Starting up your business as a small owner can sometimes involve lots of strategic planning and financial constraints.
Other times you just identify a gap in your area of residence and decide to fill it with a small business idea.
In some cases, the businesses might work and in other cases, the business might not.
That’s the whole point of entrepreneurship. However, when you invest your time and money properly, you can make one of those business success stories that had a humble beginning.
Venturing into the food business, especially around university institutions has enabled her to improve her lifestyle in ways she did not anticipate.
Here is the story of Felister Ireri, a small business owner in Kiambu, Kenya, making her way toward financial independence.
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Creating the Grocery Store
When she moved to work as a building caretaker, she didn’t know she would eventually get this opportunity.
In 2019, Felister came to Kiambu to act as a caretaker at a residential apartment building in a small town called Juja.
The apartment was located close to the Jomo Kenyatta University of Science and Technology and it mainly had students as tenants.
Back then, she knew she would do it for a month before getting a better job in the formal employment space.
However, she wasn’t prepared for the long wait that followed with numerous job applications going unanswered and interviews remaining aloof.
She then realized that most tenants would buy groceries from a far-away grocery store and decided to start a small grocery store to cater to the needs of the people in the neighborhood.
Building the Grocery Store
She took a loan of Kshs.10,000 ($75), went ahead and bought her first stock which consisted of onions, tomatoes, kale, spinach, and cabbages.
Selling stock worth Kshs 5,000 ($40) on a good day, by the end of the third month, she was making sales of around Kshs.120,000 ($925) per month from the grocery store.
She diligently plowed back all her profits into the business, paying back the loan and putting up a makeshift stall for displaying the groceries.
Initially, she sold mostly to the tenants from the apartment that she was looking after but soon she won the hearts of a lot more people from the neighboring apartments perhaps due to her great interpersonal skills.
It also helped that the location of her grocery store was easily accessible and convenient given that her immediate competitor was quite a distance away.
She would also offer delivery services to the students who lived in the apartment.
By the fourth month, most customers would ask about getting boiled beans, green grams, or githeri (a boiled combination of maize and beans), and she very quickly invested in a charcoal banner and added boiled food into her business offerings.
Boiled githeri was particularly popular with Students and single people in the area as it saved them time.
One would buy boiled maize and beans, Irish potatoes, onions, and tomatoes that they would fry with oil to make githeri, a popular yet affordable delicacy in many Kenyan households, sometimes served with avocado.
Felister would sell the boiled foodstuffs by measuring with a teacup that would go for around Kshs.35 per cup.
Before long, Felister had expanded the store into selling fruits too. After all, customers were to have a balanced diet.
Major lessons from Felister’s Grocery Store business
Building a good rapport with your customers is one of the best marketing strategies that helped her grow and expand her business.
Even though she started the business while other grocery stores existed, she managed to attract more customers in the long run.
Better communication skills and also offering fresh goods. With groceries, you have to ensure they stay fresh for better sales.
This is not only a health benefit but also promotes the business by bringing the customers back to the store.
As a small business owner, you have to understand what the majority of your customers are consuming.
She monitored her student-customers’ needs and attempted to address them as much as profitably possible.
Challenges
Sometimes students can be cheeky and the majority of her customers are students.
When they get used to you, they might take goods on a credit basis. However, some of them fail to pay up while others also don’t pay the right amount.
While starting, she would realize that she was making small profit margins. She later realized that the students were taking advantage of her inexperience, especially those who would take the goods on credit.
Some would take long and not pay back making it hard to stock up the sales on her scheduled market days.
She therefore created a policy of minimal credits and would not extend credit of more than Kshs. 100 ($0.73), to be able to regulate the debts.
Her biggest challenge however is during school breaks when most of her customers (students) go home, at which point she’s forced to reduce her stock significantly.
Luckily, university students don’t have that many extended holidays, and the longest she goes without student business is three weeks.
To Felistar Ireri, starting a small business was the move that changed her financial journey, and saved her the pain of endless job seeking.
Currently, on a good month, she can make a net profit of about Kshs. 35,000 ($270) surpassing the Kshs 6,000 ($50) salary she gets paid for being a caretaker.
