“Rudi. Tutauza mahamri.”
{translation: Come back. We’ll sell mahamri.}
Those were my uncle’s first words when he found out I was returning to Kenya for good last year.
Someone else might think he was making a joke but there’s more to that statement than meets the eye.
The first businessperson in our family was a woman…my grandmother. She was pushed onto that path after her husband passed away leaving her with 8 children.
Her in-laws called from Yemen to ask if they’ve inherited anything and she told them, “8 children.”
Needless to say, they hung up the phone and didn’t call again for a while.
From her humble house in Chaani, Mombasa, she capitalized on the one skill she had honed over the years – cook.
The daughters helped her cook, and the sons acted as delivery boys to the various local kiosks.
What did they cook and sell?
Mahamri.
When I was younger, I spent far too many summer days closing mabuyu packs (because with time my grandmother diversified her products), and updating excel sheets for family matatu businesses, but you learn a lot when you come from a business family and some of these lessons are listed before…
It’s not BD, it’s RM
There’s a quote by Simon Sinek that says, “Businesses don’t do business with businesses. People do business with people.”
The heart and soul of any Business Development role is relationship management, and that’s one thing some startups in the market do not understand. They go after clients trying to shove their products and services down their throat, with zero consideration about the real value they’re actually adding. It reaches a point that the client regrets the day they actually met them.
The best relationship management code of conduct I’ve ever read was from Gary Vee’s Jab, Jab, Jab Right Hook. When it comes to building relationships, it’s simple, “Give, give, give and ask.” (Notice, he didn’t say ‘take’ in the end. He said ask).
So while researching for this post, I asked people to tell me the worse BD move they’ve ever seen their employer do, and the answer I got was so sad it was funny. Client A approached company B to execute a project, and B wanted to hijack the complete project, own it and then not only sell it back to A but also to A’s competitors. Of course, what followed was a series of lawyer meetings that dissolved the whole thing, but it made me think, in what universe did B think they would get away with doing something like that?
Underpromising and overdelivering
Another common trait you see within this market is ‘overpromising and underdelivering’. Just like people in relationships forget that work begins after the couple had gotten married, companies forget the actual work begins after the signing of the contract. By the end of their interaction with you, your clients need to be so happy about the execution that they refer you to someone else.
Instead you hear conversations where managing clients entails “cooking lies for them,” and many conversations that start with, “this is not within the scope of our work.”
The bad thing – and the good thing – we live in a small economic ecosystem where everybody knows everybody else, and bad reputation will follow you in the end.
Attention to Details
Now this I learnt from my mother.
Under very interesting circumstances.
When I was in undergrad, I’d go back home for the weekend and my mom would pack me food to take back to uni.
But she wouldn’t just pack for me.
She’d also pack for my friends, separately, in these disposable aluminum containers that looked like they just came from a restaurant and could have easily elicited the phrase, “ahlan bil7amel wilma7mool.” (Welcome, to the carrier and the thing being carried.)
Now it is sad to report that I did not inherit any of my mother’s culinary skills (Funny enough just before writing this post, I actually burnt the toast…twice). But I did learn when you’re going to give anything to anyone, you put your heart into it. You deliver something you’re proud of.
As a final note, a lot of times you’ll hear someone say that when you’re trying to make it big, you’ve got to be aggressive, you’ve got to be a shark. But to sleep at night, you’ve got to be human.
Image via http://www.somalikitchen.com/mahamri-african-doughnuts.html/