By PAUL KARIUKI
Being a shopkeeper was the last thing Moses Wahinya thought he would be. After seeing his father struggle to profit from his shop for so long, often operating on a cash deficit, he was convinced that line of business was no way to make a living.
Growing up, he looked forward to doing clerical work at a blue chip company.
The beginning
However, he did not score enough points in his Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education exams to be admitted to a public university.
A private university or mid-level college was out of the question as his father was already struggling to educate his other siblings.
“I was determined to make something of myself, so I started doing casual jobs at construction sites for a daily wage of Sh150,” Mr Wahinya, who is now 30 and a father of three, says.
He saved most of his earnings and was soon able to buy a Simu ya Jamii payphone as well as open a shop that sold cigarettes, envelopes and stamps.
“Back then, mobile phones had not penetrated the market as they have today, so people frequently made calls from my shop. Also, sending and receiving of physical mail was still popular as it had not been replaced by text messages, email or social media,” he says.
Wahinya set up his business in a narrow room just next to his father’s larger shop.
“Even though my father and I were running our businesses basically shoulder to shoulder, we were not in competition. Mzee is a very devout Christian and a member of the local PCEA church, he would never touch a cigarette, let alone sell a single stick — this gave me a bit of an advantage,” he says.
Also, when one bought stamps and envelopes from him, he would charge a small fee to drop the letter at the post office.
Struggling shopkeeper
Working so close to his father, the third born in a family of six soon realised why the older business was struggling.
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“My father did not diversify with the changing times. Some of his customers who came looking for certain things were forced to look elsewhere as he did not stock them.”
For many people, it became more convenient to just take their business elsewhere.
Wahinya, however, felt his father’s shop had a lot more potential as it was strategically placed in an area with a lot of traffic and a growing population. So he decided to ask his father to sell him the shop.
The idea was not welcomed as readily as hoped, but after a lot of pleading, Wahinya’s father capitulated on condition that he be allowed to hold on to some share of the shop.
“I took over with virtually empty shelves,” Wahinya recalls.
The first order of business was to increase the stock.
After years of hard work, constant saving and resilience, he transformed his father’s shop into a mini-market, that today supplies neighbouring shops with a diverse variety of products.
His next stop was real estate investment. He bought his first plot, an undeveloped one that he was able to get cheap, using savings he got from shopkeeping. He sold it a few years later at a profit, which gave him enough money to buy another plot and put up low-cost housing units.
“Now I have a few plots around here with rental houses. I believe that as an entrepreneur, you should never put all your eggs in one basket; diversifying is important.”
Wahinya has 12 single rooms he rents out at Sh1,500 a month, while his shop brings him on average Sh3,000 a day in profit.
And given what it has helped him achieve, he no longer disdains shopkeeping as a means of making a living. He continues to pay his father rent for the premises, though he has since bought him out and assumed full control of the business.
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