It’s a cleaning affair

Seven years ago, 31-year-old Caroline Ngina was an office administrator earning a measly Sh6,000 each month.

Today, she runs a successful cleaning company employing a permanent staff of 15. “I had just finished a course in business administration and I really needed that job but I knew from the start that employment wasn’t for me. I was there to learn,” she recalls her state of mind when she took her first job.

Raised by her grandparents in Uganda, she had grown up admiring how they successfully ran a number of businesses. For a year, she diligently ran the office for her employer.

The next year, she began putting her dreams of entrepreneurship in writing.

“I thought about setting up a salon or acquiring a taxi.

The problem with these business ideas was that I had no savings and with no collateral, no bank would give me a loan,” she says.

Caroline was left to do only what she knew best – cleaning on a domestic level. Her mother was sickly at the time and when Caroline spoke about starting a business, she advised her to hold onto her job.

Knowing she wouldn’t approve, Caroline quietly quit her job and then started cleaning the homes of more well-off friends for a small fee.

“Thinking back, cleaning was a natural choice. I grew up seeing only white bedsheets and linen in our home even when we moved to rural Ukambani.

When I walk into a room, the first thing that I see is the dirt and as a young adult, I made a lot of people uncomfortable by pointing it out.”

She would often bring one or two other people to help with the cleaning and the profit margin was very small.

Her first business hurdle came when she wanted to expand but her clients had trust issues. They wanted her to be there in person so she couldn’t take on many jobs at once.

Also, along the way, Caroline had seen friends and relatives take up loans to boost their businesses only for it to backfire, leaving them at rock bottom.

She was reluctant to take a loan and she admits that as a result, her business may have taken longer to grow.

Major blow

By 2010, her business had slowly grown to include cleaning commercial spaces. She would hire a few extra hands on casual basis and hire machines from larger companies.

It was working. In fact, it was going so well that she took the leap and took out her first bank loan to invest in machines.

“I don’t know if it was a case of the self-fulfilling prophesy but I got a major blow by losing a major contract before I could finish paying off the loan.

I had to scale down, let go of most of the workers and move my office to my house.”

She attributes this turn of events to lack of proper business mentorship. The only reason she held on was that her business was her only lifeline, both her grandparents and her mother having passed on.

She was now running it singlehandedly, to the point of doing door-to-door marketing. Then, at the end of 2012, she got a breakthrough in the form of a huge government contract and business picked up again.

Determined to do it right this time, she did some market research and realised that she was lacking in networking. She sought and joined several business networks where she got mentored by veteran entrepreneurs and also met people who gave her business referrals.

Today, Miss Clean Domestic and Office Solutions employs 15 employees permanently, a number which sometimes doubles depending on the season. Her dream is to go international.

The best days at work, she says, are when a happy client calls to appreciate a job well done.

This, to Caroline, feels better than the actual payment. Like all life’s aspects, there are also bad days when she has to deal with broken machines but these, she says, are few and far between.

For the first two years, she barely had a social life as she was running the business hands on. With time, she set up a structure, empowering her employees such that she doesn’t have to be there for the company to keep running.

“It was tough starting out, especially because I lacked guidance. Because of this, I am taking four children through high school with the hope of mentoring them into finding their purpose.”

HOW SHE DID IT:

• She believed in herself.
• Consistency has been key. She chose one line of business and stuck to it through the rough patches.
• She acquired discipline. She gives as much as she can to her business and plans for her spending including shopping for clothes, which she only does twice a year.