Like Chapaa

  • Easily Replaceable Employees

    Posted: June 30, 2010, 1:22 pm by Kelvin

    If you’ve been running a business for any length of time in Kenya, you probably already know that it is extremely hard for a small business to get good employees. Yet, a business needs skillful and dependable employees to succeed. However, one of the keys to running a highly profitable and low-headache business is not depending on key individuals to make or break a business. While it would be nice to hire a bunch of overachievers to build and run your business, it’s a shaky strategy to rely on.

    Searching for a Sales, for example, All-Star is not easy or cheap. The process to find good candidates and put them through the interview process can be very expensive and time-consuming. Even if you take months to go through a rigorous hiring process and think you found the person you were looking for, there is no guarantee that that person is even going to live up to expectations.

    But let’s say that you do find that “diamond in the rough” – someone who is highly energetic and can bring in new business for you. You will have invested a decent amount of time training them and getting them ramped up. Everything has started running smoothly. Your new employee is bringing in a ton of new business and you don’t have to pay any attention to what they are doing or how they are doing it.

    All of a sudden they drop a bomb on you. They got a better offer at another company and will be leaving in 2 weeks. You’re frozen in panic. You knew that it took 2 months to find this person and you were extremely lucky to find them. You went through 2 other people and wasted 8 months to get your “All Star”. Now you have to start all over again and be ready in 2 weeks. On top of that, you just kicked off a huge new marketing campaign that’s going to run but not have anyone to follow up and do the sales work. There is no way you’re going to be able to get new clients any time soon.

    Enter The Real “All Star”
    Here’s a slightly different situation for you. You’re tired of going through the crapshoot hiring process and praying that you get lucky and find a salesperson that can keep your business afloat. Instead, you decide to take matters into your own hands. You’re not going to rely on having the best talent, which is extremely hard to retain and keep happy. You’re going to depend on more readily available resources – lower wage employees.

    How can your business do as well with someone who isn’t as talented compared to a rainmaker? Simple – you create processes that anyone can follow. You don’t leave your business up to chance. You create systems that you can constantly modify and tweak to make better and then you find people who can execute them.

    Humans aren’t robots so you need to provide motivation to ensure that they do their job well. You can start providing incentive-based bonuses that are tied in with your revenues and profits so that everyone wins.

    Now you have employees who are sufficiently motivated and happy because they are making more than they would with other similarly-paying jobs and you have turned a risk and a headache into a reliable and consistent system within your business.

    What Kind of Systems Should You Put In Place?
    Throughout this post, I’ve referred to salespeople when I talked about employees. That’s because they can have the biggest positive or negative impact on your business because sales and marketing for a small business has the biggest impact on the success of the business. And what we’re trying to avoid is the unpredictability that good and bad employees infuse into your business.

    Your Sales and Marketing is the first part of your business from which you should remove the unpredictability of star employees. Here are some suggestions how to do that:

    • Create a Follow-Up Sequence that details every single contact you will have with leads from the day they become a lead, until a year later.
    • Write scripts and create every single marketing/sales piece that goes out to prospects. You should drive the sales message so that it’s not who gives it but what’s being communicated.
    • Add “Call-To-Action” in every sales and marketing piece that goes out. You shouldn’t have messages that say “are you ready to buy yet?”. They should spur on the prospect so they are calling to purchase from you.
    • Automate your sales presentations. Create web bases sales presentations that prospects can view at their leisure. This removes “bad days”, “being off your game”, etc. that affect even the best of employees. Nickel Pro can help with this, incidentally.
    • Create targeted marketing campaigns that deliver interested prospects. This way, you aren’t dependent on your employees ability (or inability to generate leads).

    These are just a few examples of how you can replace highly skilled, valuable, but hard-to-find salespeople with replaceable, easy-to-find, and less expensive employees who provide the benefits without the headaches. Many of these ideas can be applied to your operations, customer service, and accounting. It’s all dependent on YOU setting up the repeatable systems that anyone can execute and not relying someone to just “get it done”.

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  • Long Live The Queen of Blades!

    Posted: June 30, 2010, 11:07 am by Kelvin

    Well, we are sponsoring a grassroots-level Starcraft tournament.

    Read more about it here.

    Why Starcraft? Well, obviously, the people who run Like Chapaa are very much into computers, even games. And Starcraft is one of the best. It is the most consistently played game in gaming tournaments all over the world and it is actually a spectator ‘sport’ in South Korea. Therefore, with sponsoring this Starcraft tournament, we hope to build up the gaming community in Kenya.

    Who is the Queen of blades? She is.

    Please show up and be a part of the first event of its kind in our beloved Kenya.

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  • Fake it Till You Make it

    Posted: June 29, 2010, 11:31 am by tranx

    As a new business owner, one of the biggest problems that you’ll face is proving to new clients that you have the experience as a business to meet their needs. It’s just human nature. Everyone is careful with their money and they would rather go with a company that has a proven track record and not someone doing the work “on the side.” In some ways, it becomes a Catch-22. You can’t get clients until you have experience, and you can’t get experience until you get clients. As a new business, we faced similar problems and had some tough times getting clients for a while. We learned some “tricks” to make our business look bigger than it actually was – how to “fake it till you make it”, to borrow the saying

    How to Make Your Business Look Bigger than it Really is

    1. Give Away Your Service for “Free” – This is a common piece of advice that you’ll see and something that I don’t really like, so we put a little spin on it. You don’t want to attract people who are just looking for a deal. It’s the wrong kind of client who will take advantage of you and never be happy with the service that you provide. However, it’s still a good way to get the credentials you need to refer to when selling your product or service to other businesses. What we did is give away our products to our clients at our “expense”. Usually, there was some sort of “Cost of Goods Sold” that we incurred and we told them up front about this. They were willing to pay this token amount because they knew it was still a great deal, and we got some money, and the test clients that we wanted. In fact, we often used these clients to test our product (again, we disclosed this too) so it was actually just part of product development.
    2. Hire a Receptionist – This is one of my favorite tricks that we used. By having someone answer all your incoming calls, your business suddenly gains a huge amount of credibility. Once businesses can support someone to answer the phones, most people will think that it’s successful. So what we did was hire someone at Kshs 10,000 per month to answer any incoming calls that we got. She would answer the calls and just e-mail us the messages or call us back if it was urgent. It didn’t take too much time for her and it was cheap enough for us. We just provided her with a mobile phone.
    3. Outsource your Work – One of the more subtle ways to look bigger than you actually are is to outsource your work and then refer to them when talking to clients. If a client is asking you to complete some work and you say “I’ll have to check with my designer to see when I can get that to you”, it sounds a lot better than, “I’m really swamped this week – I’ll try to get to it when I can”. You also can say that you have several people working in your business. Probably a little too much in the gray area, but if you’re asked point-blank and saying you’re a one-person shop won’t work, it’ll do. Even if you tell clients you outsource most of the work, it’s usually ok, because it sounds like you’re a growing business.
    4. Work with Partners – Besides coming with a stable full of qualified clients, one of the reasons that we wanted to work with partners when selling our products was that it afforded us the chance to build up our client list on our partners’ back. While we can’t refer to these clients directly when talking to prospects (or we just say that we have them through a partner agreement), we can still cite experience that we have working with clients.

    Lying directly to your prospects isn’t a good idea because they’ll figure you out eventually. But if you can fake it till you make it by using the tips outlined above, you will find that it becomes much easier to attract new clients as prospects know that you are a successful business with a good track record.

    How else can you fake it?

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  • Predictable Success

    Posted: June 25, 2010, 9:37 am by wham

    This books explores the ‘secret code’ to achieving success in business. The author, a serial entrepreneur having started over 40 businesses, states that there is indeed actually a formula to success, its just that we do not know about it.

    In his own words, “As a serial entrepreneur who has personally launched over 40 businesses, and as a consultant and coach to hundreds of business leaders, I’ve come to realize that the ‘growth code’ is out there, in plain view for anyone who knows where to look. There is indeed a code, a pattern, a DNA if you will, to achieving predictable success. The difficulty is that because most business leaders work in a limited number of business environments during their career, they don’t have the opportunity to see the pattern recur often enough to successfully decode it.”

    Download the book: Achieving Predictable Success

    What do you think?

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  • How To Turn Your Skills Into A Real Online Business

    Posted: June 24, 2010, 2:16 pm by Kelvin

    A lot of the people reading Like Chapaa have a skill set. They are strong in web design, writing, marketing, Web development, or some other different skills.

    People with such skills who want to be entrepreneurs often end up selling their skills as services. That usually entails trading money for their time, expertise and experience. It’s the path of least resistance (and risk) and a way to form a source of income. The problem is that while the business might be moderately successful, there is a limit to how successful the business can be. There are only so many hours in a day and only so much that you can charge for these services (no matter how good you are). Since freelancing is not a real business model and does not scale, you should focus these skills on building a system-based business.

    Here are some ideas to create a new business based on the skills that you already have.

    Scale Your Skills
    Instead of doing the work yourself, have 1, 2, 5, 10, or even 50 people do the work for you. Once you have other people doing the work, there is no limit to how big you can grow the business. Start by creating a manual detailing everything that you do and make it a repeatable process that someone else can follow. You will still have to find some people with some ability as you don’t want someone with zero creativity to design high-end websites for your clients. But if you create an efficient process in getting new clients and delivering their service at a reasonable, known cost, you can start scaling the business.

    In order to reduce your risk, I would start out with contractors. Pay them on a “per project” basis so you are only obligated to pay when you get paid. Your profits won’t be as high and it can be tough to find reliable contractors with good prices and quality products but once you do, it becomes very easy to scale up your business. Start out with determining your profit margin and you can estimate projects based off of the quote you receive.

    Create a “Product”
    If your skills are in web design, pick a market and create your best web design that you can sell over and over again. If you create a really great web site with a lot of cool features for restaurants (newsletters, birthday club, email-a-friend), sell it to restaurants operating in different markets. You might charge a lower price for each site but it will require less effort to set up. It’s even something that you could hire a contractor to set up on a per-site basis.

    If you are a writer, you can also create a ‘product’ around your writing skills. You just have, for example, to look for something that would benefit by having a well written guide/manual. For instance, many writers make money by writing How-To ebooks for platforms such as Joomla and Drupal. I know others who have created a complete and re-usable business plan which they sell to anyone looking to write a business plan quickly.

    If you are an Adsense expert, you could sell a program to similar businesses of keywords and ads that are pre-built and tested to be very effective. Just make sure you don’t sell it to competing clients.

    Become a ‘Digital Landlord’
    This is very similar to creating a product, the difference being that you do not sell it outright but rent it out and collect a subscription fee. Please have a look at this: Landlord 2.0

    The basic idea is to utilise your expertise to create a service. If you are an accountant, you could create an accounting system which you charge a monthly fee for people to use it either online or offline. When most people think of this, they think that it has to be a large undertaking. That is not the case, you do not have to recreate Quickbooks, the secret is to niche – create a simple accounting system specifically for freelance web designers (incidentally, such a system is badly needed).

    If you are a marketing guru, you could create a marketing system for very small businesses and freelancers (guys earning 10,000 to 500,000 a month) – a system whereby the businesses completely outsource marketing to you. Again, such a system is badly needed in today’s Kenya (most of these business owners are too busy to market properly and would appreciate some help, as long as it actually generates more business).

    Web Site Flipping
    basically, this is the selling of websites. It might require a little more investment but you could also bootstrap and start with a small portfolio that you constantly turn over and make more money off of them. But the idea is that you should buy websites, improve them, and then sell them. Maybe it’s a website that just needs a few tweaks to convert better, or a site that needs some basic search engine optimization, one that hasn’t utilized Pay-Per-Click yet, or one that could use all of these changes.

    Create systems to effectively find, value, purchase, and improve sites. Most people who flip websites might do it on a “one off” basis. They don’t create systems to repeat the process over and over again. I liken it to real estate flipping companies who have scaled their business so they buy multiple properties, have a select group of vendors they use to improve the properties, and then sell it. They have great systems in place. From the very beginning, they have a set budget and they know what changes they can make and how much value it should add to the price.

    Create Software
    Ok, nothing too original here but I think this is a case which people think too big. They think the only software worth creating and selling is something that nobody else has created. There are a lot of niche markets for which you can build useful software. You don’t have to create Microsoft Windows, just something that is useful to your targeted niche market.

    For example – you could create an online scheduling service for businesses that take appointments like doctors, salons or beauty parlors. There is a lot of scheduling software out there but if you create a product specific for an industry, you have created a successful product.

    And the best part about software is that once it’s created, there is very little effort to maintain it. Unlike trading hours for dollars, you can create a mostly passive form of income.

    What Do All the Ideas Have in Common?
    It probably wasn’t apparently obvious with each of these ideas but they all involve targeting a niche market. You’re not going to be able to create something that works for everyone but if you create something that has utility for a niche market, your system based business can grow quite successfully.

    Image courtesy of Pheezy.

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  • Landlord 2.0

    Posted: June 21, 2010, 11:49 am by wham

    I want to be the “Digital Landlord”. I want to own website real estate that I can “rent” to small businesses.

    This isn’t about owning domain names since that would not work. People would just buy different domain names – they aren’t that important for local businesses.

    No, this is about owning the building, or the website in this case, that is set up such that it is like a goldmine for people, renters. Renters would be willing to pay landlords money if the property is on a prime piece of real estate that practically guarantees a certain level of business, right?

    It is Better to Rent than Sell

    One of the first rules of real estate is never sell properties (or something like that). What it means is that you don’t usually want to sell a great piece of real estate if you can make money hand-over-fist from it.

    We’re marketers with web development skills. We could build websites and sell them to our clients, but what’s the value in that? We would rather make mostly passive income by renting out an extremely high value service month after month.

    Websites are worth the amount of time that the designer puts into the website plus a premium based on the designer’s/company’s reputation and ability.

    But let’s change the perception on that product from a website to a marketing system. If it can generate Kshs 30,000 consistently, the business owners aren’t going to pay for the amount of effort it takes to create, they’re going to pay for that high value that it generates for them. I don’t know too many business owners who wouldn’t pay you Kshs 5,000 to generate Kshs 30,000 in new revenue.

    Let’s say that you can do this just 2 or 3 times a month consistently. Don’t you think the business owner would be more than willing to pay you Kshs 5,000 a month for a LONG TIME than Kshs 25,000 just once?

    Build a Ton of Buildings
    If this works one time, why not do it over and over again? I can build a bunch of different buildings, or “client generating systems”. And I rent out a part of those buildings to a ton of different clients.

    Let’s put some numbers on it:

    • I can rent out my system to 100 different clients in the same industry across the country at Kshs 5,000 per month (I won’t get too greedy)
    • That’s Ksh 500,000 per month for just one “building”
    • Once that works, I can build 20 different “buildings”.

    What’s better than being a digital landlord? And I’m sure you can figure out the math for the monthly income….

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  • What If The People You Outsource To Are Not As Good As You?

    Posted: June 18, 2010, 11:53 am by wham

    Following yesterday’s post, Outsource Everything, I got a few emails from people who wanted to outsource but were unsure whether anyone could get the job done as well as it needed to be. That’s an understandable reaction and it was something that I fought when we tried to outsource some of our work. Sometimes it feels like it’s more work writing up a description of what needs to be done rather than just doing it yourself.

    So I put together a list of 5 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Care if Your Outsourcers Can’t Do the Work as well as You Can:

    1. So what? – My first response is so what if they can’t do the work as well as you. I guarantee you that they won’t be able to do things as well as you can because they can’t read your mind. The problem is that most people expect the work to be perfect right away. It doesn’t have to be. If someone else can do 80% of the work and you just have to go back and clean up the last 20%, you still saved a lot of time. Unless you find someone you really trust (and that takes a lot of experience), you should do some type of quality control over what’s done. Don’t just think you can hand it off and forget it.
    2. You’d be surprised how well they can do the work – This isn’t always true but it happens more often than you would think. Often times I send off instructions and just know that I will get some horrible deliverable and there will be a million questions along the way. Then I’m pleasantly surprised to see that they exceed my expectations.
    3. Some things you’ll never be able to get rid of - There have been some tasks that I wanted to hand off to someone else to do because I didn’t like doing them but then I realized there was no way to do this. These aren’t tasks that you should be outsourcing because they aren’t something that you can provide step-by-step instructions to. These are things that you have to think about and there is no way that someone else will be able to know what you’re thinking. Just outsource everything else, bite the bullet, and do this one yourself.
    4. Don’t hire them to do everything you do – Make sure you have specific tasks for them. Don’t provide them high-level needs and expect that they will think of everything. If you can’t write it down in steps, it’s not something that you should hire them to do.
    5. Find things that are monotonous – A lot of your activities might have a “thinking” component and a monotonous component. Don’t be afraid of doing the “thinking” parts and handing off the monotonous components. We do this a lot when we outsource web design. We determine what the overall design and feel of the site is and then outsource the actually coding with clear instruction on what needs to be done.

    The key is to remember that you’re not hiring someone to solve world peace. You’re just hiring them to do some monotonous tasks for you. It’s not going to be everything you do but you’ll start finding more and more tasks that you can write instructions to and that you can hand off. And don’t be afraid to break it down so you provide most of the brainpower and they do the rest.

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  • Outsource Everything

    Posted: June 17, 2010, 12:14 pm by tranx

    One of the things I am a huge fan of is that every Business Owner should outsource everything that they possibly can. I know I’m not breaking any ground with this idea (if you want to read a great book on the power of outsourcing, I strongly recommend Thomas Friedman’s, The World is Flat) but what I am advocating is pushing this idea to the max. I look at everything I have to do to see whether it’s something I can just outsource it so that I can free up even more of my time.

    One of the first really big projects that we received was for a web application in which we were paid a HUGE amount (our largest project for us at the time). This was a project that we scoped out as taking at least 3 months of our full attention. This is back when we were just testing the entrepreneurial waters and had other full-time jobs. All of our spare efforts were focused on this first product delivery, and we delivered as planned by focusing our efforts on it fully.

    That project led to another one that was 3 times as big as the initial project and took us another 6 months to complete. Now it wasn’t for 3 times the dollar amount because of a partial equity deal we were involved in. The problem was that when it was all said and done, we had put in about 9 months, and all we really had to show for it was 1 client, 1 project, and nothing else for our business from the previous 9 months.

    We don’t regret that period of time. We had a lot of flexibility because of our situation, we learned a lot, and we spring-boarded from that to working on the business full-time, but there was an important lesson learned there.

    I Should Have Outsourced Everything that Didn’t Need Us.

    The development of the application that we spent all of our time and effort on should have been outsourced to a development company that could have completed the effort based on the requirements that we had already created. We would have made a lot less profit from those efforts but we could have spent that time (which was A LOT of hours) on developing new business, creating new products, or just being lazy!

    The important distinction are those efforts for which we are required and those for which we are not. New product/service development and most marketing efforts require our involvement because it’s very tough to outsource something when it’s not even defined yet. But for something that is relatively basic like web application development, we should have outsourced the efforts.

    What Else Should I Outsource?
    Honestly, if it is something that would take more effort for me to write up the instructions for someone else to do, then I’ll usually do it myself. Otherwise, I delegate it off to someone else. These are just a few things that we did ourselves until just a few times when we realized that it’s much more efficient to hire someone else to do it:

    1. HTML Updates for existing websites
    2. Contact Generation for Marketing efforts
    3. Direct Mail Generation for Marketing efforts
    4. Service Delivery fulfillment for direct mail pieces in our online marketing system
    5. Follow-up calls to existing leads
    6. Sales Lead generation and adding new leads to our contact list
    7. Web Application development

    The Financial Mathematics of Outsourcing
    The finance behind outsourcing is pretty obvious and has been discussed many times over so I won’t spend much time on it. Simply put, if you can get someone to do something for Ksh 10,000/- and your time is worth more than that Ksh 10,000/-, it is simply an efficient form of resource allocation. Or to put it another way, it might cost you Ksh 5,000/- to outsource a very menial task to someone and during the time that you might have done that yourself, you could create a new marketing campaign that generates Kshs 50,000/- in new business.

    You don’t even have to do anything else during that time. If you would just like to spend less time working in your business, the Kshs 5,000/- might be a small cost for the additional free time that you generate.

    You Don’t Necessarily Need Offshore Outsourcing
    A lot of people automatically associate (and confuse) “outsourcing” with “[offshoring]“. Offshoring is just one way to outsource your work. You can also outsource it to onshore companies. By far, the majority of our outsourcing work goes to local resources. It’s just been easier for us in most cases to pay a little extra money and get someone we can communicate with easily.

    Regardless of where you find people or companies to outsource your work to, you need to start outsourcing everything so that you can continually focus your efforts on building your business.

    Photo courtesy of MarkHillary.

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  • Making Money Online

    Posted: June 16, 2010, 1:45 pm by tranx

    Written by guest contributor Jennifer Gorton from Forex Indicators.

    If you haven’t thought of putting some of your paycheck into a savings account, there is no better time to start then now. Having a savings account will provide a cache of money that is stored away in case of emergencies. The money can also be used down the road as a down payment for your dream home or renovations of your current home. At the moment, the interest rates banks are offering are so low that the return you are getting by keeping your money in a savings account is minimal. Even though the return is minimal, your savings will slowly build up over time to a significant sum.

    Interest rates that everyone is receiving right now might be just too low to justify keeping your money in a savings account. If you feel this way, there are other options available: there are stock brokers that will allow you to buy and sell stock online, charging little in commission. Some banks even offer their brokerage services that will allow you to make commission free trades up to a certain limit. This is a nice service to have as many investors that do not actively trade enough to warrant opening up another account with a different broker.

    Having your checking, savings, and brokerage account all with one company makes transferring funds between your accounts easier. You can still keep some of your money in the savings account while adding small amounts to the brokerage account to buy stock. Buying stocks with higher dividend yields than the current savings interest rate might also appeal to you as an investor. With your money earning more, there might be an added incentive to add more of your paycheck to the brokerage account.

    Opening up a foreign exchange account is another alternative to a savings account or buying stock. The foreign currency market, or Forex market as it is referred to, is the largest market available to invest or trade. With over four billion dollars changing hands each day, the currency market is a viable alternative that could produce a higher yield. If you are looking to trade to currency markets, be warned it is not as easy as letting your money sit in a savings account. The price of currencies will move quite substantially throughout the trading day and night. The Forex market is open 24 hours a day 5 days a week, so it is possible to trade or make longer term investments at a time convenient to you. The big swings in price could cause the average investor anxiety as your position might be profitable one moment and showing a loss next.

    The big swings, however, are the reason that big profits can be made investing in currencies. All Forex brokers will introduce you to the latest strategies and ideas through training videos. The online retail currency brokers have these videos on their web pages for new investors to watch and learn from. These videos will tell the investor what the best Forex indicators are, and when and how to appropriately use them. There are many indicators out there that will help to predict the future price of the currency. If you utilize this, then these big swings in the price won’t give you as much anxiety because you will be able to understand at what time to close out your positions.

    Currency positions can also be used by the more sophisticated investors as a hedge for another open position. Say the investor has bought shares of a company that is paying a high dividend, wants to hold the company for a few years, and then collect the quarterly payments for income. If the company is based in the United States and the market starts to go south, the stock has the potential to lose value.

    The investor still wants to hold the stock for the dividend, but would like to make sure that the loss in share price is offset by a gain in another asset. If the U.S. market is going lower because of economic issues, he can then take a short position in the U.S. Dollar. If the U.S. economy weakens and the market continues to go down, the investor will profit from being short the currency of the country. He can then continue to collect his dividend payment without feeling as though his stock position is costing him in the long run. All reputable online brokers have investment advisors that are more than happy to talk to you about investment ideas. Make sure you talk to them so you can be confident that your investment decisions will make you money.

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  • Voices of Africa

    Posted: June 14, 2010, 5:59 pm by Kelvin

    Voices of Africa is an interesting organisation. I got to learn about them at the iHub during the Nairobi Barcamp, 2010. Basically, they aim to bring ICT to the rural areas of Kenya, mainly by building rural internet Kiosks and supporting other organisations that have similar goals. Through this, they hope to give people in the rural areas the same opportunity as we urban folk have to indulge in ICT.

    This video is a presentation done by Voices of Africa during Barcamp Nairobi 2010:

    I like how she said that when people ask her what people in rural Kenya would do with the internet, she answers: “What do they do without it?”

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  • Barcamp Nairobi 2010

    Posted: June 14, 2010, 12:39 pm by Kelvin

    Did you make it? well, you missed quite the event! There was free food, free beer and other freebies but the best thing about Barcamp Nairobi 2010 was the energy. I’m a lover of all things tech so it was very exciting to see so many smart people working on so many different and interesting things. I am pretty sure that the energy that was at Barcamp is very hard to replicate elsewhere in this country. Please make sure that you make your way to the next Barcamp, for your own sake.

    What is Barcamp? I’d say its an experiment in controlled chaos. There is very little order and the main “thing” is that whoever wants to present anything to the audience can go right ahead and do so. Sound fun?

    Here are a few of the presented projects that I loved the most:

    • Crowd-sourced courier service – Virn‘s Kahenya presented on an interested idea where, if I got it right, they would hire university students and get them to do deliveries for them during their free time to make up an elegant and simple courier service. They claimed to be able to deliver a T shirt to Turkana in 48 hours or less, for less than Kshs 500/- Amazing, ama?
    • IPO2 – another one from Virn. Details were scant but basically it is going to be a new way to raise funds for your business. It will work a little like Kick Starter but fully local.
    • Shika – this is a group formed by some young and interesting people who come from the slums (not sure which one). Basically, they had gotten funding and studied some computer courses so after graduating and seeing how much better they were, they thought the best thing to do was to give back to the community. They formed Shika which is an organisation that aims to help more people from the slum get computer training. They especially focus on the girl child. A very good idea that they have it to create a freelance hub where interested companies with computer projects would list them there and the newly trained scholars from Shika would then get an opportunity to earn something and get your work done. I wish them success.
    • Map Kibera – Did you know that Kibera is probably the best mapped area in this country? That was all thanks to these guys. Their presentation detailed how they managed to most complete and detailed map of Kibera in less than a year, producing some of the most dense maps in the world!
    • Theft-based Activism – fixing democracy by using democracy’s own exisiting, broken, rules. This was a fascinating presentation on how civic hackers managed to cause crowd-sourced reform and help fix Britain’s democratic institutions. I wonder if we can pull the same thing of in Kenya!

    Well, those were my favorites but there were many more. I’ll post some videos soon.

    I know you wish you had not missed it, eh?

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  • Growing A Business Without Money

    Posted: June 13, 2010, 4:17 am by Kelvin

    Thinking up a business idea and launching it is pretty easy, if you ask me. Running the business and growing it is a whole different story. It is where almost all businesses fail at.

    I’m very much in favour of bootstrapping and I discourage everyone who wants to start a business by borrowing. However, we must realise that growing a business with no money is very hard and nearly impossible. When you do not have money to spend on your business, you end up being the chief employee – you do all the work. This leaves you little to no time for doing the more important stuff like thinking up (and implementing) new strategies, marketing, etc.

    Businesses that are trying to grow with little or no money face a very steep challenge and, if not careful, may end up always being on the chase for a big break (a well paying client/deal) that will enable the business to normalise its activities. I consider such businesses to be operating more on luck than anything else. However, I think every entrepreneur worth his salt has passed through something similar.

    Unless you just want to learn how to operate under extreme pressure, find a way to get some money to get your business up and running. Debt is bad, but it may be a necessary evil.

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  • Why Most People Go Wrong In Forex Trading!!!

    Posted: June 11, 2010, 11:26 am by tranx

    I’m going to show you the 5 myths about Forex trading and why they are all wrong. Believing in a fake myth is a huge danger. Lots of traders learned this on the worst possible way…

    When you finish reading this small report, you’ll be one step ahead them.

    Myth number 1 – If I know how to trade stocks, I know how to make money in Forex:
    If you have experience trading stocks and think you can simply apply your knowledge in Forex and make money, you’re going to be disappointed. The Forex market is much more complex. Firstly, the Forex market is open 24 hours a day. This may not seem a big deal but it’s a significant difference in relation to the stock market. As the Forex market is open 24 hours a day, this brings more complexity to a trader. If in the stock market you have periods of higher and lower volatility, in the Forex these differences are even higher.

    Many stock traders think the Forex market is easy because it is open 24 hours a day. They think they can trade whenever they want and make their quick bucks. Truth is you can make money in Forex. But for that, you need to have a deep knowledge about this market. You have to know the best time to trade Forex in order to adjust your strategy to this market.

    Besides this, the indicators that work in stocks don’t always work in Forex. The Forex market is more complex and, this way, the indicators that you use on stocks don’t work so well here.

    Brokers are another huge difference between stocks and Forex. In the Forex market, due to the lack of regulation, a lot of Forex brokers don’t act in their clients’ best interest. It’s a lot more difficult to find a good Forex broker than a stock broker.

    Later on this Free mini course I will tell you how to avoid Forex Brokers Scams.

    Myth number 2 – Since the market is open 24 hours a day, you can make Money anytime you want:
    Once again, this is not true. In order to make money, a trader needs volatility. Although this market is open 24 hours a day, in the majority of the time there isn’t enough volatility to make good trades. This is a big challenge because volatility can appear at any time of the day and the trader can’t be watching the market all the time. He has to adjust his strategy in order to trade only in high volatility periods.

    Myth number 3 – There are no trading fees in Forex:
    You don’t pay a commission fee when you place an order. Although, you pay the spread, which is the difference between the bid and the ask.

    This way, the more you trade, the harder it will be to make money in Forex because you’ll have higher fees. In the Forex market, as in any other market, a trader must avoid the overtrading at all costs.

    Myth number 4 – You need to predict what will happen to make money in Forex:
    In order to make money in Forex, you need to react to what is happening. This is not the same thing as predict. A good trader simply reacts to whatever the market is telling him. He analyses charts, reads the news and all information he has at his disposal in order to react as fast as possible to market movements.

    Myth number 5 – The more complicated my strategy, the best:
    This is another myth that has nothing to do with reality on Forex trading. The truth is that usually the simple strategies or systems outperform the complicated ones.

    This article was written by Moses, an online forex trading expert. If you would like to learn more about online forex trading, please contact Moses.

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  • 2 Things to Think About When Making Your Website

    Posted: June 10, 2010, 9:39 am by Kelvin

    I was look at the visitor stats for this website (www.likechapaa.com) and it surprised me that a good 20% of the people who come here do it on their mobile phones. I always knew that the mobile web was big in Kenya, but I did not think it was big enough to affect my own website so much.

    IN a country like ours, making a website universally usable is an important issue and ignoring it may lead to groups of users suffering isolation, rather than enjoying the use of your website. What if Like Chapaa was not available in a mobile-friendly version? Perhaps our visitor numbers would be down 20%. That’s a big and painful loss.

    Do you want your own site to be successful? Then you have to think about making it as universally accessible as possible. In Kenya, the easiest way to do this is by:

    1. Publishing a mobile version of your website – Did you know that only about 15% of the world speaks English? I am not sure how many people in Kenya do not understand English but I do know that it is not the first language of nearly everyone in this country. I think it would be a mistake to publish your website and ignore English completely, but it is equally important not to ignore other languages that your target audience may ‘identify’ with better than English. I’d love to see a Sheng or Swa version of Pewa hewa, you?
    2. Publishing your website in more than one language – The number of internet users in Kenya is growing very very fast. The vast majority of people use their mobile phones to access the internet. If you ignore mobile, you may be ignoring at least 20% of the ‘market’. I am sure this is not something that anyone wants to do willingly.

    How hard is it to do this?
    Fortunately, web design and development technology just keeps growing. The first step would be to find yourself a competent person or organisation to do your website. There are lots of sufficiently qualified people all around you.

    The next step would be to ensure that your web developer makes your website using a robust and stable content management system (CMS). Most CMSes have a very simple way to implement a mobile version and additional languages. I recommend WordPress as my CMS of choice.

    For web design and development, of course, I recommend Nickel Pro.

    What do you think of mobilizing your website and publishing in more than one language?

    PS
    Like Chapaa is available only in English. We hope to get it translated soon.

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  • Doing it like Fareed

    Posted: June 9, 2010, 6:11 pm by Crystal

    I’m not a big fan of X-Fm Djs – I find them annoying. But I love my rock, so I’m glued to the station all day.

    Fareed Khimani I have massive issues with. He has a nice voice, and he’s kind of cute, but he has this thing: nag-nag-nag-whine. Also, he can be a little rude – which I guess is the whole point of the show.

    I like him for one thing though: he got me to like Alice in Chains. Let me explain.

    Some weeks ago, I was in a matatu on my way to work. Almost all matatus like to play The Maina and King’ang’i show, or as I prefer to call it, Matatu FM. Matatu FM has great music, but the presenters annoy me. Their call-ins are even worse. So my morning routine is get into a mat, plug in my earphones, tune in to X-Fm, and crank it loud enough to drown the matatu.

    Yes, I expect to be deaf soon.

    Anyway, I was listening to Fareed, and he started talking about how he was going to play the coolest song ever, and how it would get us all jumping, and how if we didn’t like the song, we were boring.

    He hyped the song five more times before he finally played it – twice. It was just a regular rock song, and I didn’t get what the hype was about. But because he’s said it so many times, the name stuck in my head.

    The name of the song in Man in the box, by the rock band Alice in Chains.

    Later, he picked out his favourite part of the song, which is the riff-and-chant in the beginning. He played that bit over and over again, explaining how cool it was and why.

    Then, he declared it the ‘May Traffic Song’, and for the next one month, he  played it two or three times a show, usually after the traffic update. I learnt to expect the song, and within a few days, I’d learnt some of the words.

    I still have no clue what the song is about, but when I eventually found myself singing along and enjoying – even loving  it, I was amused. The song in itself didn’t impact me, but hearing Fareed get so excited about it, and having it played so often, I guess it grew on me.

    So here are some business lessons we can learn from this cute, annoying man.

    1. It’s all about hype

    Create awareness of your product, service, or business. Make it a big deal. It can be word of mouth, hot air balloons, luminous rollerblades, a regular twitter account, glow-in-the-dark vuvuzela, anything really.

    Your product doesn’t have to match the hype, but it will get noticed. And once prospective clients notice, you’ll have a foot in the door. That’s always a good place to start.

    2. Be persistent

    Fareed’s song didn’t impact me the first time I heard it – or even the second or third. But on day 2, I noticed it’s great walking music, and by day 3, I liked the words to the song. They are so fun to yell to.

    Keep yourself in the client’s mind. Make follow-up calls, get sponsored in prominent places, remain visible.

    3. Be consistent

    The thing with this song is it doesn’t change. You’ll hear it a million times and it sounds exactly the same. You might pick a word or note that you hadn’t heard before, but the content is the same.

    Once your client notices you and starts to like you, be sure that the thing they like is always there. Going herbal can sometimes be a bad thing.

    4. Tap into mnemonics

    People make links in their heads, often without knowing it. Baby girls get pink, little boys get blue, metro kids wear orange, valentines means chocolates, roses mean passion and love. There isn’t any specific reason for this. They’re all just trends that caught on.

    Fareed go me to associate man in the box with traffic. So every time I’m in a jam, I wait to hear the song play, even when I’m tuned to a different station.

    Associate your product with something popular, or trendy, or common, something with staying power, something that clients see every day. They’ll become conditioned to your work. That’s why in Kenya, all detergents are ‘Omo’ and all margarine is ‘Blue band’.

    5. Stand out

    This song has a great riff, rebellious lyrics, and an interesting beat. But more than that, the band has an amazing name. It’s hard to forget anyone called Alice in Chains. Why is Alice in Chains? What did she do? What kind of chains are they? And more to the point, who the- is Alice?

    Have your product stand out. It can be as simple as giving it a catchy name or colour, or as complex as making it actually good. You could also pull a saf-com and make it really, really ugly.  After all, cute fades – just look how quickly we get bored of babies.

    Either way, pull a Krest with it and stand out from the crowd. Make it memorable.

    Speaking of sodas and pop music, there’s a Sprite advert on TV that has teenagers ramming each other and making bubbles. At some point, a really prettylady makes a stage dive.

    I have no clue what the advert means, but I love the music behind it. Does anyone know what it is?

    Crystal Ading’ is a professional author, editor, rock lover and mother. Her work is available through www.threeceebee.com.

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  • How To Run a Virtual Business

    Posted: June 8, 2010, 8:18 pm by wham

    I hate to call our business a virtual one, but that really is what it is. We don’t have a bricks-and-mortar office location (unless the post office counts) besides our home offices. Some clients might consider it unprofessional but by running our business remotely, we are able to operate more efficiently and at a lower cost. We have created systems to allow us to operate our virtual business with the same effectiveness if we had an office full of people.
    The Advantages of Operating in a Virtual Business

    • The biggest advantage of running a business is the significant cost savings. Without having to pay tens of thousands per month in rent, we have more flexibility in our cash flow and a much lower overhead costs.
    • We can run the business remotely. We are not tied to a particular location. We can quite literally work from anywhere in the world.
    • No one has to be in the same location. For instance, I study in the US and only come home occasionally but the business still runs smooth! We talk often and e-mail several times a day, but we aren’t forced to be in the same location. We can also hire employees and sub-contractors from different locations.
    • You can live wherever you want. This is similar to the last one but it’s a bit different. When I come back home I do not want to live in Nairobi. If our office was based there, this would not even be an option.

    Running our Virtual Business
    Creating a virtual business was a necessity based on how we started – part time. If we weren’t working on the business full-time, there was no way that we could have justified creating a bricks-and-mortar office for a business in which we almost never meet our clients. Once we went full-time, there was no need to change what worked. Here are some of the simple steps we took by necessity and now, by choice, to run our “virtual busines”.

    1. Don’t Look like a Virtual Business – A business without an office, doesn’t always inspire the most confidence in potential clients, so make sure that you have all the outward appearance of a professional business. This is pretty easy and usually just means having office phone lines, publicly displayed physical offices (which my actually be your dad’s), normal office hours, etc.
    2. Always Choose Online Software – By necessity, we have always gone with online applications as opposed to desktop applications so that we could access the same information from multiple locations. For example, we are a huge fan of Google Apps over any of the other applications. We are also thinking of going with the online version of Quickbooks over their standard desktop applications. One of the other advantages is that it provides more dependability. Even if a computer crashes, we have nothing to worry about since it’s just a web site away.
    3. Make Sure Your Tools Work Remotely – Similar to the last point but one of the first things that we did when setting up our business was to get a VoIP business line. It’s not that big of a deal now but it was pretty new then. We wanted something that we could operate from anywhere and that was configurable and accessible from the web. We also use tools like eFax so that we can both receive faxes and we have an online version, which is much easier for us to operate with. We also have e-mail accessilbe phones so that we aren’t tied to our computers (which need to be laptops, of course!)
    4. Keep Soft Copies of Everything – Again, by necessity, we have been forced to keep things online instead of printing them out and dealing with them by hand. Instead of filing cabinets, we try to keep everything on an online back-up site.

    The Future of Our Remote Business
    Someday, we may get a formal office location, and that’s only because it will be more cost advantageous when we bring some of our outsourced work in house. However, that doesn’t mean that we won’t still run a virtual business. Since I’m so lazy, there is no way I will be able to make it into an office everyday or have less than 2 vacations a month. Therefore, we will still need to run everything remotely.

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  • 3 Hot Tips For Online Forex Traders

    Posted: June 8, 2010, 10:10 am by tranx

    If you’re just starting trading Forex, there are a few tips that can save you time, work and money.

    The first tip is extremely simple:

    1. Trade just a single currency pair – Most professionals trade just one or 2 currency pairs at most. However, most beginners tend to try to trade all the currency pairs. If you’re just starting trading Forex, it’s a good idea to trade for example the EUR/USD. Don’t trade anything else unless you already have lots of experience with this currency pair and feel you can start trading 2 currency pairs.

    2. Trade the larger time-frames – Other common mistake in Forex is that traders try to make a quick buck. This way they tend to trade intraday charts in order to capture fast profits. This is a mistake. No matter what strategy or system you’re using, there’s a good probability that it will work much better on larger time frames. If you decide to start trading using, for example, a 4 hours chart, you’re way ahead of traders that try to trade on a 5 minute chart. The truth is that in the intraday charts there’s much noise, and since you can’t trade 24 hours a day, you end up losing some of the best movements. If you’re trading larger time frames, you’ll trade with less stress and you’ll be able to capture bigger trends. With these 2 advantages, it will be easier to start making money in Forex.

    3. You need to use good risk management rules – Don’t start using too much leverage, because if you do so, a single mistake can make you lose your entire account. If you start by risking no more than 2% or 5% of your account on a single trade, you’re protecting your account in case something goes wrong. This is one of the best tips you can follow in Forex. Most traders lose money because they use too much margin. They end up losing all their account before they even learn how to trade Forex successfully.

    If you follow these simple 3 tips, you’ll be on the right track to trade Forex successfully. These rules are simple but highly successful.

    If you would like to learn more about online forex trading, please contact Moses.

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  • The Four Letter Word That Can Make You and Your Work Irresistible

    Posted: June 5, 2010, 10:55 am by Kelvin

    Love is a four letter word in the business world. It makes us uncomfortable. It is inappropriate and even taboo.

    It can also make you and your work irresistible.

    Download the ebook: How to be irresistable.

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  • How To Increase Revenue By Decreasing Effort

    Posted: June 3, 2010, 10:57 pm by tranx

    When Sergey Brin and Larry Page founded Google, they created the original search engine based on a research project that they did at Stanford. Once they thought they had a real idea to work with, they rented out the garage of a house to begin their business and to continue working on their search engine. This was all occurring around 1997 and 1998. Google didn’t start making any money until almost 5 years later. However, the Google co-founders spent most of that time working on their business and not programming their search engine.

    The lesson with their story is that they realized that they couldn’t continue building their product – they needed to build their business, even if there was no revenue coming in (there were investors to provide them with cash to survive on). If they continued to work IN the business instead of ON the business, the company would not have been the success it is today.

    I’m not sure what specific actions they took to build the business but they had to implement systems and processes so that other people could work in the business (building and improving the search engine) while they could grow the business (getting financing, hiring people, creating systems to generate revenue).

    As a small business owner, the only way you can have a truly successful business is by stepping outside of your everyday activities and create a self-sufficient business. It might seem like it will cost you more money but in the end, it is the only way to drastically increase your revenues while decreasing the effort you put into the business:

    1. Create a Manual
    No matter what task you are doing for your business, write down the steps you take in a manual. It might seem like more work without any direct benefit but this step is probably the most important thing you can do for your new business. The next time you do the activity, it makes it that much easier because you just have to follow the steps that you wrote down. It also makes it easy to hand it off to someone else to do in the future.

    2. Outsource as much work as Possible
    This doesn’t mean that you have to ship your entire business to India. It just means that you have to find someone to do a lot of the tasks that you do yourself. It could be something as simple as distributing marketing materials, doing weekly bookkeeping activities, or providing support to existing customers. It’s very easy to hire a virtual assistant to get stuff done for you.

    If you completed Step #1, you just have to hand it over to someone else to complete. It might seem like a waste to pay someone Kshs 5,000/- to do something that is so easy for you to do but imagine if you can spend that saved time on 1 thing that will increase your revenue by Kshs 20,000? You increase your revenues and there is less work that you have to do.

    3. Define a Sales Process
    If you don’t have a defined sales process and just wing it with every new lead or visitor to your web site or place of business, you are missing out on a significant amount of business. You are reinventing the wheel each time you get a new prospect so you are spending too much effort on that initial sales effort.

    It also means that you are not perfecting your sales process so that you can increase the effectiveness of your sales process. By finding a system that works, you can constantly apply that and make changes to increase the effectiveness of it. It also minimizes the human element so that you are not as reliant on a superstar sales person (whether it’s you or someone else). By having a sales process in place, you will increase your conversions and increase your revenues without any additional work on your end. You are just replicating what has already worked.

    4. Automate Your Sales and Operational Processes
    This draws on much of the first 3 steps. Once you have created a manual and have systems that are beginning to work, you need to work on automating processes as much as possible. If you’re automating your sales process, maybe you send the same basic e-mail to potential leads through an e-mail auto-responder. If you call to set sales appointments with leads, maybe you can hire someone to do that part of the process for you.

    As far as automating your operational processes, software is often the best way to do this. See if you can purchase a product that will automate part of your process. It might even be worth it to hire a developer to build a program to help you automate part of your set-up or service delivery process.

    5. Act on Regular Tasks Less Frequently
    Start setting aside time each day, or week, or month for specific processes. I used to get in the bad habit of working on accounting tasks every day. Not that it’s so bad to stay on top of that stuff, but by focusing my attention on it once per week instead of each day, saved me a tremendous amount of time. I love checking on the status of some of my marketing efforts but I must force myself to wait until my regular time each week so that I’m not repeating the same thing every day.

    Increase Your Revenues and Decrease Your Efforts
    Creating a new business requires a tremendous amount of upfront time and effort. Successfully growing your business means creating systems and processes so that other people can work in the business while you grow it by working on the business. This is the only way that you can significantly increase the revenue in your business while decreasing your effort. In fact, it’s the only way to really build a business. Otherwise, you’re basically just a one employee company and you will never get much bigger than that.

    Photo courtesy of eneas.

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  • Earn From Resume Writing

    Posted: June 1, 2010, 7:32 am by ismah

    At some time, it’s better to leave your brain on the loose – right? It’s better to give it the greatest freedom it deserves and it’s then and only then, that it will pick up many ideas – both dirty and fresh. At this point, you don’t need to care what it picks up, you will sort good from bad later on. It is under this principle that My brain picked up as many ideas as it could and when I started separating the good from the bad, I realized I was almost throwing one important idea to the dust bin, so I quickly picked it back, dusted it and decided to research more about it and I realized, wow, you can actually earn from writing professional resumes – God! ever thought of it?

    Come on let’s face it, Times are tough, and we’re moving ever deeper into the age of specialization. Employers are demanding to know more about the applicant – their work record, natural talents and personality traits. They want more information upon which to base their interview selections than just the cold facts on the application form. Personnel managers are placing a higher premium on their time, and delegating to others the job of “weeding out” the unqualified applicants from those whose backgrounds and goals come closest to fitting the needs of the company.

    To get in to see the person doing the hiring nowadays, the job applicant has to “sell the short-stopper,” and that calls for a professionally written resume. More and more firms are demanding resumes. Prove me wrong on this one. Most of the jobs worth having will require a written resume before even an initial interview is granted. On the other side of the coin is that Probably 80 percent of the people searching for jobs don’t have a resume. Of the 20 percent who do have resumes, many are ineffective; they simply do not adequately present the applicant’s total qualifications. Everyone – with or without a resume – is looking for this key: A professionally written resume, a sales presentation of their qualifications and experience that will get the job for them – the job they want. The job hunters are wound up in their own specialties and problems. They don’t know how, and they don’t have the time – AND they’re willing to pay you to put it all together for them.The demand for this service is growing daily. Here’s a business you can start for virtually nothing, parlay into a million dollar enterprise in less than two years – trust me!

    Setting Up a Resume Writing Business
    There is no special knowledge, education or experience required. Knowing the general format of a “modern resume,” and the ability to keep yourself up-to-date on new resume formats is the only qualifications you need. There are so many newsletters, websites, blogs and short courses on resume writing, you can consider signing up for some.

    You’ll need a computer, professional quality printer. You can begin, with a lower quality printer but “think big” if you’re to survive in any business. You don’t have to book a big office at the city center or so, just start from the comfort of your bedroom.

    Invest in a good book on how to write “job-winning” resumes. Select a book or eBook which discusses both the cover letter and the format of the body of the resume. You can also find free articles on the internet. Also study different types of modern resumes. You can check some here, www.bestsampleresume.com

    In addition, you probably, at some point, will need a resume writing software that will help you. If you need a free software to get you started you can e-mail me on resumwriter@gmail.com.

    Now that you’re set to go, there comes popularizing your services. If you have an e-mail list, you can send this to your subscribers explaining your services in details. You can also print posters and put them in relevant places. The notice boards at Odeon Cinema is a good example. You could also consider running an advert in the local newspapers or websites like Career Point Kenya depending on your advertising budget. Aside, you can print business cards and circulate them around. you can also create your blog and explain your services.

    You’re now done. From there, you should start thinking of how to organize interviews with your future clients and establishing competitive prices that will keep you in business.

    If you would like to get more tips on resume writing and frequent updates on online resume writing jobs plus other online money making opportunities, send the word, “money” to 4445.

    Good luck!

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