Class, who remembers Newton’s First Law of Motion from their form three physics class, anyone? Okay, people sitting at the back? Nobody? Take that as your assignment then.

We learned early in our business that unless you push things, they don’t move and for moving things, they don’t achieve your intended motion until you go extra on them. That is a paraphrased version of the physics law we are talking about up there. So, you don’t have to google. We pitched against the big boys of the industry. At times, all we had was just a laptop while our competitors showed up with projectors, seasoned professionals to take on the presentations, refined industry language, and big cars. We knew where to get all the matatus in this city. We walked for miles on end. Our shoes could tell tales. We made friends with security guards who allowed us to brush our shoes before getting in for pitches. Remember when we talked about meeting the right people? The security people became our right people.

Meanwhile, our networks expanded in the intervening years after our project with KEMA East Africa. Our confidence grew and our audacity multiplied tenfold. Spade on the ground, the agency world came calling. We pitched for jobs with the same agencies that hired us as models. To swim with the sharks we understood, we had to pack up enough oxygen to venture into the deep end. And our first deep-end dive happened in 2010. Around this time, Blueshield Insurance was undergoing receivership. Their Life Insurance business was however to remain as the regulator had just started to restrict insurance firms from running composite companies for life and general insurance. On our shoulders therefore was a herculean task, one we loved to do, but which required concerted effort to pull. Our task went beyond rebranding, we had PR—a big chunk of this task—up our sleeves. To manage the crisis that had happened at Blueshield and transition its Life Department to Shield Life Insurance—a 360-degree marketing campaign was upon us.  

To our credit, the stand we had fabricated for them at the ASK Jamhuri Showgrounds the previous year, had won the best stand of the year. That may have been our vote of confidence seeing that there wasn’t much on our catalogue at that time in terms of the work we had done.  Needless to say, we did the task—immaculately so.

Our Soft Life Era

This business may as well be credited as our introduction to the real agency world. To this day, we are still a 360-degree marketing and communication agency arising from that deep dive. We bought our first cars thereafter. What a milestone that was. We moved from our one hundred and fifty square feet office at Solar House to a bigger space—a six hundred square feet office at Norwich Union House. Our dwell time as underdogs had come to an end and if this movement did anything, it was to announce our arrival and much much more than that our start of creating communication solutions for corporates in Kenya and Africa. We enriched our menu of clients. We did a project for Oriflame for the African Market, as well as a project for the CDC. We had an interesting client shortly after. The Kenya Meteorological Society. Even before we could go through the brief, we had a pertinent question. What do you say about a Meteorological society? It is not like they are the daily run-off-the-mill society that you talk about every day. We did an elaborate campaign that ended up securing a partnership with the office of the then Prime Minister of Kenya for the Save The Earth Project. Needless to say, the work we did speaks for itself to this day.

Tuko Na Safaricom: A lunch payment that gave us ideas

One time, Otis and Augustine were having lunch not far from the office. When they went to pay, the till number that had been done with a marker pen and plastered on a wall irked them. It bothered them that the product—Safaricom’s Till Number—did not seem to represent the company. Immediately they got into character: comms people per excellence. As this was happening, the agency (read Jobby) was deep into research about collaborations with the telcos of the country. Our primary target was Zain (now operating as Airtel Kenya). The incident at the eatery pushed Augustine to develop a prototype to better present the Till Numbers to the public. The idea was buoyed by something similar he had seen during a trip to China. Inadvertently, our primary target became Safaricom. Jobby on the side, had discovered through the research, that Safaricom was struggling with placing their products—the till numbers—as the preferred mode of payment for businesses in the country. Immediately we began a monologue with Safaricom’s marketing. Many unanswered emails later, we met a gentleman who did a formal introduction to their marketing team. The right people, remember?

Days later, Safaricom responded. They agreed to send their marketing team down to our office to check the prototype. Meanwhile, we had what we could call the ugliest prototype of all time, and by all time we mean all time. Weeks of improvement led us to an Acrylic L.E.D light that would display the Till Number in a more presentable manner commensurate to the Safaricom brand. When the team came to our office, they loved our product. Safaricom contracted us to replicate this across the country, from Lamu to Turkana. What that meant is that we were left with an eight million LPO. And given the urgency of the work at hand, it had to be raised quickly—one day quickly. For context, our annual turnover was around the same figure. We made calls to friends and our bank. The bank had reservations about the kind of money we wanted and the speed with which we wanted it. Do you know what we did? We did what Jacob would have done. By Jacob we don’t mean Jobby, we mean Jacob from the good book. We refused to leave the bank until they gave us the money. And in cash. Through the friends and the bank, we raised the money in one day. If you don’t believe in miracles, this might be a good time to convert. See the light. Miracles happen and sometimes in a banking hall.

As this happened, we were in correspondence with a manufacturer from China via mail. At some point, a scammer intercepted our conversation posing as the manufacturer. The scammer wanted us to send the whole amount via Western Union. Luckily, Jobby overheard a telephone conversation between Augustine and the scammer. We decided to do two transfers, one via Western Union and the other one via direct bank transfer. This was our saving grace as days later, the real manufacturer called to ask about the money. Shock on us! We had fallen prey to a scammer. A quick decision was made to salvage the situation. We sent Augustine on the next flight to China to try and recover the money if not the whole amount, at least the one we transferred to the bank in China. Quite a close shave if you ask us.

The consignment took more time than we had expected. We were running against time as the implementation stage of the project was almost with us. The pressure this delay mounted on us is indescribable. A near nerve-racking experience. Our team grew to thirty almost spontaneously. We suddenly became a very busy group of people. Safaricom was to visit our stores to commission the project. Sweat and tears—thankfully no blood. On the day of the commissioning of the project, a lorry drove into our stores with the product. A concourse of another set of miracles. We had missed a bullet.  We were ready to take on Kenya. No. We had already taken Kenya. If you ever saw the first Acrylic L.E.D lights displaying Safaricom’s Till Numbers, that was us. We did it. It’s giving good vibes.