Sarah Kabu is the managing director and co-founder of Bonfire Adventures, a domestic and international tours and travel company.
Starting and Building a Business: many people believe that you must have plenty of capital to start with. However, this is not always true. For example, we started this company with Sh. 20,000 only. We used this money to buy a desk, a chair, and a phone. In the same vein, we didn’t use a lot of cash on marketing. In fact, we used Facebook, Twitter and similar social platforms to market our services. Our main trick was in affordability, awareness, and an unexploited market. From my experience, women must at all times gauge the level of competition, number of potential customers, availability of market and size of the town or city they’ll be based before starting a business.
Distinguishing good and bad business ideas: A good business idea will always be the one that creates unique problem solving products or services. People must need your product or service for it to survive in the market. In the time I have been in business, I have observed that many aspiring entrepreneurs make the mistake of copy-pasting ideas or trying to implement business ideas that cost more to acquire customers. However, you will always know that you are on the right money-making business if your product or service satisfies its consumers or if the resulting effect is referrals and more customers.
How I settled on this business: This company was born out of a passion for traveling. Back then, in 2007, I was an administration officer and belonged to an online group of professionals. I organized several trips for the group as we met and interacted. Many thought the trips were well-organized and assumed that I was a tours and travel agent. The reaction and the big number of people who kept turning up for the trips made my husband and I think a tours and travel company would be the most ideal to start.
Biggest money making lesson: I subscribe to the saying that kidogo kidogo hujaza kibaba (little by little fills the barn). In this business, my approach is in making less profit through many customers rather than exploiting one client. Having seen its efficiency over the last few years, I believe this is a profit-making policy every woman in business should adopt.
Biggest money mistake: When the business started, I didn’t have proper financial accounting systems. I learned the importance of this through the hard way. There is no way you’ll ever make progress or get the true picture of how your business is doing without an efficient accounting program.
Handling wealth: My biggest lesson in building wealth is working harder and longer than the people who normally work and think strategically. You will always meet both profit-making and investing opportunities. However, if you opt to consider investment as a way to build wealth, I have learned that you must never invest money you don’t have or invest in something you don’t exhaustively understand.
