Jackie Malomba is the owner of Parlisa Fitness Club. She is also an SME business liaison manager at a regional bank. For that young person who just started working and is flirting with thoughts of quitting to start a business, Jackie’s advice is to slow down.
Entrepreneurship is fulfilling, she says. But there are aspects of it that you can only learn from the workplace. There are things about it that you can’t learn from workshops. And she should know because she is both an employee and a successful entrepreneur.
By day, Jackie is a small and medium enterprise (SME) business liaison manager at a regional bank. She also owns Parlisa Group of Companies which include a gym and a laundry business.
“My business has been successful largely because I was able to put up working systems and processes that I learnt from employment,” she says.
Entrepreneurship was a longtime passion for her. She however only acted on it after two decades of working in a bank during which she had risen to top management. She felt that she had reached the glass ceiling and left her job with the intention to go back to school and to start a business.
“I had the option of using the benefits to pay off my mortgage but I instead took the risk of investing it in a business with the hope that it would pay off,” she says.
It has been four years running her business. She has made mistakes, lost money to unscrupulous employees but she has also learnt from those mistakes.
She is also a member of the Kenya Association of Women Business Owners (KOWBA). The mentorship she has gotten from here, she says, is invaluable. Her clientele has grown and from her own lessons, she offers consultancy services to people seeking to put up fitness centres.
“I made the mistake of starting off with cheaper alternatives and when these machines started breaking down, I knew I had made a costly mistake. I help my clients source for machines, recruit their staff and make the process less painful than it was for me.”
When she graduated earlier this year, she went back to work. She was lucky to find an employer whose passion for empowering women is in line with hers. Her job and her business feed off each other. Her clients are mainly female entrepreneurs. She either teaches one or learns from them. She reckons that there are many working women with excellent entrepreneurial skills who are not bold enough to start.
“You can successfully do both. Do a job you love and grow leaders in the form of people you assign the day-to-day running of the business to.”