ET633
This is an aged woman engaged in food preparation business sector. She has very young and vibrant skills and diverse expertise which helped her to have side business opportunities. Even though food preparation sector is our concern for the study, it’s better to promote the impressing skills that this old woman has. The main business area that she is engaged in is preparing foods such as cookies, cakes, bread, the and different types of spices which is a separate business having seven female salaried employees. In addition to that, this woman produces sweater, shoes, scarf, and overcoat/carpet for female girls/women of all age levels using thread. The hand crafts are exclusively made by the woman herself and are considered as side business activities. So far, Addis TV has visited her business and encouraged her to keep up with her wonderful professional skills to further boost up her business. The woman told us that her business is in a position of being visited by a government body and private entities in turn to promote the business and encourage the woman. She is striving to produce an export standard products. However, still the woman hasn’t officially promoted her products to the local market other than producing the items at her home. She has no separate production place for all the items. But she has partitioned the main house as a production , and finalizing areas of the products. This is especially for the products like the cookies and wine.
The woman(owner) of the business has also raised that the wine products are not yet officially and publicly introduced or promoted. They are family members and some other neighbours who are using the wine product. Here, the wine needs seal but the respondent hasn’t able to access it. Thus, the lack of bottle seal is one of the bottle necks which hinders her promote the product to the market.
ET779
I am going to share the story of a woman whose business sector is a laundry(ET779). She is 25 years old and unmarried. She graduated with level IV in construction. Before she started this business, she tried many jobs such as shopping. She worked as a baker for many hotels. It wad her brother who first opened the laundry. After working for a while, he permanently moved to Addis Ababa. When he moved, she bought a washing machine and continued working.
The firm was well-known and she continued to work in her brother’s name. Initially, she has 3 branches. One branch was closed because it was not suitable for work. Now it has only 2 branches. She told me that she wanted to open a third branch. But the biggest challenge with the job is the lack of drainage which means water cannot flow away because there is no drainage, so she has to pour the washing water into the latrine.Bu t that exceeds the capacity of the latrine and it gets blocked. She wants to invest in better drainage system with enough capacity. The owners, from which the work place was rented in don’t want the pouring of washing water into their latrine. Most of the time, she covers the cost for this activity at her own expense. However, it costs much money since the latrine fills up faster. One of the two branches serve only by receiving customer’s clothes and sending to the main branch for all the processes but the main branch receives and processes/washes the clothes.
Her future goal is to expand the branch further but she has not been able to find a suitable place for her work.
ET376
Before he has started this solid and liquid detergent production business, he work in another the same business in order to acquire start up capital, necessary skill and experience about the business. This respondent planned to start his own business starting from he was student and has advanced diploma in relation to the business type he is engaged for. This Business Started In march 2015.Now the business aims to be accessible through opening three sell points and try to boost production through install additional machinery. Before he join the market, he done supply, demand and other determinants analysis.
The driving force to start this business is he know how potential the market was and existence of small producers during that time.
He install additional plants during COVID 19 in order to react for the increasing demand for the detergent products products.
ET898
Today’s story ET898.In the past, we have shared the story of this respondent, about her plans and the extra work she was started, and the fact that she was going to leave her place of work due to an unintended increase in her house rent price. When we met her last time, She shared us about this unexpected rental cost and she was planning to change working place in other area. When she was working on it, another challenge made her take business ceasing decision. It is the issue of taxation.
She has been ordered to pay 434,131ETB for three years. She went to pay, thinking that it would be the same as she had been paying so far. The tax, however, is far from what she thought it should be. She tried to ask how it was, but she could not find the right answer, and she returned without paying and then consultation with her family to filed a complaint, as shown in the photo above, but has not yet been able to resolve it.
Right now, as we have seen today, it is completely closed and she packed the working items and put in her sister’s warehouse. She has not yet decided what to do, but she thinks she wants to take a break until the holidays and then start looking for a good place to work in a new spirit. Also She has not yet decided
about her new business either she staying on this stationary business or other. she is very motivated there are a lot of business ideas she thinks about after the holiday. Together with her family, they
will researching the market situation, such as what is best for her to do and so on. Her father is especially helping her with this. She told us that, she got a lot of awareness especially on the uses of taking financial diaries since working with L-IFT and when she returned she is glad to share every processes of starting new business. With her best guess she have a plan to start after one month. We hope we find her in a good place.
ET782
This firm is engaged in producing leather product mostly children’s shoes. This company was established in 8th August, 2003 with 4 partners. They were employee of a leather firm and most of them get the skill through experience and so our respondent believe he has a magnificent potential in creativity so he use to open up and share his idea to his boss, but his boss won’t hear him out, there boss won’t hear any ideas from them at all so ET782 he decide to start his own business. While working there he got to know the supply chains of the company he has the skill, motivation, passion/love to the work. But there is lack of capital so he convince his friends at work and they accept his idea on opening a leather production company. While working there they use to have Equb (traditional saving system in Ethiopia), after plannin and discussion they start the business by initial capital of ETB 20,000. Unfortunately some guy he knows from somewhere gave him 2 machineries which need to be repaired, so they repair it and they rent a small place it was just one room, and then they start their journey.
Even though they start their own business by renting a place they haven’t left the company they were working on. It is because they don’t have money for their household if they leave the company it is gonna be a risk for them since the business they opened is in a start-up stage plus they don’t have back-up in case something happens to the business they are associating. So they start the business by free manpower since they have skill there is no need of employing others, they won’t receive salary from there firm until they are stable. There work schedule was 8:30am – 5:30am they work at the place they are employed after the working hour ends they automatically went to their firm and work till midnight mostly from 6:00pm- 12:00pm. They work this way for a few years. ET782 know a lot of people who is engaged in retailing leather production so finding suppliers and customers wasn’t hard for him at all.
After working there for 1 year and 6month they change their place around Kality they needed a bit wider area since the product they are providing increase but still they need more bigger place after searching for a few month they got a huge place around Nefas selk and the owner quantity increased from 4 to 10 their reason was since there is a shortage of capital the more share they sold the more efficient they got. And four of them left the firm they use to work and start working to their firm only, employed 4 persons, bough a few low cost machinerys they start growing. While going on this way they heard that government is giving for small enterprises a place with a low rent, they try it out unfortunately they fulfilled the criteria and the got the current place they are working now.
They keep on increasing employee numbers, business was going well. The places they distribute are Merkato, Piyassa, Megenagna, saris, jemo, and Gerji. They are focusing on producing children and man’s shoes they want to extend their focusing area to women shoes and bags as well but the consumers need and there materials are not balanced yet they are Working on that. In the covid crises the business was really in a bad term they always give credit to the shops, supermarkets and other places because of the pandemic shops were closed so they couldn’t pay the money the day they are expected to pay because of that the firm experienced shortage of raw material even they paid their employee from there saving for more than 4-5 month and the conflict arises right after the pandemic the leathers supply chain was from different regions so that hurt the heart of the business. In order to survive they focus
on sales and they succeed on it.
Leather product are mostly sold in during holidays like new year , wedding times mostly on September month there is holidays and school starts then. So now currently there capital is around 2,000,000 ETB totally and currently they are in preparation for the exhibition plus the owners are minimised to 3 partners the detail will be presented next time.
