Tips on how to keep in business

Enterprise Uganda, a private Sector organisation is celebrating 10 years of existence coinciding with the global entrepreneurship week. Samuel Sanya spoke to the founding executive eirector Charles Ocici about the developments in the organisation and the global entrepreneurship landscape.

Qn: It is now 10 years since enterprise Uganda started, what have you achieved?

Ans: Over the last 10 years enterprise Uganda has been able to demonstrate that local enterprises can grow to any size, domestically and even go regional and international. We have also been able to confirm that there are many other partners who are interested in assisting in the creation of a strong indigenous private sector. We have worked with banks like Stanbic, Centenary, Standard Chartered, Barclays and the East African Development Bank (EADB).

But also along the way, the institution has been challenged to come up with products that reflect the growing need for more Ugandans to move into the private sector.

Global reports indicate that Uganda has a high business start-up rate and also, a high business failure rate. Why is this so?

To say that Ugandans are good at starting enterprises and very poor at keeping them in the market is very correct.
Ugandans have been known to be very resilient in environments where nobody knows about them. So the spirit of a Ugandan exists, but it is being choked by image and a fear of failure.

Our education system punishes failure and for that reason we fear failure like hell. God created man to learn, experiment and keep improving, to hope for perfection from man is to hope for the impossible.

At enterprise Uganda we say perfection is to God, excellence is for man to aspire to. The journey to excellence is a long and painful experience of sometimes getting it right and at times wrong. But you learn along the way, avoiding the mistakes you made until you achieve business excellence.

Ugandans had better know that they are competent they can do anything except let us rewrite the script we got from school which says; go to school, study hard, get a job and when you get that the good job you will be a perfect person. The world does not receive perfect people but only those who continue to perfect the game along the road.

Tell us about the Business and Enterprise Start-up tool?

We created the Business and Enterprise Start-up Tool (BEST) four years ago, and we are happy to say that we now have a program that is being emulated across the world to get people, young or old into the private sector.

The tool has been so successful that not less than 18,000 people both in urban and rural areas, with or without education have created more than 22,000 jobs.
The tool is so powerful that over 60% of the program beneficiaries have been able to start their own businesses within the first three months, the success rate has been amazing, especially in the village setting.

One of the things we walk with to mark the ten years is that we got our fellow developing countries such as Ghana, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Guyana sending their heads of development institutions and trainers to come for a 5 day understudy recently, in order to replicate our methods in their respective countries.

To us that is a stamp of recognition and we feel that it’s one of the ways we will be able to solicit for more resources through our development partners.
We are sure that these countries will fly with the product. Whatever is good for Africa, we are more than grateful to share it. The entrepreneurship week at Africana Hotel, is going to be graced by the finance minister and the head of the European delegation in Uganda as we celebrate the contribution of entrepreneurs to the welfare of the country.

Inflation and commercial bank interest rates are soaring. How can young entrepreneurs remain competitive in these hard economic times?

First of all down turns in business are a standard, they may be started by external factors as it is now, they can be started from within the organisation or from within the industry. The scope for challenges in business are numerous.

Young entrepreneurs should agree that times are dire and not pretend.
Secondly, in addition to government efforts to improve the situation, they should concentrate on making their own steps to improve their products and services.

No matter how hard situations get, there will always be consumers, there will always be supermarkets, schools, and restaurants among others.
They should ask themselves, where can I reduce expenses so that my customers do not receive the entire bill? Use the harsh times to discover what it takes to win.