Dinesh Patel had a solid plan: go to the United States (US), play professional golf and win a PGA tournament. His dream took shape when he earned a sport scholarship to study at Florida State University. When he got there he realized that it was going to be tough.
“It’s incredibly competitive and I don’t think that I was good enough, to be honest. But I also don’t think that I wanted it badly enough&#8230; Those guys are good, they work so hard and they were willing to sacrifice so much more than I was willing to sacrifice,” he says.
Patel, the son of a doctor and teacher from Durban, South Africa, decided to focus on his business studies but flirted with the idea of a career in the music business. In his final years at university, he worked as a campus label representative for Warner Brothers’ Electro Records.
“You throw parties and you get access to all the new music and you basically build these artists on a street level.”
When it came down to a career, Patel followed the money. His first job was in Atlanta where he worked as a senior consultant for Deloitte.
“On the day I joined, I think I knew that this wasn’t for me. But it was a great training ground because you learn so much about reading financial statements and understanding the mechanics of business.”
Two years later, he worked as a banker, at the peak of the financial crisis, for Goldman Sachs in New York.
It was here that Patel came across the innovative virtual canteen, Seamless. Patel made use of Seamless to order food on the nights he worked late in the office. The company initially focused on corporates but when they branched out, catering for everyone, business boomed. The concept of Seamless remained at the back of Patel’s mind and resurfaced years later.
After 10 years in the US, Patel returned to South Africa. He had many job offers and pursued his own business ventures but struggled to find his feet.
Through it all, he kept hearing his parent’s voice ringing in his head.
“Dinesh, first you wanted to be a golfer, now you’re not a golfer, then you wanted to be an accountant, now you’re not an to accountant, then you wanted to be a trader, now you’re not a trader, then you wanted to be an actor, well now you’re not an actor. What do you want? Can you just stick to something?”
Tired and on the brink of giving up, Patel experienced his epiphany. It came while he was lounging on his parent’s couch, in Cape Town, and the conversation was about dinner. It came down to two options: chicken from Nando’s or pizza from Panarottis.
“That’s when I immediately thought ‘there must be more options, if we had Seamless here it would be so good.’”
That night, Patel dashed out to meet Joseph Okleberry, who would become an investor. He had relocated from the US to South Africa to work as an internet strategist for Naspers. Okleberry brought his expertise of the web to the table.
Their conversation went something like this: “Joe you used Seamless, I used Seamless. Do you think something like this would work in South Africa?”
Okleberry was keen on the idea and the two men spent the rest of the evening drawing up the plan for OrderIn – an online food ordering service. It would partner with companies that offered delivery and customers would pay restaurant prices. In return, OrderIn would charge restaurants 8%.
Patel spent the next three months researching. He sent a proposal to Jason Finger, the founder of Seamless in the US, who jumped in.
“Jason brought in his development team from Seamless so we had all of their experience to build OrderIn from scratch. We used their experience and avoided some of the mistakes they had made. It was fascinating to see what a website that does a quarter million orders a day looks like,” says Patel.
Hennie Booysen, who worked for Skype in London and is also a co-founder of Groupon, joined the team as a co-founder. He brought his expertise in the e-commerce space.
With the help from an investor at Naspers and a hedge fund in New York, OrderIn secured the capital.
Patel formed a team of five who worked on the website for eight months, from a house in Camps Bay in Cape Town. As the launch neared, there were nerves.
Then the first order rang in.
“Everyone freaked out! We were like ‘oh my gosh there’s actually an order,’” says Patel.
The customer, who was working late at Investec, had a craving for sushi. Everything was running as planned. The order appeared on the OrderIn system, the machine at the sushi bar had printed the receipt and the customer received notification that the order would take 45 minutes. There was only one problem; the sushi bar had no delivery man.
“I raced from my house to the restaurant, picked up the food and dropped it off at the customer,” says Patel.
The guy told Patel, dressed casually, that he didn’t look like a delivery guy. Patel spun the story that as the first customer he received a special delivery from the founder and CEO.
Although OrderIn has had its fair share of hiccups, it has not deterred them. By next year, they would have signed 650 restaurants.
Patel says many overlook the cost of staff, maintaining a website and customer service when calculating profits.
“A lot of guys coming into the market are pricing themselves very cheaply, one to three percent. But the reality of it is that’s not a sustainable business model.”
When it comes to business, the 32-year-old founder and CEO of OrderIn doesn’t worry much, as he relies on the expertise of his team.
“I’m always the stupidest guy in the room. My investors and our team are so much smarter than me, that makes running a business so much easier.”
From sportsman to banker and now online food, Patel is happy he kept moving forward.
“I’ve always had this hustle. I want to do something on my own; I want to create something… When you are in a large corporate environment you don’t feel like you’re in control and as an entrepreneur, I think you want to feel like you are in control. You want to feel like you’ve got a say in your destiny.”
So, if at first you don’t succeed, try everything, try anything but try, try and try again.

‘I’m Always The  Stupidest Guy In The Room’

The morning sky was clearing as the first glimmer of the sun emerged when Charles Kimei, sipping hot black coffee as he read the daily papers, heard the frantic tapping of shoes against the concrete floor outside his office. It was too early for someone to be running, he thought.
What happened next was like a scene out of a movie. One of his managers stormed his office, panting and distraught. Kimei, the managing director of Tanzania’s CRDB Bank, instinctively glanced out of his fourth floor window. Everything looked calm outside.
“Then this guy came running in. I was scared; I thought he was coming to kill me. He shouted ‘Robbers!’”
Kimei recalls that day with the preciseness that comes with banking experience. There was no time to ask questions, and so began the worst day in his management career, on October 14, 2002.
Armed robbers disguised in staff uniform had quietly entered the bank in the morning and emptied the safes. In the process, they shot one of the customers, while a bank employee hurt himself as he tried to hide.
By the time Kimei reached the ground floor, where the bank operates its main branch, the robbers had sneaked into the safety of Dar es Salaam’s morning bustle. The robbery took between five and eight minutes, he says, and was so smooth that people outside and on other floors barely noticed anything. Only one gunshot was fired to scare staff and security guards.
“The first thing I did was to ensure that there were no serious casualties, I then called the police. And because we needed to know how much money was stolen, I called the auditor,” he says.
Initially, he thought it was a small amount. But the audit revealed that around $2 million had been taken. The bank had just imported a large amount of dollars to sell to forex bureaus and retail customers and had a stash of euros ready to be shipped out. The timing of the raid pointed to an inside job.
“We had just launched a smartcard, TemboCard, with purse capability, the first of its kind in Tanzania. Then I kind of provoked the robbers. At the launch ceremony I warned them that it would no longer be attractive for them to attack buses plying upcountry routes because passengers will not be carrying cash but smartcards,” says Kimei.
The following Monday, they hit.
“The problem is that our staff are probably shy of looking at each other’s face, otherwise they could have noticed the strangers. The robbers blended in and no one suspected. They ordered everyone to lie down and knew the whereabouts of everything in the branch, including the names of the safe custodians,” says Kimei, the father of three who turns 61 in August.
Back then, the bank was quite small, making a profit of $2.1 million. The pain of knowing that the robbers walked away with the equivalent of the bank’s earnings was excruciating.
CRDB, a product of financial reorganization and financial sector reforms in Tanzania in the early nineties, is now a well-established bank with assets worth $2.2 billion, more than 105 branches, 445 partner microfinance institutions, 350 ATMs and 500 agents across the country. Kimei joined the bank in 1998 and has been pursuing a recovery path, culminating in the listing on the Dar es Salaam Stock Exchange (DSE) in 2009 and a rebrand to CRDB Bank Plc. From 100,000 customers in 1998, the bank now boasts 1.5 million and counting, riding on ICT and modern, customer-friendly branches.
A bank robbery tests the limits of management and business continuity. Decisions have to be made at the speed of a cash-counting machine. The urgency to resume business and the need to arrest suspects and recover the stolen money were competing for Kimei’s saturated attention.
The bank re-opened half an hour late, but early enough to avoid suspicion from its customers and the public.
“I did not want customers to know what had happened. If they panicked, they would think the bank had run out of money. The task was to ensure there was confidence outside the bank. We told staff to be calm and take business as usual. Later, I realized we underestimated the panic and trauma among staff, although they managed to render services,” says Kimei.
Around that period, there was a wave of bank robberies in Tanzania. So, the bank beefed up its security by bringing in additional police and boosting private security guards. On the fateful day, police officers were not on guard.
The biggest issue for Kimei was how to recover the money.
“There was a possibility of recovering the money. At some point, I felt if I was given a police uniform I would do a better job. I was getting phone calls on leads on where the money was but the police were slow. Few people were jailed, but the only money recovered was from the insurers.”
Kimei held a press conference to assure the public that everything was under control and the bank was safe.
“It was well received and most customers who had visited the branch did not even notice there was a robbery. The fact that I gave them the news myself gave them confidence,” he says.
The bank installed CCTV cameras, enhanced its diligence on staff and reviewed their profiles. After the vetting, some suspects were identified among the staff. The morning after, panic was still palpable and morale had not improved, but it was business as usual. Kimei visited the branch every morning to assure staff. This was not made easy by investigators who regularly questioned staff.
“The way we handled the matter was very professional. There is very little someone can do better, even with the benefit of hindsight. Robberies are unexpected and you cannot prepare for them. For example, the police officers were always on site before. We should have noticed the absence of police that morning,” he says.
The bank now has a business continuity plan. But Kimei says disruptive events are not always similar so a business manager must always be ready to use their own intuition alongside what is documented. Staff must know how to react to disasters. This is the mentality powering the bank’s operations, which has seen 30% growth each year.
But he notes that some things happen spontaneously, giving little time for the grab list.
“If something were to happen now, I will run to the drawer and grab my wallet. I won’t even remember there is a grab list,” he says jokingly.
Kimei has always been in decision making positions, both in school and the corporate world. Perhaps this has played a role in preparing him for critical moments.
“I was head prefect at Shinyanga High School which was the most cantankerous experience. People see me as very humble. But I have handled very complicated situations.”
This is why he enjoys games that exercise his mind.
“If you play chess you learn a lot of strategy and concentration. You can’t watch football alone; you must be in a crowd to enjoy it. Some of these games are good for relaxation, not building your mind. Chess, and even normal cards, gets you thinking, because you try to guess your rival’s strategy and you are always betting your fortunes.”
That’s the strategy he is using to grow the bank into an industry leader in Tanzania.

‘I Thought He Was Coming To Kill Me’

“What would you say if I showed up barefoot and without a belt?” asks Reginald Mengi, one of the richest men in Africa, as we discuss attire for the photo shoot for his interview with FORBES AFRICA in Johannesburg, South Africa.
It could have been a great headline: Millionaire Barefoot and Beltless. Alas, he suffered cold feet and came dressed up to the nines in designer shoes with an Italian navy-blue pinstripe suit and a belt, of course.
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Walking without shoes is nothing new for the media tycoon, from Dar es Salaam, who’s worth an estimated $550 million, according to FORBES.
He’s a simple man, bound closely to his roots in the village, who enjoys plain language and has a story for everything.
Mengi grew up in Machame, near Kilimanjaro, in northern Tanzania. His parents, both farmers, owned a little plot of land where the family of eight lived in poverty.
“We lived in a mud hut with two cows, three sheep and a few chickens. Nothing more than that in terms of what my family was worth because we just couldn’t make ends meet… We couldn’t afford food and when we got two meals a day it was a great celebration.”
Mengi wanted more than two meals a day and took drastic action. In Form Five, with one year left of high school, he earned a scholarship to study corporate accounting at a college in Glasgow, Scotland.
“I couldn’t tell my headmaster that I won a scholarship to go to [Britain], halfway through Form Five, so I ran away from school.”
Everyone tried to convince him to stay, but his mind was made up. He flew from Moshi to Glasgow, via Nairobi and London. Mengi always thought the streets of London were paved with gold but when he got there he realized the truth.
“I saw a beggar in the street, a white beggar, and after that I said, ‘You know what? Even London has many things like home.”
In Scotland, it wasn’t the history, the whisky or the glimpse of the Loch Ness Monster that impressed him. It was the warmth of the people.
At college, in Glasgow, Mengi had a change of heart. He no longer wanted to become an articled clerk. He informed his sponsors who told him he had to stay in Scotland for the six months as it had been paid for.
So Mengi stayed, abandoned the course, took night classes and finished high school instead. During the day, he worked many jobs, from a bus conductor to cleaner, to make ends meet.
“I wouldn’t turn it down because it’s too dirty or the money is too little. My question is the alternative: If I work I get $1; if I don’t do it I get nothing… $1 is better than nothing.”
A year and a half later, Mengi, who had finally found his feet, received devastating news from home. His father had died. Mengi was stuck 7,000 miles away with no money to go home.
“The biggest regret I had was he passed away without me being able to show him that I’ve been able to make it in life and do something for him to say, ‘Well that’s my son.’ That I regret. I wish he had just lived on for a while for me to go back and say ‘daddy you know what, I’ve been able to do it and let me now be by your side.’ That eats me up even to today,” says Mengi as he pulls a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe away tears.
After high school, Cooper Brothers, now Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC), offered Mengi a job where he completed his articles. He climbed the ranks, became a member of the institute for chartered accountants for England and Wales but he yearned for home. After nine years away, Mengi transferred to the Nairobi office. It was one of the shortest careers in history; after a few hours, he resigned.
“I wanted to be in Tanzania. I knew I could make more money in [Britain] but I wanted to be back home. I wanted to go back to do something for my people. I was educated by poor Tanzanians and I thought it would be a good thing to give back.”
After a year in Moshi, Mengi moved to PWC back home in Dar es Salaam. He worked hard and, at the age of 30, became one of the youngest partners in the corporation. At the height of his career at PWC, Mengi, who was the chairman and managing partner, resigned.
“Some people leave their jobs when things are bad; but I left mine when things were really good. I couldn’t wait until things got bad and then left. You change when things are really good and you go into the new job with a big kind of energy rather than going there totally depressed because you had been sucked [dry] or you were not doing that well.”
Mengi dreamed of running a big business but understood that he had to start small. Everywhere he looked he saw suffering in the then socialist society and shortages of almost everything. His first bright idea came on the day he went to buy a pen and couldn’t find one. He decided to become a purveyor of pens. With the help of a friend he found a pen manufacturer in Kenya who shipped the parts to start his business.
“When the components arrived I didn’t know where to put them, so the best place was my bedroom and it was in that bedroom that I started the assembly of the pens.”
It was a big change from PWC where Mengi had a large office, staff and a company house. Now he worked 16-hour days, downgraded his car from a Peugeot 504 to a Peugeot 104 and also delivered on foot.
“That little business gave me my first million dollars,” he says.
Mengi sharpened his eye for opportunity. He sold shoe polish, made from ground charcoal and oil, and a natural skin exfoliator, which was simply bottled sea mud. He was on a roll and made anything he could: toilet paper, soap, detergent, beds, shoes and toothpaste.
“At that time, I made sure that no one in Tanzania could spend a day without coming into contact or touching one of my products… the only thing I couldn’t do at that time was the air you breathe.”
It was news that brought him his greatest success. In 1994, he launched his first newspaper, The Guardian, and a year later came Tanzania’s first television network, ITV. He did it all with no journalism experience. His media ventures were formed under the IPP Group, where Mengi holds sole ownership.
“We launched five years before government TV. There was a law in Tanzania not allowing television, it was government censorship… When I came with my network it was operating, on one hand, to report as if it was national television, but on the other hand it was private television.”
Mengi now owns eight newspapers, three radio stations and three television networks and has more than 1,000 people working for him. The only time he gets worried is when the politicians are not.
“If you start being praised by politicians… then you must be careful, there must be something wrong that you are doing. To be criticized is healthy; it means you are doing your job well in the media.”
Besides his interests in media, Mengi is also involved in mining and bottling for the Coca Cola Company. In business, that set him against his friend, Mohammed Dewji – also among the richest in Africa – who is trying to take on the world’s biggest name: Coca Cola. It was a move that proved a business disaster for Richard Branson when he launched Virgin Cola.
“One thing I really think is fantastic is competition. I think it’s good for you as a business person. It’s also good for the customers. If he came to me for advice, I would advise him to move even faster because without competition you are not going to grow.”
When it comes to media in Africa, Mengi says although free speech is ideal, it comes with limits. Surprisingly, he doesn’t blame international media for the often gloomy picture the world paints of Africa.
“The images you see in the western media, many of them come from the African journalists. But African journalists should bear one thing in mind; there are two sides to a story…  If you are an African journalist and you do not see the beautiful side of Africa, you only see the bad and write negative things, then you are not being responsible.”
Among the negative stories written about Africa is corruption, both in politics and business. Mengi says the reasons people don’t speak out is they are corrupt or they are perceived to be corrupt, therefore they are scared to open their mouths and talk about corruption for the fear that they may lose contracts and contacts. Mengi is known for his tough stance on corruption. In 2005, he launched two newspapers, ThisDay and Kulikoni, aimed at shedding light on corruption – often the reason why people are poor.
“For a long time we’ve been saying Africa is poor but that’s wrong. Africa as a continent is not poor; it’s the people who are poor. Instead of saying Africa is poor we should open our eyes that Africa as a continent is very rich, but of course, people are poor.”
Mengi speaks of countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo that have an estimated $24 trillion worth of untapped minerals. To him, it doesn’t make sense that a country so rich should be seeking help.
“Africans are selling themselves too cheaply. When we encounter foreign investors you talk of a gold mine. We think this deal is $1 million, they believe its $100 million. Do you think they are going to say ‘why not make it $50 million or even $100 million?’… They capitalize on our ignorance.”
He says Africans need to find ways to exploit the resources of the land to make money. In Tanzania, Mengi says the booming sectors are mining, agriculture, telecoms and oil and gas.
“Right now I’m fighting to create opportunities for Tanzanians to be able to invest in oil and gas. To have a sustainable private sector you need adequate participation from local people,” he says.
When it comes to entrepreneurs in Africa, Mengi says none can hold a candle to his mother.
“My mother could take a bunch of bananas and come with a kilo of rice. My mother could take just one chicken and come back with a kilo of potatoes. My mother would carry a bunch of bananas and come back with a pair of shorts for school. That is the greatest entrepreneur I admire.”
When asked about his wealth, Mengi shies away saying it is un-Tanzanian to boast.
“A rich African cannot look at life the way a rich American or European looks at life. In the case of Africans we are surrounded by many poor people, we grew up with them. We have to know where we’ve come from. Look at the rich Africans; tell me one who didn’t come from poverty. We all came from poverty, but we have to look back to where we’ve come from. We should not forget.”
He is an advocate of philanthropy and has given money towards education, the disabled and health. Along the way he earned the strange nickname ‘The Condom King’.
“If you see someone on the roof of a house and you think ‘he’s not alright, he wants to jump down’. And by jumping down he’s going to crash and die but there is a ladder nearby. Would you take the ladder and put it there for him to come down smoothly? Or would you say ‘just jump, just jump’?” he says about the wisdom of using condoms.
“I had been advocating the use of condoms in Tanzania. I had a very big fight with the bishops in the Catholic Church. They said, ‘Mengi has a huge plant for making condoms… Mengi is in collaboration with white people, he wants to use condoms to exterminate the black race…”
On the contrary, Mengi wants to give his money to his fellow Africans before he dies. He doesn’t want to be remembered for what he had, more for what he did.
Many see Mengi as a hard worker.
“Am I working harder than the poor woman cleaning the streets in the sun? Am I working harder than someone breaking stones at a construction site?”
Mengi’s story of triumph in the face of poverty is one many can relate to. From barefoot and sharing a hut with cattle to dining in Paris, Mengi proves that anything is possible.

Tag: July 2014

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

‘I’m Always The Stupidest Guy In The Room’

‘I Thought He Was Coming To Kill Me’

‘Africans Are Selling Themselves Too Cheaply’