My name is Martin Wanjohi I am a successful and battle-tested entrepreneur who is married and has one daughter. I live in Nairobi, Kenya, a place called Eastlands. I have lived in this area since I was young and I have been able to finish high school successfully. After graduating from high school, I was fortunate to have a father who paid for the first 2 years at the University of J.K.U.A.T however this all changed as my father was laid off and I had to go to school on borrowed money. This did not last long and so after 1 year, I was forced to look for money to go back to school. And so I went on for employment search, luckily I found one.
I started as a Supermarket attendant at East matt in Nairobi, where I was getting paid KES 15,000/- per month. I was working from 7 am till 8:30 pm and right at that time, I had the innate desire to one day open a shop of my own.
I later resigned from the role and decided to look for another job that would support my family and me. I landed a job as a Data analyst and since then I have been looking for a way to escape the daily rat race so I decided to save a small amount just enough to start a small shop(Duka in Swahili) together with my wife who was currently a housemaid. I made my wife in charge of being the shop assistant as I continue working as a data analyst.
The shop is a small retail store that sells basic needs to our neighbors. We started this shop in 2020 but it was not successful, so we reopened again in 2021 April. Basic goods include essential cooking oil, sugar, maize flour, sweets, milk, refreshing beverages, matchbox, toilet papers, stationery tools, e.t.c.
The goods we sell are considered important in our area as we are selling in residential neighborhoods.
We choose this business model since it was a way of helping us be able to help my family and also my parents and also since it was a dream of mine to start a shop back then when I was employed as a shop assistant.
The typical costs that come to mind when running this shop are mostly the refilling of run-out stock and also paying vendors who deliver to our doorstep. We started this shop with a revenue of 16,000/-(150 dollars) and now we generate a revenue of close to 10-15000/- per month.
The profits we get, we usually save on a joint account created by my wife and me. We are planning on giving our daughter a better life later on probably going to school.
Given the money. I would take this opportunity and rent an office to boost trust between the business and the customer and also gain more awareness with resellers and obtain a longterm hosting contract with them as I save to make enough for purchasing physical servers and data-center leasing iaas (infrastructure as a service) and server hardware acquisition while implementing open-source apps to serve as Software-as-a-service(Saas) to all customers locally and internationally.