Social by Design
Thursday in Botswana
I just learned there are more cows in Botswana than people, (the position is that there are only slightly more cows) and that the goats are also catching up.
Amnesty International – Demand Dignity Campaign 2010
Last a year, I wrote a couple of article in aid of the demand dignity campaign that was being run by Amnesty International. Well, here we are again with the same message but different campaign themes.
This year, the focus of the Amnesty International Demand Dignity Campaign will focus on the following three theme:
- Slums
- Maternal Mortality
- Corporate Accountability
Over the next few days, weeks and months, expect posts on this blog to focus on the above theme with a very strong bias to the Kenyan situation as concerns them.
Blogging Hiatus and Entrepreneurship Progress
This is not one of those “I am sorry I have not blogged for a while” kind of posts. God No! This is me coming back to a blog I love to talk about the past few months that I have barely posted here and what I have been up to.
So last year I decided not to look for employment ever. Big decision for a young person just out of campus and broke. But there is more where that came from. Earlier when I was at the University, I had always proclaimed that immediately after campus, I would work for two years straight and then quit to start my business – regardless of the salary I was earning. But a year after campus, I was still deep into books reading to improve my chances of getting employed in one of these financial institutions. No need to say that things were not going according to plan.
Then the idea came and I turned it inside out in my head and finally thought – this could actually work. But for it work, I needed to dedicate a lot of time to it and for me to do that, I had to make yet another resolution – never to waste my time looking for job. This resolution ensured that I also could not afford to fail at making this idea a reality.
With that out of the way, I went back to an entrepreneurship booklet I had gotten while at the university and which I thought would come in handy when I went out on my own. I had printed it out – the 65 pages of it – bound it and kept it someway I could come across it almost on a daily basis so that it could remind me of my plans for it. I opened the booklet and letting it be my guiding light wrote my business plan from the executive summary to the budget and projections, never missing anything in between. It was an eye opener in terms of forcing me to take into consideration parameters I would have other wise ignored.
After three months of intense research and writing day in day out, my business proposal was ready and so was I to hit the Banks with it to get a loan for the initial capital I needed. But before I could start, a friend who I had met while I was at the university was in town and while exchanging courtesies after he asked me what I was up to, the very idea I had crafted my business idea around was what he was looking for. So I got my first client and a month later I was paid. This payment covered part of my initial costs which included the cost of putting up a website.
Throughout this period, I had been experimenting on the layout of my website which was then locally hosted as I played around with the codes. Note however that I never went to a computer school to learn the basics when it was the norm for everybody after school. I taught myself everything and that includes how to develop a descent website. That meant incurring costs of website development was not in my budget. Also during this period, I was writing content for the site and had quite a number of blogs ready for the site. So after the cheque cleared in late December, I decided to launch the website. But issues kept coming up such that by 30th December 2009, the website was not up. But I was not going to be denied and on 31st night, at 11 pm, the website in its most basic form went up and so did my first blog for my business.
Today, my website Socialight Media Kenya stands very strong with traffic steadily streaming in and inquiries about the services I offer slowly trickling in.
The past two months have been fraught with all those teething problems that I guess all businesses go through as they struggle to get steady footing. There have been mistakes on my part, near misses where I almost got big accounts but did not quite have a firm enough grasp. But still I soldiered on because failure is not an option. I sleep late and wake early every single day to ensure that all foundations of my business are strong. Online, I am busy creating a name for myself in this industry by writing in increasing depth about social media use organizations.
I have not earned enough yet to cover all my initial costs but I am close.I threw the idea of a loan out of the window and will not revisit it again until maybe my next project which I have plans of putting in place in the next 6 -12 months God willing.
But as I become busy with business, I am beginning to have issues with her. A couple of times I have postponed seeing her when I am in the city because of other business commitments. Sometimes she hides that she is pissed but she knows she will use those moments as ammunition when we get into a fight. But what choice do I have? I cannot fore-go a business opportunity to take my broke ass to her! Can I? That is not me and I tell her that this is that time in the business where I must breath, eat and sleep business because my business is me and it cannot breath on its own yet. Soon it will but for now, I am the support mechanism, the air it breathes and the blood running through its veins. She understands that sometimes but sometimes she refuses to because she needs to fight or blame.
That aside, I am doing good. And feel free to visit my business website and putting links to it in your respective blogs or recommending people my way when they need any services that have to do with new/social media.
And when I am not here, I am there making ends meet.
Marvin Tumbo
