2008: The Pitstop
In this city, You earn your living—well most people in this city earn their living. You toil under its unforgiving sun. You find yourself smack in the middle of tall buildings and even taller egos and cutthroat business shrewdness. To stand tall, to succeed, to make it work, your dreams have to be bigger than your fears. Because nobody is coming to save you.
To fully get into the agency business, we had to taper down commercial modeling jobs to focus on our vision. Jobi bought equipment for his now budding professional MC career. Augustine had just bought a still camera, a small Kodak camera that we would use in portfolio photography for commercial models. That would fetch between Ksh.3,000-5,000. We did this mostly on Saturday morning and it amazed us how easy it was to make a quick 5,000. We observed from the onset that Augustine’s gigs were small and regular while Jobi would get big-money gigs that came at very spaced intervals. We figured that then, we had to sit and have difficult conversations about how we wanted to run the business.
We agreed that Augustine’s department would keep us going, while Jobi’s department would keep us growing. They were just roles back then with no job description. For a broader understanding, it was Augustine’s role to worry about such things as rent, space, and survival of the company, while Jobi’s worry would be to grow the business by looking for new clients and thinking about better ways of smoothening our operations for proper optimization of not just our resources but also our efforts during that and later stages of the business.
From the days we ran O3, we had one basket where we’d put money to start the company. We had been starting for a very long time. And things were unfolding in a way to tell us, the time was ripe.
Photography was a Pitsop, something to hold court as we steadied the ship to shore. However, we had a gap in our business. We only had the skills to operate still cameras. Enter Otis. He brought in the expertise we lacked in videography. We had a company to establish and we were not pulling any stops We found a lowly hanging fruit: weddings.
Our first client was our good friend Alice Pote. We provided sound, photography, and videography. Our good guy Jobi, was the day’s MC. We took a few more wedding gigs. But a question still endured, where do we go from here?
2009: A Taste of Corporate
Many weddings later, Kenya Sugar Board came calling. No. Not what you are thinking. They wanted us to do embroidered t-shirts as part of their corporate branding. We needed Ksh. 140,000 to do the job which we didn’t have. It was our friend Kevin Machero who loaned us the capital if you could call it that. When the first batch of the t-shirts was ready, they were all small in size. To keep our end of the deal, we had to print new ones with proper sizes. Out of this business we took home a whooping Ksh. 20,000 and a truckload of lessons. Oh, the business helped us have an enviable L.P.O record for future business. Around this time, we only had a receipt book as the most prized business property.
In the intervening period, we did design jobs for Mastermind Tobacco and The Papercraft Company. We designed calendars and other merchandise. And because emails weren’t as common yet, we would go all the way to physically show our clients the designs we came up with. God bless emails! Talk of the long walk to freedom. Should you be counting, we had done events planning and management, photography, videography, and now, branding. We were on our way to becoming a 360-degree marketing and communications agency.
Becoming an Agency
We received a call from a lady and a man called Monica and Jonathan respectively. They wanted us to handle their rebranding. From KEMA to KEMA East Africa. From our assessment, we thought they didn’t sound serious.
They asked to visit our office and we responded that the office was too serious yet we didn’t have an office then. So we porposed to meet at a Java Restaurant as we gauged their seriousness. We only had money to buy sodas. And when the two invited us to eat, we pretended that were full but the hunger was real.
We went through the scope of work. They were inviting us to provide 360-degree marketing services. Effectively, they were calling us an agency. It was work we would roll our sleeves for. It had been a long time coming. Jacob wanted to suggest a quote of about 200k for the whole job until he heard the lady say, “Na by the way, tuko na pesa.” They said that as if to answer the many questions they read from our furrowed brows. Sweat, tears, and more sweat. Years in the making. This is the work that set the table for us. Our work was cut. And as we had learned through this process, lazima i-work. We officially became an agency.
Na by the way, walikua na pesa. That payment set us up. We moved to a bigger office, bought our first car. And built a reputation that has got us to where we are currently.
In our next series of this story, we tell you how a simple idea birthed while having lunch in a hotel the size of an elevator opened more doors for us with the biggest Telcos in Kenya.
