Mom turns a hobby into big business

BY: SMARTBIZ REPORTER

Wambui Njoora the Managing Director and founder of Extra Dimensions
Wambui Njoora’s rise from a bank secretary to a multi-million events manager is a study in defying odds to get to achieve your goals

Like many secretaries Wambui Njoora’s every day at work was busy. And serving three bosses didn’t make it any better for a fresh graduate from secretarial school. “I used to serve three managers at the bank I worked,” she recalls, “The managing director, marketing director and finance director.”

She hated it. Ever so more because of the way they treated her. Yet years later, Mrs Njoora finds herself using that long experience to run her own business, Extra Dimensions, where she has to serve not three or four, but nearly ten bosses.

As the managing director of one of Kenya’s most successful event management companies, she says multi-tasking has become part of her job description. After working for many years as a secretary at the bank, Ms Njoora took over a nascent events start-up from her sister in 2000, which she would mould into a Sh18 million company with an expanded service offering that includes tents, floral and plants, event planning, fabric installation and décor.

“My sister was employed and didn’t have time for the business,” Mrs Njoora said in an interview at her Kedong House office in Kilimani, Nairobi. “She asked me to supervise it but after the third event, I took it over. I loved décor but had only done it as a hobby.”

With two clients, just four tents and 50 seats, Mrs Njoora, who now handles big accounts like Safaricom, Kenya Airways, GSK, KCB and Diamond Trust, had to baby-sit the start-up, trying out flower arranging business first and weddings until she found her niche’ in events.

Events range from press conferences where a company or organisation makes an announcement to the more complicated cocktails, where she says ambiance and décor can affect people’s appetites. “What the eyes see determines how you will enjoy the event,” notes Ms Njoora, a mother of three children. “Colour can change your mood, and how the table is laid out, with candles for instance, can make the meal really enjoyable.”

Every event is unique and calls for different approaches. A product launch has focuses on the front of the venue and might not have lots of decoration on the sides, but a thank-you event, like company parties, require more creativity. That’s where décor plays a big role.

Ms Njoora says the Safaricom 2007 Dealer of the Year ceremony was her turning point. “It was interesting and challenging,” she says. “There were no VIPs and so we had to come up with the concept of continents to represent various agents from different parts of the world.”

Clients have high expectations, she notes. More awareness has meant not just more contracts from agencies she works with, but also more quality-conscious CEOs and brand managers. “You have to treat them equally,” she says, underscoring that the client’s thoughts must always be captured, although sometimes they can be way off the mark.

After years of double-digit growth, Kenya’s corporate received a bloody nose in the global meltdown and post-election violence in 2008. Many cut marketing budgets and trimmed their payrolls, as sales slumped, but event managers say business has been growing. “We were not affected by this,” Mrs Njoora says. “There was the usual slowdown in December and January, but business has been growing.”

Extra Dimensions is moving beyond serving its traditional market in Kenya to identifying transnational companies. Many times Mrs Njoora travels, for instance, to Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda to plan and manage events for KCB. “We want to be in those countries to make it easy to serve them and others who are going regional,” she says.

The immediate challenge, however, is to get the right people, creative enough to please the demand and different expectations of various brands in a competitive market. The past nine years have been tough and, for her 25 permanent staff, she confesses, it was a hard and painful search.

“You can’t be everywhere all the time so you need people to delegate to,” she says, “but it’s hard getting creative and responsible workers. So we sometimes have to train and mentor.”

While she has taken courses in design and flower arrangement, she says her natural talent comes in handy, executing “things that I haven’t been taught by anybody.” But then as years move on and the work takes a toll on her, she plan to handover the business to one of her three children, and steer from the backseat.