Businesses don’t just start. They are first, ideas and at times those ideas are curated, birthed, and brought up in a room without furniture in a flat in Kasarani, Nairobi. The concrete jungle where dreams are made of. Alexa, play Empire State of Mind- Nairobi rendition. We have a theory; if you can make it in Nairobi, you can make it anywhere. Especially if you, like us, start in a furniture-less flat in the belly of a populous city with nothing but dreams.
When we think about starting a business, we think of complex ideas, lengthy boardroom presentations, rolling numbers excel sheets, projections, and other business thingamajig. While other businesses start on this premise, others do not and nothing in the smallness of an idea says it won’t become great.
We were not afraid. We like to think that we had nothing to lose either. Young men with well-chiselled bodies, pursuing different things in life that we would walk away from (the exodus) to start building (the Genesis) Ad Media Communications. On our sleeves, we had impregnable audacity, unrestrained confidence, and what the streets call kujituma. And now, with the benefit of hindsight, we can confidently say, that kujituma pays off eventually. It can and will take time, but it will pay off eventually.
Everything ahead of us in 2006 was a dream. Everything behind us were the ideas that buoyed those dreams. Our story doesn’t just start with us building our dreams. Far from it. It starts with us first building our muscles. To look good—as any young man living in Nairobi dreams of and to find our footing in the world of commercial modelling. We can say that working out didn’t just pay off, it also paid us.
Circa 2006, three brothers audition for a Wringley’s PK chewing gum ad as up-and-coming commercial models through Versatile Models. The brief was to first have built muscles then the rest would follow. Nobody knew we were brothers. Nobody needed to know that we were brothers. Jacob Ouma—our co-founder was then Mr. Kenyatta University, a nursing & Public Health student, who took commercial modeling on the side.
Augustine, our other co-founder, a trained graphics designer, a fitness enthusiast to a fault, an idealist par excellence, and the owner of the rented furniture-less house in Kasarani. An ambitious man Augustine. He had the future company name Ad Media Communications inhaled so deep into his system that he exhaled it every time and everywhere he went. So strong was his faith in the future of the company that he managed to pull us in as though he had this huge suction pump and we had no option but to orbit around it and eventually get sucked in (no pun at all here). The third person in this holy trinity was our elder brother, who went on to become a pastor.
We all got the roles under the casting directorship of Lenny Juma a charming gentleman who opened great doors for us in the modelling world. The thing they don’t tell you about TV commercials is that they take time to make. It took us a month just to do that section of the ad that involves putting a pellet of PK chewing gum in one’s mouth. If you are calculating, we may have taken a year’s supply of the pellets just to get perfect shots. This not only taught us patience, but it also taught us about networks and how good it is in business it is to maintain them. Much more than this, it set the stage for the agency work we would set up in the future.
Soon, it was 2007. We had an interlude. You see before most dreams lay their foundations, before they transform from ideas to structures, sometimes they are supported by other ideas. Our other idea became a business before our main idea could crawl, walk, and finally run. We named it O3.
Here’s why.
Barrack Obama had gained fame in Kenya and quickly became Kenya’s best export. Another holy trinity was forming. Obama, Oliech Odinga. Obama, Obama was then the senator of Illinois with presidential ambitions that rolled like a boulder down a hill. Oliech was then a Kenyan footballing sensation and Odinga was then as he is now, a Kenyan Political Enigma. The birth of O3.
With these names, the idea to print t-shirts was conceived. This earned us the pride of place as the first people in the country to create a product out of the idolization of famous people. And boy, did we hawk those things. We had this guy in downtown Nairobi—that is how many businesses in Nairobi start, by having a guy in downtown Nairobi. You see every business’ success is based on its ability to provide solutions to needs. Those needs are what business people call gaps. You see them and you seize them.
We bought t-shirts and marked up by upselling the finished products at Ksh.1000. This gave us what, 50-100% profit? Buying low, selling high. We would distribute during the day, meet in the evening to ‘pay’ ourselves, and decide on how much we would plow back to the business. No new idea stays new forever. Someone saw an opportunity in our opportunity. They started printing ‘our t-shirts’ and selling them cheaply. Which is to say we had to act first or we would soon be out of business and then what? A decision had to be made. Much as our idea had not been patented, it was our idea and we felt it was only right to protect it. And protecting it we did. We went to the ‘production house’ of the fake t-shirts accompanied by a friend who looked like he knew a thing or two about piracy. This was a tightrope act. Together we performed a raid on their premises, took their, fake t-shirts and we never saw them again. And we never saw the fake t-shirts again. If you are asking, we still have some of those t-shirts from back then as a testament to where we’ve come from. They remind us that with the right t-shirts, you can start a business in this city. Maybe that is not a smart thing to say, so let’s try this again, with the right mindset, you can start any business in this or any other city. All you need is an idea, a great deal of audacity, a relentless desire for kujituma, and faith. Well, it would help if your house has furniture, but that should not impede you from dreaming.
