The Way You Look

September 12, 2010 by 2 Comments

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 🙂

Filed Under: Make Money, Small Business

The Place For Love

September 10, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Weird topic to be talking about here, eh?

Love is a strong positive emotion of regard and affection. It is mostly used in regard to loving someone else. When you love someone greatly, much of your energy goes into making that person feel your love. You put hundreds of hours into these efforts. If you do not invest in your love, chances are that she/he will find someone else, who can do that.

A friend of mine started a new business the other day. It is an online business and so my friend does not spend the whole day working on it, he does not need to. He came to me for advice when he noticed that one of his sites was failing despite “frequent updates”. After some thought, I diagnosed his situation as being a case of a lack of sufficient love.

Managing a website is hard work. It goes beyond just regular updates. Managing a website is a popularity contest carried out among millions, yes millions, of websites. Why should I come to your tiny little site when I have akina Facebook to spend my time on? Your website may be the best in the world but I do not have time for it until I see that it would be valuable to me in some way.

Think of it this way: there may be an amazing and super interesting and motivating book available in a library. But if the library has thousands of other books, and this particular book happens to be in a top corner of some shelf, what are the chances that a great number of people will read it? Websites can be thought of in a similar way.

For the most part, in order to distinguish your website you have to love it. You have to spend hours thinking and working on it, trying and re-trying, testing and re-testing until you get something that people actually want to use.

I find that the best way to grow a site is not to try and target anyone – just target a small niche group of people who you think will relate to the sites content. Instead of making a site about farm animals, for example, maybe you could start with a site just about “white little piggies”. Niche-ing down this way has two benefits:

  1. It is probable that the smaller niche is closer to your heart than a more general one. You can therefore be more passionate.
  2. It is very easy for people to relate to your site. If your site was about farm animals in general and I was looking for one about “white little piggies” then I may overlook your generalized site.

If you aim to make money online through a website, be warned that it needs the kind of passion that can only come from Love.

PS
I do not know why I chose to use “white little piggies” as my example.

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Tagged With:

6 Time Management Tips For The Small Business Owner

September 7, 2010 by 1 Comment

These are some Time Management Tips I utilize (most of the time……) to reduce my time commitment in the business, so I can spend time on more valuable activities or just for personal time. I think they can be effective no matter what type of business that you are involved in.

1. Put a Price Tag on Your Time
Take the amount of money that you made last year and divide it by 2000 (40 hours x 50 weeks). This is your hourly rate. Whenever you are doing something of questionable value, ask yourself if you would pay yourself to do that activity? If it’s not, either eliminate that activity because it’s not productive, or outsource it to someone at a lower rate. You can now focus on more valuable work.

2. Meetings are Time Management Killers

  • Don’t schedule meetings if they aren’t really necessary. I used to have a lot of scheduled weekly calls with some suppliers and other partners that we worked with. They would often be valuable at first but after several meetings, everyone felt obligated to join the meetings because they were valuable previously. Unfortunately, we spent the same amount of time in them and got less and less done. Maybe you can block off the time and meet only if someone really needs to that week. Better yet, don’t meet with them unless you have some specific business decision to make.
  • Don’t schedule meetings for an hour if you need 15 minutes. If that is the time needed to cover something, schedule it for that amount of time.
  • Have agendas for your meetings and stick to them. There really should only be 1 or 2 things that you need to talk about
  • Meeting to talk about nothing specific is a waste of your time.
  • Try to limit uncommitted conversations. In the business environment, it is perfectly natural to have small talk amongst people you work with on an every day basis. These are conversations about the weather or television shows you watched the previous night. It is important to have these conversations with others in order to connect with them and show you are a human being. However, too many of these kinds of conversations are wasteful of your valuable time . It takes hard work to know when you are doing it, catch yourself and get focused back on the business item at hand.

3. Limit Hypothesizing
A lot of smart people waste a lot of time hypothesizing an answer to something when they should just stop and go get the facts. Too much time can be spent guessing or speaking with feelings versus speaking with data and facts. It is perfectly acceptable to admit “I don’t know the answer” as long as you follow it up with “but I will find out and get back to you”.

4. Keep Your Workspace Clean and Organized
Keep your desk and computer clean and organized. I don’t have a permanent workspace or office (and never have in my young business career), so I treat every location I go into as a temporary workspace. At the end of the day, I pack everything up I need, put it in my briefcase and leave.

5. Use a “To-Do” list
Yes, one and only one list. I personally like to use Google calendar to keep my To-Do list but I know a lot of people who are proponents of taking it off the computer and away from e-mail so they aren’t tied so closely together. I might do that eventually.

Here are some other real important points around To-Do lists:

  • Do not use your email inbox as a To Do list. Your email is a business tool used to communicate with others.
  • Always make your To-Do list short enough that you can complete it the next day. Don’t have 20 things that you will never realistically be able to accomplish. I like to have 2 or 3 big things that I need to accomplish.
  • Complete your “To Do” list for the next day before you close up shop for the night.
  • Review your list and work to move things off it and always place new things on it.
  • If you have your list in Outlook or Google Calendar, print it out and work off that paper.
  • I read Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People a couple of years ago and he had a great concept of placing your time in quadrants. He noted that highly effective people prioritized their time around important items and urged the notion that not everything is urgent all the time. So, I prioritize actions around these categories and try to spend most of my time in Quadrant 2 (Important Stuff but Not Urgent). There are enough unforeseen problems that pop-up and consume your attention each day. It is always okay to ask others when they want something back from you to gauge the importance and urgency.

6. Check Voicemail and E-mail Twice a Day
Check your voicemail and e-mail twice a day. Don’t check them first thing in the morning. I recommend checking it at 11 AM and 4 PM.

This means that you absolutely have to remove any new e-mail notifications from your computer so you’re not getting a notification whenever you receive your e-mail. I even turn off Outlook’s automatic Send/Receive so that I can get stuff in e-mail without checking out everything that was sent to me.

Best of Luck with these Time Management Tips
These time management tips are intended to be helpful. They work for me on most occasions. No one is perfect all the time and it takes great discipline to police yourself if you want to achieve higher levels of productivity and effectiveness.

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

Rich Man, Poor Man

August 25, 2010 by 3 Comments

working less will help your business grow

Over the years, we’ve worked with very many people and many, many small businesses. I it’s always interesting to see how a small business is run and how the owner approaches it. I was thinking about this today, and I realised there are two types of small business owners: hard workers, and smart workers.

Comparing these two is very eye-opening. Take two businesses in the same industry with the same amount of experience and you will get drastically different results depending on the owner’s approach to business. I am going to just say it: – some people work too much, which hurts the growth of their business.

I know a smart guy who only works a few hours a day on his business compared to the 12-15 hour days that other owners work each day (and a few hours each weekend). Based on my real rough estimates, I believe that his business also made about 5x as much as the other owners (in the same industry). Imagine that – you work a quarter of the time and your business makes five times as much money. Or to look at it another way, you are 20 times more productive with the time spent managing the business.

Both types of owners probably make a very comfortable income but even if I made the same amount of money, I would take the business that requires a quarter of my time. I could use that time to do whatever I wanted or I could use it to grow my business or start new businesses.

What is the Difference?
Smart business owners are incredibly gifted at creating a process oriented business. It’s a very educational experience every time we work with them or visit their offices. Everything such an owner does has to be broken down into repeatable systems and processes. If it can’t, he’s not interested in it. He could easily take on new business if he wanted, but the work would be ad hoc, and would not scale well. If it isn’t something that he can scale, he won’t do it. It might cost him 2 or 3 customers a month, but if he is spending his time creating systems to bring in 10 other customers on his terms, which one do you think is a better deal?

The other type of owner is very detail oriented. He believes very strongly in personal service and is involved in every step along the way, from marketing, to sales, to operations. Instead of delegating work to other employees, he does everything himself. Instead of creating a product that he can sell over and over again, he customizes everything for his clients.

Remember, this owner is very successful and he would be correct if he said he’s been successful for a long time doing it in his style, so I don’t want to say that hard work isn’t the right way to grow. But if he had just relinquished some control and created systems and processes so that other people could execute them, I bet his business would be a lot bigger than it is now. If he decided to put in just 1/2 the time each day that he is used to, he would be been forced to create systems that other people can execute.

When Hard Work is Required
When you are starting your own business, you need to spend a lot of time in the business, growing it. If you don’t do it, no one will. But instead of doing everything yourself, you need to start creating systems and processes so that other people can start operating the business. If you sell some sort of product, don’t be the salesperson, customer service, and operations manager.

Start out by creating systems to outsource some of the work and then continue to move away from each part of the business. Otherwise, you will be working too much and you will end up hurting the growth potential of your own business.

Filed Under: Case Study, Small Business Tagged With:

Some Interesting Kenyan Sites

August 14, 2010 by 1 Comment

Like Chapaa PresentsJazzified – this a new blog dedicated to talking about Jazz music. It provides an interesting and eye-opening peep into the local jazz seen from the eyes of a dedicated fan. If you’re a jazz fan, you should visit and follow this blog.

Eat Out – is a beautifully made and executed website that showcases restaurants in Nairobi and Kenya. If you want to find a place to…eat out, then this is the site for you. The site is not only elegantly designed but it has been managed well and has virtually taken over its niche.

KenyaMoja – a nice website built in the image of popurls. If you find yourself with too many local websites to keep up with, then KenyaMoja is the place to go to – it lists news and opinion pieces from all the major Kenyan news sources and blogs. Would make for a good home page, if you ask me.

Like Chapaa Presents is a weekly showcase of interesting sites in Kenya.

Filed Under: Cool Sites

Success & Motivation

August 9, 2010 by 1 Comment

Mark Cuban is an American entrepreneur. He is the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, an NBA basketball team, owner of Landmark Theatres, and Chairman of HDNet, an HDTV cable network in America.

He is also an extremely rich man and a very successful business man.

So you know what? When mark was 24 he was jobless, lived in a house that was probably condemned for destruction with 5 other friends and dreamed of running his own business one day but had no idea what or when to start or even if he could actually do it. That actually sounds like someone ‘normal’, like you and I right?

Mark Cuban has a VERY interesting series of articles he titled “Success and Motivation” that give you his story of what it was like starting his first business. Please have a look at it, you will be motivated to succeed.

Filed Under: Internet Culture Tagged With:

Hustling Online Just Became A Little Easier

July 28, 2010 by 2 Comments

DukaPressSo tuseme you want “in” on this Internet thing. You’ve heard people make money online, and you want your share. Of course the first thing you should do is get yourself onto a computer and head over to this blog and read up on all the things you can do to make money online.

There are hundreds of things you can do to make money online. One of the easiest, most fulfilling and most intuitive ways of doing so it to sell something online. This is something that most people already understand – you’ve probably sold dozens of things in the offline world. Selling those same things (or others) online may be a new experience but it certainly is something you already understand.

What do you need to do to start making money online in Kenya by selling stuff online? I’d argue that you FIRST need to think hard about your business. Selling online is no different from selling anywhere else. Your business plan must make sense if you are to succeed. You must think realistically and sensibly about what you want to sell, where you will find it, how much you will sell for, how you will deliver it to customers and how you will market and advertise your new shop. This is the hard part.

Next, you should think about technical issues – i.e. find a way to set up an online shop. E-commerce technology has existed for years and there are lots and lots of options here. A sad note is that in Kenya, even very simple online shops will usually cost you at least Kshs 50,000/-. This is a bit high, of course, but it is justifiable given the complexities involved.

Of course this was true only up to last week. Last week DukaPress was launched. What is DukaPress? It is a tool that lets you start your own simple online shop in less than 15 minutes. Have you ever tried to get a blog over at WordPress.com? That’s how easy it is to get a DukaPress shop up and running.

Why DukaPress?
There are many other options to DukaPress (akina Magento, osCommerce, CubeCart, etc etc), so what makes DukaPress worth it? In my opinion, DukaPress is probably the simplest way to get a fully functional online duka. Take Magento, for example, it has a fantastic feature-list but actually setting up and running a Magento shop is a nightmare that is too much to bear for the average person.

How Easy Is DukaPress?
Have a look at this online shop. That shop is powered by DukaPress. It was built in ten minutes! It is a fully featured shop and can accept payments via: AlertPay, Paypal, MPESA, yuCash, and ZAP among others. If you want to build the same exact shop in even less time, you can do so!

All you need to do is:

How easy is that? Should take you a few minutes in total if everything is ready! If you’re stuck, we’re here to help.

DukaPress is and always will be free to use, and it is from Kenya.

Filed Under: Internet Culture, Small Business Tagged With: