Then he bought the second delivery truck
and at the same time got a newer personal
car since the dealer that had sold him the
pickup truck was willing to trade in his
old car for the newer one. That is when he
began to attract neighborhood attention.
One morning he woke up to find that
both his drivers cum salespeople had not
reported to work. His routine was usually
to prepare the deliveries of the day on the
previous night and prepare a route plan
for the following day to enable efficient
operations.
The family suddenly faced an unforeseen
predicament, none of them had any idea
what the father’s business was as the wife
was a homemaker and the children had
never gone to the office where he worked
from and all they knew is that he had a
lot of business associates
He was unable to raise both of them on
the phone and since he was running late
for work he decided to cancel that day’s
work and plan to catch up from the next
day. But as it turned out they did not turn
up on the next day either. This mentality and belief led to a
conviction that they owed nobody any
explanation as to how the company was
run and in most cases did not share
crucial information with those that they
chose to work with resulting in disaster
when the founder was not there.
Frustrated he took two days off from
official work to sort out his mess and
decided to first deliver the outstanding
orders which had not been delivered.
When he got to is customers he was
surprised to find that they had been
supplied by his absent drivers. The other unfortunate occurrence was
that the enterprise was so wrapped up in
the founder’s ego to the extent that any
attempt to point out that the firm was
on a perilous trend tended to end up as a
personal affront hence the emergence of
the non-fallible founder.
He was to find out later what had
happened. Apparently his drivers were
approached by a neighbor who offered
them a better salary to do the same job
they were doing. He had been spying and
collecting information by engaging his
drivers who had helped him know the
ropes of the trade. They also had the ‘I want to be my own
boss’ mentality which suggests that they
were rebelling against what they surmised
to be incompetent bosses that they had to
report to in their past and were therefore
practically deaf to advice and ignored
team input since they were now the ‘boss’.
He had bought a pickup and had quietly
been stocking on the product and had
even found the foreign suppliers and had
been appointed a dealer. When he was
ready to start operations he asked the
drivers to just quit without notice as he
would compensate them.
The Founders Psyche
As we collected and interviewed more of
these founders we were able to start to
glean at some commonalities of what drove
these tenacious and gritty individuals and
why they so often ended up setting up
enterprises that did not outlive them.
There was the belief among all of them
that since they were the ones who had
come up with the idea of their enterprise
then they were automatically the ones
who had the vision and ability to run the
firms that they founded. It was akin to
giving birth to a child.
The founder rarely thought about the
company beyond his or her lifetime since
the company becomes an alter ego and
a natural extension to them. This lack
of separation between the company and
self is what makes them have a myopic
attitude to forward planning.
We also found that most founders were
unable to extricate themselves from
traditional practices and hence assumed
that their sons would succeed them in the
business rather than identifying the most
suitable offspring to run the business.
The resultant tension which was created
by a show of favoritism drove an
irreparable wedge among siblings who
rightly assumed that their common
heritage meant an equal share of the
estate but tradition never dictated equality
especially where women were concerned.
Although it seems that the obvious
reason a person creates a company is to
make money, in the case of most founders
the need to own the company superseded
financial consideration hence they were
willing to settle for less money with total
control rather than more money with
diluted control.
The companies therefore had built in
failure mechanism since the curtailing of
growth to maintain control often resulted
in the companies being underfunded as
the founder refused to see sense and inject
outside capital to grow the business.
Of greater concern were the many
businesses that were starved of cash
because the founder had diverted the
proceeds of the company to unproductive
real estate, especially land which is a
dormant asset but unfortunately a prized
possession for a Kenyan.
Some founders actually had some foresight
and left elaborate trusts to oversee what
they had founded in the spirit that a gift
was not a right but failed to realize that
human greed transcends commonsense
and what they had legally tried to prevent
was challengeable in court.
Such cases that were invariably
accompanied by multiple injunctions
crippled the businesses and the only
people that seem to make any money are
the barrage of lawyers that have perfected
the art of keeping these cases perpetually
in court.
The cover piece was assembled
and crafted by Marketing Africa
magazine editorial crew. For
feedback or any more discourse
please drop us a line at: Info@
marketingafrica.co.ke.