Like I promised , here is more on Africa renowned successful Zimbabwean woman, Divine Ndhlukula.
Divine Ndhlukula is a Midlands State University
MBA graduate and has a MBA (Honorary) from Women's University in Africa . She recently won the Africa Awards for Entreprenuership. Here is her journey to success in short.
After attaining an accounting diploma from an
institution in Zimbabwe , she worked briefly for the government at Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation as an accounting officer. She went on to take up an appointment at Old mutual
and later took up a job at a local insurance company in 1985. While working at these places, she was always running around doing some
small business on the side e.g. was ordering clothes from Harare
factories and selling them to colleagues at work. Within a short while, she had made enough
money to buy an 8-tonne truck, which she hired out to a construction
company.
As time went on, a situation cropped up where she had to rescue her late
father’s farm from being auctioned. Her brother (who had inherited the
farm according to custom) had taken a loan with a local bank which
he had been unable to service, so the bank opted to auction the farm
which her brother had tendered as collateral. As a result, she had to sell
the truck in order to raise funds to rescue the family farm from being
auctioned. The title of the farm was changed into her name and she ventured
into the farming business in 1992 and quit her job. She then took a loan
against her house in Harare, to prop up the farming business and poured
the loan in a maize crop that flopped due to a drought that season.
Thinking of almost losing her house in 1995, she went back to her former employers, Intermarket Insurance (now ZB Insurance), and asked
for her job back. Since she had been one of their top performers, the
company was happy to take her back. In no time she moved to the executive
team.
"Let me say that right from a tender age, I had always told myself and
everyone that I was going to start and run my own business which I
always envisaged as a large business".
Hence the time she had stopped
working, she had taken time to learn about all the critical elements of
business as she had learnt her lesson the hard way. Among the various
development programmes sheenrolled for was an Entrepreneurial Development
Programme which she did in 1995 and this sharpened her
entrepreneurial competences in a big way. She learned elements like
opportunity seeking, to goal setting, business planning, networking etc.
Her quest to start and run her own company never dissipated and
therefore, even as she was back at work, she started scanning at the various
opportunities that she could see and think of.
Eventually in 1998 she saw an opportunity in the security services
sector. The opportunity was prompted by what she had noted in this sector-
a total lack of professionalism, quality and services that customers
really yearned for. There were two distinct groups of security
organizations: the first group was comprised of the long established and
larger companies – there were about five of them at the time.
Words from her:
My advice to women all the time is: If you want a certain future, go
out and create it. Conquer your fears as that is what enslaves most
women. Opportunities are now galore. We just need to roll up our
sleeves, lift our feet, and walk through the door as no one will carry
us.
Have a game plan and execute it with passion, determination and
focus. Never mind that you are a woman. Do not think about that except
as a competitive advantage. No one is going to give you anything on a
silver platter. You have to work twice, thrice, five times as hard and
do not lose focus. Work with your passion, it will keep you going and
once you have a footing in your business, make the most of it and create
the momentum and that will get rid of all the little challenges that
may bog you down. Lastly, choose your team carefully and get rid of
non-performers soon enough.
