Hafiz Juma: Aim Group
This is a series of accounts on how entrepreneurs made the leap into the wonderful, challenging — yet fulfilling! — life of building a business in East Africa. They stuck it out in both the exciting I-have-a-brilliant-idea-that’s-going-to-earn-me-lots-of-money phase and the not so exciting no-one-will-actually-buy-my-product phase. Here is how they did it!
If the company tagline “Corporate meets Cool” doesn’t sound cool and new-age to you, I don’t know what does. Corporate meets cool at AIM group, a company based in Tanzania that uses technology to solve complex business and consumer challenges. Hafiz Juma — who founded the company alongside his brother Nadeem Juma and best friend Paul Bomani, describes the business as one focused on cultivating an ecosystem around the points where media and technology meet. This manifests itself in different ways including content development, payments and finance or last mile distribution. With a current team of 140, they are cultivating an ecosystem on the new basis of African economies — away from the trade-driven economies to the economy of the new age. Hafiz was gracious enough to share their story with us!
On Starting Out
“Aim Group was founded in 2010, but actually went active in 2011. Initially, the business was started by my brother Nadeem, sister Shaista and I. In 2011, my best friend Paul joined the company as a co-founder. We were engaged in a few other businesses, but none of them allowed us to express our creative side. Also, at about that time, there was a proliferation of outdoor advertising in Tanzania which we felt were a blight on the landscape of the country. We decided to start something that would be our creative outlet and a way we could try to change the way advertising and marketing was done. We initially launched with physical deployments of infrastructure like touch-screen kiosks and interactive projections or retail spaces. The idea was to provide either utility or entertainment with a channel for advertisers to promote their products or brands. That initial phase was a complete failure because it was around a time we had some of the worst power rationing in the history of Tanzania. So, maintenance of the physical installations was expensive. We also didn’t have enough content on either information or entertainment because there was no ecosystem of content creators in the country at the time. Plus we really struggled to get advertisers. Therefore, for the first year and a half of the business, we unsuccessfully struggled to break even and keep the doors open.”
On Surviving the Bumpy Ride
“During that very difficult year and a half, we kept going because we really didn’t have much of a choice. We were a young self-funded business. So we had to sustain ourselves, keep the lights on and food on the table and would have done anything to keep the business running. It’s really grit and a bit of luck that kept us going. I can’t underestimate the importance of luck and circumstance and being in the right place at the right time.
“We also recognized that none of us were experts in the areas we were engaged in and invested a lot of time building our skill set. It is important to know what you don’t know and invest in learning that skill set. I remember one of the very first client pitches we did, they were throwing out all this marketing lingo we had never heard of in our lives and we were seated with our phones under the table Google-ing what they were talking about! We had to learn so many new skills and have been at every level of our business — from entry level roles to more senior roles. Because of that, today we know what it takes to be effective in these positions.”
On Growing the Business
“Toward the end of 2012, we had an opportunity presented to us from Tigo — a Mobile operator in Tanzania. They asked if we would be interested in helping them implement their Social Media strategy across their entire footprint. We didn’t have too many options at the time so decided to give it a try. We had a concise pilot period that had KPIs set for 3 months which we achieved in about 3 to 4 weeks, much to their delight. Following that, we invested in the capacity of our technical skills and grew our team. Over the period of 2013 to mid 2014, we scaled quite quickly and were adding a new client every month.
“In order to remain competitive and keep ourselves interested, we decided to add a new twist or to pivot our business every four years. 2014 was our first major pivot where I moved from being the Creative Director to being the General Manager of the Agency Unit. Our partner, Paul, became the General Manager of a new business unit we set up — the Projects Unit. To create this new business unit, we absorbed one of our sister companies.
“We have developed a few key products, one of the most successful ones being the KYC solution. This is a digitized version of the standard paper-based Know Your Customer processes you would go through with a bank or a mobile operator. We developed it because of the regulatory crackdown that happened across the region after it was revealed that some of the perpetrators of the WestGate terrorist attack in Nairobi had unlawfully registered their SIM cards and couldn’t be tracked. We saw this as an opportunity and started working on a solution. We developed a prototype and Minimal Viable Product (MVP) which we showcased to Vodacom. They thought it was a viable product but one with no clear competitive advantage with their competitors. So they asked us to convince the rest of the mobile operators to take on the solution in order for them to take it on themselves. Which we did. Over the years we have built a reputation within the identity space and are exploring other markets and operators in Africa. We are also not only providing our solution to mobile operators but to banks, MFIs, credit bureaus and other financial institutions.”
On Winning Strategies
“What has made us unique is the fact that we don’t define and confine ourselves to a specific area. We are open to capitalizing on new opportunities for which we have the skill set and capacity to explore. It is very important to be adaptive and agile enough to recognize an opportunity and take advantage of it. It’s something young companies need to do to continue to grow, scale and stay relevant. That is their differentiator from the larger companies. Some of our competitors are large companies with a history of excellence. In addition to being rooted in the areas we provide solutions to, the only other reason we can compete with them is that we are adaptable and are therefore able to solve for a very contextual and specific problem rather than solve for a general generic problem.
“I am glad we could identify an opportunity or problem in a space that is not being addressed by the market and present a potential solution to it. But we have also always been very conscious of the fact that we don’t know everything, nor do we have the capacity to do everything. The moment we make the commitment to doing a job, we figure it out and build the teams and skill sets needed to do it. As we grew, we weren’t afraid of learning new things, but also weren’t afraid of letting our clients know what we didn’t know and were sure to give them reason to have faith that we would figure it out.”
On Building Teams
“Never hire down, hire up — that’s our philosophy. Never bring on someone for a role that you can do better but someone that can do it better than you. We are quite rigorous in our recruitment process to ensure we have highly skilled people.
Because of mistakes we made early on, we realized the importance of having a strong empowered leadership team that is as empowered as we are in the business in order for them to feel invested in it. We do this by being transparent. There’s nothing that happens within the business that our leadership team isn’t aware of. Fundamental to building the right team is having honest two-way communication, regardless of the position you are in — from a trainee to a senior manager. We also hire for potential and not skill. We hire fresh graduates for a lot of roles and invest a lot of energy in training and capacity building of the team because it’s important to have a team that has bought into who we are and are committed to our vision.
“Most importantly, I attribute a lot of our success to having the right partners, something people often undervalue. Nadeem, Paul and I are all very different, bringing unique skill sets to the business and balancing each other out. Nadeem is very good at business development, cultivating relationships and identifying opportunities which has allowed us to scale and grow while Paul and I are more focused on the operational aspects of the business. We are also able to keep each other in check — neither of us can stray too far away on a tangent because we have the other two to bring us back. Conflict is also a lot easier with us because of our relationship. While we disagree and have heated arguments, we are family at the end of the day. Having the right team, right partners and the right leadership in place from day one is the one thing that has differentiated this from the other businesses we have previously done.”
On Organization Culture
“There was an attempt to intentionally build a culture, however we found that — at least for us, it was more lip service than anything else. Culture is fluid and evolves and changes with people, as they evolve and change. As new people come and go, grow and mature, our culture also evolves. We have built a set of values but don’t believe in the idea of crafting a company culture because we feel that it will be reflective of wherever our team and business is at a specific time. Having a certain way of doing things helps influence the way you operate your business but I think culture is a sum of the component parts of the business. As the component parts change, the culture changes.”
On Leadership
“Work constantly to make yourself redundant by making yourself replaceable. Always ensure that you have people around you that can do your job and do it better than you can. Do this by giving up some control, empowering and enabling your leaders and ensuring that you’re not intimidated by people who know more things than you do. Always look to hire people that can make you look stupid!”
On Biggest Mistakes
“Growing too fast, hiring too quickly, not firing quick enough. We moved from a team of 5 to a team of 30 in a period of 6 months and didn’t have the processes to manage that. We also did not invest in the core fundamental operational processes of the business early. Those are the things we would do differently.”
Most Exciting and Most Challenging
“The fear of the unknown was the most exciting part of starting this for me. I wish though I had known then that we would be here today. One of the biggest things that drives an entrepreneur is the paranoia and the fear of losing it all.
“We were all really young when we started this. So, one of the most challenging things was being able to have someone who might have been double your age take you seriously.”
On Resources Utilized
“We never raised any funds either through equity or debt, but we also started our business with little money and slowly grinded it out. We have since changed our perspective on fundraising because we are now thinking about raising funds for certain aspects of the business. Previously we were a bit sentimental about it but now really want to grow an institution. We don’t want to just be a good respected SME in Tanzania but want to be a legacy institution in Africa and to do that, we need a certain amount of muscle financially and a certain type of partner to support us in that.”
What’s Next?
“We have hit our four-year mark and it’s time for us to pivot once more. We are going through a change management process at the moment because now it’s much more difficult to pivot our product offering as quickly because we have grown so much. There are many opportunities we haven’t been able to explore because we haven’t had the structures in place to do so. So we are moving away from the two business units of the Agency and Projects units to a more Practice-driven approach. Some of the Practices we are rolling out are the Agency Practice — which is the delivery of marketing, advertising and communication services with a digital focus; Content Practice — which focuses on original content development, looking at how we can produce narrative and editorial content sustainably in our region, how we can distribute and monetize said content more effectively and how we can support traditional media houses to transform themselves to become more relevant in the digital age. The third practice is the Insights Practice — where we are building up a repository of the internal institutional knowledge we have within the organization but also leveraging some of our insights and research methodologies as a service offering to our clients. The Projects Practice will be the commercial implementation arm of the products we develop and finally the Labs Practice which is our internal incubator.
“We have over the years made a couple of investments and are now formalizing our Ventures Practice as well. We invest in businesses that are either complimentary, have some synergies with our core service offering or are early stage businesses within the region that might struggle to access funding but need seed capital. We are also looking to expand regionally and have already done so with the KYC product. Our goal is to be an ecosystem player within the region. To provide solutions within the nexus of technology, media and digital finance across East and Central Africa. It’s an interesting and scary time for the business because we are really transforming who we are. Paul and I are taking a more strategic role rather than an operational role in the business and are therefore empowering a new generation of managers.
“My hope is that as we grow, we become an enabler and catalyst for other businesses within the ecosystem to grow by providing not only the tools but also the capital needed. Our 5-year goal is to be in a position to support the creation of 100 other companies like ours rather than being one of a handful. All the founders at Aim Group are passionate about the fact that there is a wealth of talent and skills in East Africa waiting to be unlocked and we want to be a part of that.”
*Puppies and baby Pandas to Hafiz for sharing his story with us!
