to go to? Could it be by how clean they appear to be? The quality of the meat? The price? Location?

All these are reasonable factors to consider before choosing one of the two. In fact, every client thinks about these factors. What differs is the order of priority that they put them in. Some are more concerned about the price than how clean the guy is, while others are the opposite.

With an online business, most of the time you do not need to actually meet your clients face to face. There is the occasional meeting when the client needs extra attention, otherwise you are good to go. So most of us don’t really need to worry about what we look like because our clients won’t see us. So they can’t really judge us based on our outward appearance.

This could be a good thing since more often than not, if you have an online business that is successful, what you look like really does not matter. Other times, this is a disadvantage since you have to make up for the lack of ‘visibility’, if I can call it that, with other things. Like say, make your website ‘appealing to the eye’. This is not so hard though since you can always just hire someone to do it for you. You have to work hard on the other departments though like customer service and product delivery. Everything else has to be twice as good as a ‘physical’ business.

Anyway, on a normal weekend the two guys above get roughly the same number of clients. Surprised? Different locations, different target groups, different priority orders, but clients all the same. So it’s pretty much your choice. What kind of guy do you want to be? As long as you market yourself well and to the right people, you’ll still do good.

PS: If I were you, I’d pick guy A. Not giving you ideas or pushing you against a wall or anything like that. Just saying 🙂