Innovative packaging company wins market for superior service

Pictured is the managing director
of Allwin Agencies Kenya Ltd.
Mr Saji Kuriakhose.

If you have been involved in manufacturing then you know about this very annoying thing that tends to happen too often these days. You purchase a machine at what you see is a good price but when it beaks down the spare part to get it working again is like half the original price you paid for the whole machine.

Actually this trend of manufacturers making their profits from parts started in the motor industry but was perfected computer printer manufacturers.

The truth is that it can be a very annoying and Allwin Agencies Kenya Limited have been able to pick up manufacturing clients rapidly by simply ensuring that the packaging machinery they supply is fully supported by excellent after sales service.

“We will never deal with a manufacturer whose prices for parts are exorbitant,” says managing director Saji Kuriakhose.

By simply caring just a little more for the customer, Allwin has not only been able to get a quick foothold in the market but the company has also been able to expand very quickly taking away market share from more established players.

Allwin has also been able to take advantage of the phenomenal growth in the number of small and medium sized businesses in the region in recent years. Some of the company’s hottest sellers to this market include foot sealers, hand sealers and band sealers amongst others.

Saji believes that packaging can change lives and revolutionize business in the country because numerous products are way too expensive just because of the packaging. There are also numerous opportunities entrepreneurs can take advantage of. For instance there is a big market for anybody who can figure out a way to package raw honey in smaller packaging and maybe even satchels that can be affordable to a bigger percentage of the mass market.

Get more information on packaging products from Allwin Agencies Kenya Ltd.

Will the Equity magic end?

Picture shows Equity Bank CEO and managing director Dr James Mwangi

Where is the soft underbelly of the bank?

There are about 5.5 million bank account holders in the country and out of those, a staggering 2.5 million of them are held by one local bank—Equity Bank.

This amazing revelation illustrates the power and stranglehold that this bank has. It is hard to believe that this now giant domineering bank was a small struggling building society not too long ago.

The fairy-tale brief history of Equity Bank is often told of how as a building society the institution took the plunge and welcomed with open arms masses of ordinary Kenyans whose accounts had been forcibly shut by the big mainstream banks in the 90s. The then arrogant banks were apparently giddy from the massive easy profits that they were making from government Treasury Bills (TBs) at the time. This caused many of them at the time to see small account holders as more of a nuisance than an asset Virtually all the big banks at the time even went as far as shutting down numerous small branches countrywide.

Incidentally the widely-held view at the time was that small penny-counting account holders were just not viable for any bank. And so Equity Bank was often the target of cruel jokes in banking circles as its' demise was often predicted. But what the conservative lazy bankers in the country at the time did not see was the impact that
technology was going to have on profits and especially the ability of a bank to run numerous small accounts profitably.

It was not long before the joke sharply turned against the main-stream banks as Interest rates came down and the huge easy profits from TBs disappeared virtually overnight. The rest as they say is history and as you read this, the same banks that were so eager to shut down small accounts only a handful of years ago are now busy trying to play catch up with Equity getting back the same crowd the send packing. In fact former Equity marketing employees now litter many big multinational banks literally hawking their banking services on the streets of major cities and towns in the country.

Indeed so rapid and phenomenal has the growth of Equity Bank been that last year it suffered a hostile media attack engineered by dark unseen forces whose aim was clearly to cause a run on the bank. The fact that the bank not only survived but continued to thrive is proof enough of how solid the institution seems to be. Experts are mostly in agreement that not many banks would have endured the kind of smear campaign that Equity weathered. In the 1980s Alnoor Kassam's TradeBank also survived several storms including a run on the bank. Fascinatingly Kassam a brilliant entrepreneur who was not averse to taking risks decided to quickly pay on the spot anybody who wanted to withdraw all their cash. What followed was that most of the clients who milled around the bank to get their money out were soon milling back to re-bank it.

In the case of Equity, informed sources who do not want to be named have shown Business Africa several pieces of evidence that point to one mainstream foreign bank being the main source of the attacks. This is telling because it suggests that well-funded multi-national banks based in the country are feeling the heat generated by Equity and are even looking at the bank as a real threat to their survival and
prosperity.

One of the reasons why Equity was able to come out of the crisis virtually unscathed has to do with their sheer numbers. Meaning that they do not have to lend money to generate revenue. For instance a single transaction by the 2.5 million account holders charged at Kshs 30 would give the bank a staggering 75 million.

But surely even mighty Equity must have a soft underbelly somewhere.

The first place that most analysts look at is the customer service component. It is rather obvious that any organization that grows at the speed with which Equity grew is bound to run into some problems serving such a huge customer base. Indeed there have been complaints from customers who previously found it easy to see the branch manager and are now having great difficulties in accessing a mere credit officer. However surprisingly a number of long term customers at the bank interviewed by this writer say that customer service has in fact improved over time even as the number of account holders has ballooned. Clearly customer service may be one area that the bank is still able to deal with.

However what most analysts agree is that the greatest weakness of this now colossal bank is the issue of dominance by a single individual so that the success and future of the bank is hinged too closely to just one person. That person is of course CEO and managing director Dr James Mwangi. Observers ask what will happen after Mwangi, as brilliant as he may be now?

Entrepreneur stumbles on unique way to sell

When Murori Kiunga first launched his tiny book publishing business he was pretty confident about the quality and content in his books and so he distributed them in leading bookshops and waited for sales to take off. Nothing happened.

Weeks later it dawned on him that not too many people usually visit book shops looking to purchase inspirational books. So his next step was to place an advertisement in the daily newspapers which he did and rubbed his hands in anticipation waiting for the huge response he knew would have to come. And he really needed it to cover the cost of the rather costly advertisement and give him a good return for the book he was selling. He was no novice in the field of newspaper advertising having worked as an advertising sales representative for the Daily
Nation for a number of years before going into business and had seen numerous clients get a huge response from advertising in the daily newspapers.

But again it ended in disappointment. Nothing happened and at the end of the day he had hardly received any enquiries; his pile of books remained unsold, gathering dust in his small office along Moi Avenue, Nairobi.

Many business people would have thrown in the towel at this point and done something else, but luckily Kiunga did not give up and decided instead to think out of the box and to try some unorthodox methods of selling. And that was when he stumbled onto a breakthrough of sorts.

"I went to a small seminar in Nyeri and sold Kshs 15,000 worth of books within a very short time," Kiunga remembers. This excited him tremendously and to date he still uses every seminar he can get to as an opportunity to sell. That is how Kiunga's Queenex Holding Ltd has been marketing and selling. But last month the determined entrepreneur discovered yet another new way of depleting his stocks while fattening his bank account balance. Kiunga had experimented with flyers before
but this time he got serious and printed thousands of small A6 full colour flyers.

The biggest challenge was of course distributing them. Those with marketing experience are well aware of the fact that by far the most important thing in any promotion effort is to reach your targeted audience. He explains how he has been organizing distribution in commuter vehicles early every morning to reach people going to work.

"The people commuting between 5 am and 6:30 am are mostly security guards, messengers and cleaners. Those are not the people I am looking for to buy my books." Kiunga explains that his prime targets are office workers who commute between 7 and 7:45 am. And that is the time when he concentrates all efforts on distributing his flyers in commuter vehicles coming into the city from various estates and suburbs.

So successful has his this distribution of handbills been that he usually gets several orders on a daily basis to deliver directly to clients who request the books. He has even had enquiries from places as far off as Kisumu.

Flyers or handbills are no doubt effective enough methods of advertising a business these days, if Kiunga's experiences are anything to go by. Just the kind of thing that would save numerous
small and medium sized businesses that are at this very time struggling just to survive and cannot seem to get enough clients to do so.