George Andeche had always dreamed that he would one day become a news anchor. He wanted to be a prime time news presenter and could picture himself pursuing communication in college or university. This is why it seemed like the end of the road for him when his parents told him that he could not proceed to secondary school after completing his KCSE in 2018. “I had attained the minimum mass communication college entry grade of C Plus. But my father couldn’t afford the fees. He worked as a stone mason in Kakamega. I also had younger siblings who were joining Class 8 and Form One,” he says.
However, Andeche was determined to make something out of his life. In mid-January 2019, he relocated from his parents’ home in Kakamega to Nakuru where he started working as an untrained teacher with a monthly salary of Sh. 4,500. “I stayed with a relative. This enabled me to save Sh. 3,000 out of the Sh. 4,500 that I earned. I opened a KCB Lock account on my mobile phone and selected the Target Savings option. This option sent me reminders to save Sh. 3,000 for a whole week every month,” says Andeche.
Five months later, in June 2019, with savings of Sh. 15,000, Andeche decided to quit his job and venture into business. “I wanted to be independent. I was convinced that I could increase my income by going into business,” he says. His savings were not too huge to start a mega business with. “I knew that I would need to start with a small scale biashara then scale up. With my savings the only options I had was the cereals and vegetables business or the second hand clothes business.” He decided to start a veggies and cereals kibanda at Mawanga Estate in Nakuru. “I started by selling vegetables including broccoli, spinach, managu (black nightshade), terere (amaranthus), cabbages, sukuma wiki, onions, tomatoes, cauliflower, capsicum, lettuce, and herbs,” he says. he named his business Andeche Mini Market.
To scale up and retain customers, Andeche would offer free services such as cutting and packaging vegetables. “I realized that most of my customers were working in town. They would come back home tired and worn out. I realized that by offering to prepare their vegetables, I would take away the tiresome fear of retiring home to start preparing vegetables,” he says. His operating capital quickly increased from Sh. 15,000 to Sh. 24,000. By the end of 2019, Andeche’s operating capital was at Sh. 80,000. “I decided to open a business account where I could operate from and potentially get funded,” he says, adding that he opened the KCB Biashara Account, an account that is dedicated to people in small and medium businesses, and enrolled to join the KCB Biashara Club. He also began contemplating expanding into wholesale and retail cereals business. “I needed half a million shillings to start this, an amount that I did not have.”
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In February 2020, Andeche sat down with a credit manager and pitched his case for a Sh. 500,000 business loan. “Since I was very new in business, I was advised that I could get Sh. 300,000 loan to start with, then based on how the business would perform and my repayments, the bank would advance the remainder and give advice on how to expand,” he says. Andeche adds that this surprised him. “I was not expecting the bank to offer to hold my hand because of all the gluttonous stories we hear about banks and loans. The least I expected was to get a loan, stringent repayment terms, or an outright denial,” he says. He opened two shops, one at White House area and the other in the Lanet area in Nakuru. “I chose densely populated areas where I could easily tap in new and return cereals and vegetables customers,” he says. He also employed two women to oversee the two new shops while he operated his main kibanda. “I did not shut down the kibanda just because I had opened the two new shops,” he says. “It was my primary business.”
One month later, the global pandemic landed in Kenya. By April, 2020, Kenya went into lockdown. “It was a terrible time. Spending power fizzled out. We started closing down by 6.30pm in order to be home by 7pm,” says the 26-year-old. “And in all this, I had a loan that I was servicing with about Sh. 10,000 monthly payments, two employees, and two house rents.” By May 2020, he shut down the shop at Lanet to cut down on costs. “I had to restructure my business in order to survive. I also approached my bank and requested if I could get a loan restructuring until things normalized,” he says. Fortunately, Andeche’s loan was restructured. However, he did not stop making deposits to accelerate his repayments. “I didn’t want the loan to pile up. I wanted my lender to meet me halfway,” he says. In 2021, as Kenya eased out of the strict semi lockdowns of 2020, his business began to bounce back. Today, he has served over three quarters of his bank loan. “My earnings have risen to Sh. 8,000 per day, translating to about Sh. 208,000 gross per month,” he says. Andeche says that he has concentrated on stocking his shop with different varieties of cereals. He has also renovated his kibanda, expanded his deliveries door to door at Mawanga, All Nations, and JB, and White House estates, and a number of hotels in Nakuru town.
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“I have also leased land where I am farming vegetables,” he says. One of his current challenges is a cold room or refrigeration system that can preserve and extend the shelf life of vegetables when there is glut in the market. “For high seasons, I have adopted a harvest-on-demand approach. I harvest my vegetables and stock up my kibanda based on consumer demand and cash flow,” he says. In the next one year, Andeche is hoping to reopen his Lanet shop and scale up his fresh produce farm and start transporting on a larger scale to bigger markets in Nairobi and Mombasa. “I have been attending business training workshops and seminars hosted by KCB, for Biashara Club members, where I have learned critical business components such as bookkeeping, and measured expansion,” he says. “I am also glad that financial experts from the bank have also been visiting my business every now and then to evaluate my development. I can now qualify for over Sh. 1 million financing.”
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Andeche says that his experience with KCB’s Biashara Club and his financial relationship with the bank have shown him how an entrepreneur in the micro, small and medium category can grow. “We don’t see banks as partners. We see them as aggressors who smile when giving loans and rebuke when demanding payments. My experience has been different. I would not be where I am today were it not for my bank,” he says.