Left to right: A montage of Ms Anne Juuko, CEO of Stanbic Bank and MsVaolah Amumpaire, the founder of Wena Hardware and Mr Japheth Kawanguzi, team lead, The Innovation Village. PHOTOS/PAUL MURUNGI The Covid-19 crisis has expedited change in the way companies do business. Some companies have moved faster in digitising their customer, supply-chain interactions and internal operations to deliver growth.
Vaolah Amumpaire, the founder of Wena Hardware
Our outlook for 2020 was to expand our market stake and sales into Kenya and Ghana because of the burgeoning infrastructural projects and construction trends in both countries. We hoped by setting a footprint in more main markets, our revenues would increase.
When we set up shop in Kenya at the beginning of the year, it coincided with the Covid-19 induced lockdown.
This meant we couldn’t oversee most of our operations in Kenya and yet we hadn’t set up well. We realised this was going to be costly and decided to put a halt on expansion and remain more efficient with operations.
We cut costs through using Google hangouts for updates and WhatsAapp for instant updates.
We also had to change business operations and leveraged on partnerships – with Jumia- to make more revenue. Our partnership with Jumia improved on our customer retention and base and we were able to raise more revenue.
Covid-19 also gave us an opportunity to expand our e- commerce platform digital space by focusing on the local clientele.
Before the pandemic, we largely banked on the diaspora community to tap into potential clients. But this is changing because we are observing a steady increase of Ugandan clients to the website from about five engagements to 30 per day.
Ugandans have started appreciating online transactions to conduct business.
Lessons
We have learnt that as a business, we need to set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for workers. With Covid-19, it sets a new precedence on how employee input is measured.
I also learnt that establishing my business online gave me comparative advantage over those with only physical businesses. I made a few changes to adapt to Covid -19 compared to other businesses struggling to shift online.
Anne Juuko, CEO of Stanbic Bank Despite the difficult operating environment, Stanbic’s performance in this first half has shown the bank’s resilience and achieving the strategic objectives as set out in 2018 of creating the opportunity for Stanbic bank to venture into […]
