IE Business School Application Essay. Bradford Kamami, September 2015 Intake

Describe a situation in which you took a great risk. What was the outcome?

I pass and I move, I help you, I look for you, I stop, I raise my head, I look and, above all, I open up the pitch.

-Xavi Hernandez(Spanish footballer)

The Risk11th October,2014: I resigned.

1. Porte-folio Group (A business process engineering firm I founded where we help start ups write Business Plans and prepare financial models). This I believe is my gift. I want to be the Xavi Hernandez for small businesses that are looking to grow.

2. My application to IE and more so fine tune the idea I intend to enter to the IE Venture Lab or Business Creator program!

I quit my job as a property consultant at Home Afrika Limited to focus on:

• November 4th 2014

• I was asked by a law firm in the city to help them do their expansion plan.

• My first contract

• I learnt a lot about the rigors of private clients and how to keep deadlines and how to interpret their goals in their language.

• I finished the job 28 days later. Sweet sweat. Pleasurable strain

Outcome 2: Eliza Domestic Solutions

• I picked up a conversation I had had earlier in 2014 with a lady who runs a maids’ services bureau

• I proposed that we speak to Parapet Cleaning Services-Kenya’s largest cleaning company-and propose that we use their curriculum to produce trained professional nannies.

• We sent the proposal to Parapet.

• Parapet called back!

• And we are now registering Eliza Domestic Solutions: which will supply Nairobi’s mums with professional nannies. Parapet is helping do this.

• P.S The lady who owns the bureau is my mum.

• I picked up another conversation with a friend who had a rough idea. He wanted high school students to have a debit card that limited their liquidity and thus denying them the ability to spend pocket money in pubs or brothels.

Parents would also monitor electronically the spending habits of their sons.

• We worked out the business model.

• Proposed the model to Kenya Commercial Bank-Kenya’s biggest bank by asset base.

• The managing director is currently looking into it and we are in correspondence.

• I remembered yet another conversation I had with a friend called Mike. He was looking for a way he’d sell off 50 plots of land he’d been contracted to sell.

• I suggested we create an agri-product of the plots. Sell the plots of land with erected greenhouses whose produce has been forward contracted to waiting buyers or shall be sold in a commodity exchange.

• In so doing offering the land buyer 2 possible incomes: seasonal income from the produce and capital gains due to the land value appreciating due to value addition. We named the product ‘The Bustanis’ (Swahili for gardens)!

The Bustanis

• The land seller agreed to the new model. We are waiting for a final decision from Amiran Kenya(Kenya’s leading green house makers-who so far love the idea).

• In April 2014, Liz Fleming, an IE lecturer came to Kenya and gave a presentation on IE’s MBA entrepreneurship module.

• She mentioned the Venture Lab incubator program.

• I purposed to apply to IE and enter an idea for the venture lab program!

• I got an idea and named it ‘The Kraals’.

• I formed a local team under my firm Porte-folio to help me do this.

• It’s a mortgage subsidy product that seeks to help home buyers buy cheaper homes. Effectively reducing the cost of a mortgage loan

• A development of apartments will have say 40 units of houses.

• Each mortgage buyer of a unit will receive a free cow in a dairy scheme located in rural Kenya.

• The cow’s total monthly milk produce will be sold to a dairy cooperative company.

• The earnings thereof per cow will instead of going to the home owner, go directly to the bank administrating his mortgage and will offset part of his monthly mortgage repayment.

• I submit my application to IE on the 3rd

of December, 2014. I am hoping for a favorable outcome. If I am to be XaviHernandez of small businesses, then IE is the club I’d love to train me.