The Hustle and the ‘Rona

My peoples. Friends of Kantai. Holders of dau. Fellow Kenyans. Fellow South Africans. Fellow [insert your nationality here]. Come closer. I would like to give you some advice. 

These years of the ‘Rona are threatening to be the lean years. You have had to shut down your businesses, or at the very least slow down your hustle. You have had to adapt, at speed, to new ways of doing business. This means that each and every sale is almost priceless, and must be pursued as seamlessly and as friction-free as possible. Price, no surprise, is at the top of my advice session to you.

1. Always, always, state your price against the item or service you are selling. There is NO exception to this. Whether you are selling a pair of slippers or a Bentley Flying Spur 6.0 W12, put the price right up there in your advert. There’s a silly notion that putting up prices erodes your competitive advantage, or that higher-valued items need to be put behind the mysterious veil of ‘price on inquiry’. It is exactly that - silly. Whether you are advertising a bedsitter in Huruma, or an eighteen-room mansion on a ten-acre farm on Riara Ridge, you lose nothing, and gain a lot, by stating your price. To begin with, you will weed out the 80% of resources you would otherwise dedicate on fielding inquiries on the simplest of issues. Additionally, your price is carefully considered (I hope). If someone is undercutting you on this, either emphasise your quality or, if it is a commodified item, add value.
2. It goes without saying, but I will say it anyway. You should always have a means of reaching you in your advert. Do not put up an advert on, say, Twitter and block access to your direct messages; or Instagram and then block comments. If you put up a phone number, please (I cannot believe I need to say this, but I do) ANSWER THE PHONE. If you feel that it is too intrusive to have your personal number out there, get a phone number for business calls only. It will surprise you, or not, how many times phones, whose numbers are shared prominently, go unanswered, and a sale is lost. Just this morning, I called a certain stationer, in search of fountain pen cartridges. This company has five branches, and ten numbers, advertised. None of the calls to those numbers were successful, and some of the numbers seemed obsolete. If you have working hours, declare them prominently, so that customers do not call you at 8 p.m. on Sunday night expecting you to answer.
3. Technology is your friend, but don’t forget that you need to conform to its dictates. Don’t have a fancy app, and then demand that people visit your factory in Rumuruti to fulfil their order. 
4. Please, please make it easy for us to pay you. There is no reason whatsoever for anyone in tweny tweny to not have an option for accepting mobile money for payment. Equally baffling is to have a mobile money payment option, but not the major ones. Additionally, it is becoming easier (plug-and-play, in fact) to integrate card payments onto your operation. Heck, Sammy Lusiola, Sartaaj Rihal, Bangs Waithaka and I were integrating payment systems into websites way back in 2001, using nothing better than a monkey wrench, sellotape and grease. It is much easier now. If you make it difficult for me to pay you, I probably won’t.
5. Add value. You serve food? It is inconceivable that you would not have serviettes and plastic flatware in your pack. You’re selling real estate? A map and a location pin to your property should be a no-brainer. If you stint on the basics, or think that adding value is an extra cost, then I will simply take my business elsewhere.
6. Delivery is crucial. What people call the last mile is what may make or break your business. You may be making the perfect mutton rogan josh, seasoned exquisitely and served with love and care. Your (dearly departed) sit-down customers used to praise you to the heavens. But now, you get one order, no repeat customers and lots of nung’unikaing online. You may not realise that maybe that delivery nduthi has been delaying delivery to your customers, and thus the food gets to them cold, congealed and unappetising. Your fruit and veg, delectable as it is when it leaves your premises, may be reaching your customers when it is squashed. Regularly check on your final customer. Call them up to see how they are doing, and you may receive very useful feedback. If it gets to that, invest in your own delivery mechanism.
7. Additionally, remember that your front-line people are the first and best advert for your business, your service and your product. If you hire people to answer the phone, make sure they are pleasant and not easily flustered, because there will be some particularly nasty people on the other end. Empower them with enough information to actually complete the sale. If they do go to the customer as in (6) above, for heavens sake don’t let them lose you the customer, perhaps for life. I have dealt with food delivery people (in the BC days) to whom personal hygiene was not the most urgent priority. After gagging sufficiently, I gently sent the food back. If you are running a fashion outlet, don’t send someone out with a torn t-shirt (unless the tear is one of those fashionable ones). If you’re providing grooming services at the customer’s home, don’t stare with intent about their sitting room, implying that you will be back that night to undertake a collection. At the same time, please protect your people, in all sorts of ways. If you cannot afford to pay them their usual wages, let them know early enough, and gently. Be honest with them, so that they do not see you raking in the money while you lay off staff and ask them to work for free. Show concern about their very natural fears, especially if they are having to interact with strangers. It goes without saying but, provide them with all the correct gear, in the right quantities, of which more below. Be loyal to your people, and they will be loyal to you. 
8. These are unusual days, and all of us are concerned about korona. Invest in making sure that your goods and services reflect these concerns. Make sure that you clean, sanitise and take all the precautions, even if the customer is not watching. Invest your people with the right gear, be it masks, latex gloves or even more serious equipment and clothing. If you do go to the customer’s home, treat it with respect. If you’re delivering physical goods, demonstrate and assure the customer that they have been handled with the greatest of care at all stages. If you’re there to deliver a service such as repair work or a haircut, ensure that you wash your hands as soon as you walk in (ask to use the bathroom for that purpose). Do not touch things unnecessarily. And do NOT, under any circumstances, touch their children. If they approach you because they are fascinated by screwdrivers and electric tape, gently ask the parents to lead them away. You do not want an outbreak in that house, with you fingered as the primary suspect. And I need not remind you that if you’re coughing, sweating or sneezing repeatedly, please do NOT visit customers. Not even if you have been tested and found corona-free. You will just scare people to death. 
9. Manage expectations. If you find that orders are overwhelming, and you’re unable to keep up, you would rather refuse the order than create an expectation that is then unmet. Sorry to go back to food, but I once ordered take away. The house was full of hungry children, but it turned out that the restaurant I was ordering from had a technical breakdown of some kind. An hour and a half later, with the children threatening mutiny and a frustrated me threatening to burn down the city, an unapologetic motorcycle guy finally pulled up at my gate. We haven’t ordered from there again. A more pleasant experience was from Willy Kimani’s supermarket. I made an order, and within the period I was expecting delivery (not many hours later), they called me and explained that they could not honestly deliver that afternoon, and could they do it the following morning. I not only appreciated the management of expectations, but became a repeat customer (and not just because he is my friend).
10. Innovate! Innovate! Innovate! Have I said you should innovate? This is the best time to try out new things, including improvements to products and services, their delivery and their uses. Schools have obviously been forced to learn how to provide online classes. Barbers and salonists are now coming to the home. But who says this is where it stops? The (forced) innovation right now is revolving around the closure of physical premises and the need to deliver goods and services at a distance. But why not innovate in other areas, or learn from these innovations? Think - if parents and students have realised that online learning is a close facsimile of the original, then *you* can now deliver lessons online, with the entire world as your audience. I think you all know that my dream is to be a history teacher; now I can create the most compelling online lesson series on African history, and have students from literally every country in the world. You could design Zoom and Microsoft Teams backdrops, and insert the relevant bookshelves for people on demand. Because most men will now no longer trust barber’s machines, start selling grooming kits - with a shaving machine, apron and some combs and brushes. Offer to have it branded. If we ever go back to barbershops, I will be the safest and most stylish customer. Develop a health app tailored to the African market. Create content that allays people’s fears or gives them information. At the beginning of this thing, I collated all the information I could find, packaged it as the A-Z of Covid-19, and shared it. It took only two hours, but lots of people asked whether they could use it and share it. I was glad to let them have it for free. If you’re a real estate agent, this is now the time to invest in graphics and augmented reality, so that you can show a property without having to have people tramp all over town. Just yesterday, I saw someone with a business offering meal plans and recipes (i.e. a box containing a recipe and pre-measured ingredients) - this is not new globally, but it certainly is for the Kenyan market. Bully for them! 

So instead of sitting there worried about the ‘Rona and what comes after, embrace this opportunity to grow and deepen your business, and the ties to your customers (both existing and, one hopes, new). In the meantime, if you have cartridges for a Montblanc Meisterstück, please let me know. If you have a 2020 Bentley Flying Spur 6.0 W12, I can let you know where to deliver that as well.