eBusiness Weekly
This week Leslie Mupeti (LM) had a chance to sit down with renowned entrepreneur and comedian, Carl Joshua Ncube (CJ), discussing the business side of things. Enjoy the conversation.
LM: You’ve had an illustrious career as a comedian and as a marketer. You have done big projects for parastatals and big corporations. What’s the secret behind all this success?
C.J: I think the thing at the core of it is that I’m a designer. I learned earlier that designing was about creating solutions and everything started making sense for me.
My job was not just to create pretty things but to have results. So when I’m creating an advert, the advert has to have a result and it’s about knowing the result the client wants.
It’s about listening to what the client wants but you as the expert can also advise the client and so a client may say I’m going in one direction but if you see that there’s a better direction, you have an obligation to tell that to your client.
Early on it resulted in me losing a lot of clients, but I gained more clients who understood what I was doing and that’s what made me grow as a designer and I became a more recognised brand in my line of thinking.
There was a “Carl” type of thinking that was more sought after by my clients and I have learnt to harness that by doing two things: firstly, I do work for clients but secondly I do work for myself so when I do work for myself is when I’m most creative.
So, I get to do things that other clients are afraid of doing and so when I’m now telling them that ‘‘look I tested this out in my comedy’’ they’re reassured.
That’s why I did the comedy because I was tired of trying to convince my friends who were artistes that they could export their art to the rest of the world. So, when I started doing that as a comedian, exporting myself as an artiste, then people started paying more attention and started thinking to themselves that ‘‘maybe there’s some kind of truth in what Carl Joshua is doing.’’ It’s really about solving problems as a designer, if you solve a problem for yourself a market will definitely exist.
L.M: So what do you think about this trend in our local marketing whereby most of the agencies are recycling hit songs as jingles?
C.J: So, I think generally marketers, advertising agencies and corporates are lazy. They have become used to selling their products to a captive audience. They exist in markets with no competition. I mean, you pick any brand in Zimbabwe, it wouldn’t survive outside the country, it can’t.
They wouldn’t become as big as they are here, not with that line of thinking. I think it’s just a lazy approach to marketing. I think advertising had a function, the function was to educate and to entertain and to also be effective as a means to getting people to buy into a product or have loyalty towards a certain product but I can tell you right now that there’s very little brand loyalty in Zimbabwe. If a new brand comes into the country, people just switch without hesitating, they couldn’t care less because there hasn’t been a form of advertising that generates brand loyalty.
L.M: So, what have been some of your biggest learning experiences in running a business in Zimbabwe?
C.J: I started my first company when I was 15 years when I was at school and from 15 to being 43 now, it’s been a long time that I have been running businesses in different forms. I realised that there’s a difference between an idea, a prototype, a product, a brand, a company, a corporate, a community and a platform. These are so different and if you don’t know where you are in that category of things I just listed, it could be the death of you.
Some people started a company based on an idea, and they are just an idea, they haven’t even created a prototype or even if they created a prototype and a product they are not even a company. For example, people don’t understand that the computer and the television have many companies involved in creating these products. There’s a company that makes the chips, the keyboards, the mouse . . . all these are companies coming up with one product which is part of another company. So, these are some of the things I have learnt, that is to know where you are because sometimes you have a product and you’re trying to act like a company but you’re not a company, you don’t have the structures and the things required for you to be one. So it’s about knowing where you are and knowing when to transition from one form to another.
L.M: So, what do you think about the ease of doing business in Zimbabwe?
C.J: There’s one thing that Zimbabwe has been very good at that other countries are not good at. I would say it is knowing the balance between regulation and less regulation. For example, you could easily start a company from scratch and the country allows you to grow unregulated until you need compliance, so when it comes to the big deals you now need to be registered among others, but generally it allows you to grow unregulated for quite some time and that’s great because it allows businesses to grow.
The challenge is that when the young businesses are growing they want to act like the big boys, so they complain about things like ‘‘the government is not giving us contracts!’’ . . . no, no, no . . . when you now want to get a tender they you’ll now need to have certain documentation at a cost, but you can still operate as a small player making your money, you don’t have to do the big jobs as a small company.
That’s the problem you now have, a lot of small companies that don’t allow themselves to grow, gunning for the big tenders, then they want to register quickly, they’re not even a company. They become one big company, they get one big contract, make money, then they die. It’s happening a lot in this country. That’s also why we also get poor service delivery in this country, small companies gunning for the big jobs they’re not capable of fulfilling.
L.M: So, what inspired your transition from comedy into establishing your Rural BnB company?
C.J: A lot of people call it a transition but for me it wasn’t one. I was going around the world performing comedy. One of the biggest challenges we had was if you go without an identity, it becomes very clear when you travel around the world. When I was travelling to South East Asia, they would take us on these trips where they would show us their culture.
They would then ask about my country and experience my culture, then you would realise you don’t have a culture to show. More and more that became very apparent where people would say ‘‘Carl I’m in Zimbabwe, I finally came! Show me your culture!’’and then you have nothing to show. So, for me it became, we have to solve this problem for ourselves. For example, I was a chef and a very good chef but I was a terrible chef at Zimbabwean cuisine.
I now had to learn how to cook our food to cook it better to the level I could cook any other dish in the world. That transition came about as fellow comedians became more and more interested in Zimbabwe and when they listened to my comedy and they said ‘‘I want to come to Zimbabwe’’ but I had nothing to show for it. So the solution was to create a product we called Rural BnB, but before we did that we had to move to the village and learn about the village. I was a kid who had never been to the rural areas before so I didn’t have a story to tell.
L.M: You were featured on the ‘‘Best ever food review’’ show. One of the biggest YouTube channels in the food space. That was epic!
C.J: That’s a good example. Imagine if he had come and I hadn’t done the training, what would I have been showing him? How to make a burger? How to make French Fries? I can’t impress an American by making his food. Clearly what he was looking for was an authentic experience, which is the reason why we went down to my growth point. There’s a lady there called Mai Gari, her shop that’s where we normally drink from and have Sadza. I asked her, ‘‘Mai Gari, can I please come and cook for these Americans here’’ but the reason why I did it specifically was so that Mai Gari could see what I was doing and when other tourists come she can do the same for them because Mai Gari, we advertise her business as the restaurant that was on the Best Ever Food Review show. So, there’s that advantage that comes from it. Mai Gari’s growth point is opposite the airport so she’s the closest restaurant to Victoria Falls. Imagine she puts up a big sign that says ‘‘As seen on The Best Ever Food Review show,’’ how many people are going to come as a result? That’s what Rural BnB is all about. Enabling people to see beyond where they are currently at.
L.M: What role does strategy play in your career?
C.J: To run a comedy business you are solving a problem, so you take your product somewhere, for example, Mazoe Orange can be good in Zimbabwe but maybe in Nigeria they like Cream Soda, so having a diverse product range is important. I looked at myself as a supermarket and I’m opening up branches around the world and that’s what I wanted to be. I started doing comedy during the time Robert Mugabe was still President and there were certain things you couldn’t say in Zimbabwe so instead of making jokes about that, I looked for countries that had leaders who had been in power for more than 30 years.
I went to those countries and when I told my jokes they could understand. The jokes became better. So, using a strategic approach to your art is very important. Just because you sing a song in Zimbabwe and it blows up does not mean that the same song will work in another country. You have to know your product and know your audience.
There is a strategy that the CIA uses to recruit their spies, I saw it in a TV show so I don’t know if it’s real or not but it’s called MICE. Money Ideology, Coercion and Ego. You can work with a person based on money, for example, you can say I’m worth five bucks and you can make sixty five bucks profit if you work with me, the person you’re trying to work with will most likely agree to work with you since they will see the value that comes in doing so. You can also work with a person based on ideology.
For example, you can say I want to talk about Africa’s narrative, news agencies love that narrative and the press will happily work with you. In coercion it’s more like bullying people without them realising it. For example, I can say to someone I will design all your posters for your festival for free and that person is more likely to book me as a comedian because that person subconsciously owes me a ‘favour.’ It’s more like appealing to someone else’s other needs and they will do something else for you in return.
With ego it’s all about just going to someone and just saying to them ‘‘ah mudhara makapenga’’ and putting them on a higher level. Sometimes people are more willing to work with you when you’re smaller. Imagine if I rolled up in a Benz, some people would less likely give me work because they would expect me to give them work since I looked like the more privileged guy. They would think I’m the one with the money and they would want to get the money from me.
L.M: Do you have anything you would like to tell your younger self?
C.J: What I would tell my younger self and any other young person out there is that I wish I had used my school or my learning institution to start my company. I never realised that if I had started in school, the school would be willing to support me and my ventures. This whole thing of ‘‘If I finish school I want to do this or that’’ is probably the biggest mistake everyone makes, and the number one question that’s sending our youth in the wrong direction is asking them what they want to do when they finish school. Why must you finish in order to do something? You can do something while you’re there.
Leslie Mupeti is a brand strategist and creative innovator. He is the founder of Daily Brand and can be reached for feedback on www.dailybrand.co.zw or email on: [email protected] or +263 785 324 230. His Twitter and Facebook is @lesmupeti.
