Diary of a poultry farmer: : Ten habits to grow a poultry start-up

Farming such a poultry-keeping, takes a lot of patience and multi-tasking. FILE PHOTO | NMG

What you need to know:

  • Having a plan won’t harm your business prospects, but the only way you’ll learn is by doing. My business plan didn’t solve all my problems.
  • As such, making money should never be an entrepreneur’s sole motivation, instead, starting a business should be about solving peoples’ problems.
  • Instead of splashing their money on luxuries to bolster their crumbly egos, they invest in philanthropy.
  • Entrepreneurship is a way of life and you should never start a business if it involves doing something you don’t enjoy.

In 2015, I had a conversation with Wangeci, a farmer, on effective habits of upcoming and seasoned agri-preneurs.

“Farming takes a lot of patience and multi-tasking,” she said. “If you’re the anal-retentive type who works best on a schedule, either forget farming or learn to loosen up fast. Keeping livestock requires one to learn on the fly.”

I’d never given this topic much thought until a year later when I read an article by Anver Versi on cultivating a right business mind-set. He posed the question: “Why do few businesses grow into substantial companies?”

Anver concluded that the difference between a business that has stopped growing and one that keeps expanding has far less to do with the activity itself than the attitude of the entrepreneur. That got me thinking.

Since then, I’ve been studying habits of successful entrepreneur and the only way to truly master these behaviours is to live them, rather than just read about it. Here are 10 habits I’ve found useful to my poultry venture:

Master ‘big-picture’ thinking: Many farmers are astounded to hear that poultry accounts for 9 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product— some $6.3 billion (Sh63 billion) annually (2015 FAO report).

This information has inspired me to set ambitious short-term and long-term goals for my business.

To illustrate the ‘big-picture’ thinking, I use this analogy;If you put bananas and money in front of monkeys, they’ll choose bananas because monkeys don’t know that money can buy bananas.

Deploy practical knowledge: Second, we mostly learn by doing and having a good business idea in your head is useless until you implement it (ideas are rarely unique and what matters is how you execute them).

Technocrats think that to start a business, you first develop a written plan, raise capital, develop a product and voila, money tumbles down like hailstones.

Having a plan won’t harm your business prospects, but the only way you’ll learn is by doing. My business plan didn’t solve all my problems.

But, through on-job experience, I’ve harnessed valuable lessons to improve on it and train other farmers.

Solve problems: Trial-and-error approaches work better for entrepreneurs because good ideas don’t fall from heaven like manna.

In the same way businesses care about making money from selling their products, customers equally yearn for solutions tailored to their problems.

As such, making money should never be an entrepreneur’s sole motivation, instead, starting a business should be about solving peoples’ problems.

Practise delayed gratification: If you are the type that mostly regard a car as a status-symbol—as opposed to a means to get you from one point to another— then you’re certainly not made to be an entrepreneur. I read that Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, owns a modest $30,000 Acura TSX entry-level sedan and Azim Premji, the 61st richest person in the world, drove a Toyota Corolla.

Instead of splashing their money on luxuries to bolster their crumbly egos, they invest in philanthropy.

In 2006, Warren Buffett who up to this day still lives in a modest house that he bought in 1958 for $31,500 in Omaha, Nebraska, gave away 85 per cent of his fortune— or about $37.4 billion—to charitable causes. (See 5 Frugal Habits of the World’s richest people available online).

Mitigate risk: When I hear someone saying that entrepreneurs are fervent risk-takers, I think to myself, “What have they been smoking?”

Entrepreneurs make mistakes but they also do due diligence before plunging in. When I started out in 2014, I realised I’d spent Sh102,468 to raise 100 Improved Kienyeji chickens in the first six months, from October 17, 2014 to March 4, 2015.

Commercial feeds accounted for 43 per cent of the total amount I spent. If I’d started with 5,000 birds, I would’ve been bankrupted. I now formulate my own feeds and save between 30 and 50 per cent on a 70kg bag.

Embrace failure: I read that folks in the Silicon Valley discuss failure as a badge of honour. To me, failure and success are opposite sides of the same coin.

Learn every day: Even after spending years learning everything there’s to know about rearing poultry, I still consider myself a novice.

Network effectively: Since I started penning this Diary, my in-box is always full of requests from people I’ve never even met. I always respond to them because when you connect people, you also gain connections.

Work hard and have fun: Entrepreneurship is a way of life and you should never start a business if it involves doing something you don’t enjoy.

Get lucky: Success also involves some luck in that you’ve to be in the right place at the right time and capitalise on opportunities when they come your way (I’m still waiting for Ladyluck to smile on me).