Managing a business, having built it from scratch requires more than commitment and sacrifice. For billionaire, Paul Kinuthia, he managed to reap Ksh 1.5 billion shillings by selling his company in 2013, having started it up with Ksh 3,000 only.
A report by Business Daily in 2013, detailed the story of a savvy entrepreneur who used to purchase chemicals to make Kenya-made shampoos in 1995.
Kinuthia, who had pitched camp at Kirinyaga Road, Nairobi, would hop from one beauty salon to another, pitching his product to consumers, hoping that he would convince them into buying the product he had manufactured himself.
Having worked as the only employee in the sole proprietorship, Interconsumer Products Limited, Kinuthia achieved a breakthrough in 2001 after hatching a marketing strategy that propelled him to greater heights.
"We broke even in 2001 and that is when I formalised its operations and hired professionals to help run the show. Kenya is a price-sensitive market and the mere fact that we were able to supply our customers with quality products at relatively much lower prices did it for us.
"Before long, we were drawn into an all-out market share war with the multinationals who had dominated the personal care business for decades," he recalled.
Kinuthia then came up with the famous Nice & Lovely shampoo that skyrocketed the growth of his firm, racking over 1.7 billion in 2012. The tycoon had also ventured into manufacturing sanitary care products.
The Nice & Lovely brand attracted a giant French cosmetic company L'Oreal who purchased the company's shampoo plants at an estimated Ksh 1.5 billion, leaving him to manage the sanitary care products.
"I had planned to list the company in the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) by 2015 but the stringent compliance rules before and after listing were daunting," Kinuthia disclosed.
By then, to list a company in NSE, one required a shareholder base of at least 1,000 shareholders and a significant increase in the cost of administrative operations.
From the proceeds of the sale, Kinuthia focused onto sanitary care products and bought land along Mombasa Road for construction of a new plant.
By the time he split his company, he had managed to employ 500 permanent staff and another 6,000 temporary ones who were under a sales and distribution department.
