Why 29-Yr-Old Entrepreneur Quit 200K Plus Job With Multinational Company

By Tabitha Makumi,
Andrew Wanyoike did something which may come off as ‘offensive’ and a little bit ungrateful to a lot of Kenyans who envy working for multinational companies. To many this means pocketing a tidy sum at the end of the month, say 200K plus just like he did one year ago when he used to work at Colgate Palmolive as the Regional Manager but all in all, he decided to quit.

Why would he do such an unfathomable thing? I decided to probe when I met him at his office located on the 2nd floor of Park Place in Parklands.

To bring me up to speed with his career life he says, “I studied for a Bachelor’s in Marketing at St Paul’s University and honestly speaking I don’t know how I found myself studying for this,” confesses the 29 years old who adds that, “Maybe it was the ‘hottest thing’ to study then or I was persuaded to study in this line by my parents or some outside influences but I can tell you one thing, it wasn’t what I had wanted to study for since it wasn’t in line with my passion,” he says with a tone of finality.

But his studies weren’t in vain as he tells me that he later found a well paying job with East African Breweries as the Territory Manager where he worked for four years until he moved to Colgate, where for him it was where he met his end of the road as far as employment was concerned.

“I am the kind of person who even if I am employed and I have a regular salary, I will still try to see what I can do as a part time gig.” This he says is something which gives someone the comfort of knowing they have something to fall back on or some kind of a plan B if things do not work out as planned with employment.

“It’s for this reason that two years ago during a round table discussion with likeminded friends while trying to figure out the kind of businesses we could venture into while still employed, a one friend who later became my business partner suggested that we try out our hand in car hire business and selling car accessories such as car batteries, tracking systems to car alarms and since I have always been passionate about cars since I was a small kid I thought why not.”

He says that it didn’t matter whether they didn’t have a car to begin with, “We took a loan to buy a second hand car where at the end of the month we would literary pour our salaries into it trying to make it look better on the eye and more efficient”

He recalls that, “The business didn’t pick up as soon as we had hoped and our vehicle would sit in a garage without any hiring offers coming in but without giving up on our idea, slowly things started to look up for us and within a short period of time, we had already secured our second car,” this he insists happened when he was still in employment.

Why then did he quit his job at Colgate, I insist. “Well, I was to be transferred to Tanzania and that didn’t augur well with me since I had this part time side hustle which had already started to pick up and at the back of my mind I was thinking what would happen to it if I moved all the way to Tanzania,” he says he raised the issue with his employer.

“I said I was not ready to move and I remember during my performance appraisal when my boss reminded me that during my job interview I had said that I was willing to move in any part of the country for the sake of the job, what then had changed?

He says he recalls that it was on a Friday, “I told him I would give him my feedback on Monday which I did in the form of a resignation letter.”

He says he has never regretted his decision but, “I was scared after I handed over that resignation letter wondering if I had done the right thing. Remember I still had a loan which I hadn’t finished to pay back and I had a child to think about but I found encouragement in the fact that there a lot of people out there today who have lesser education background and have made it in life. People who have not seen a university door but they’ve prospered in whatever field they’ve put their minds into. Here I was with big connections, having worked in two coveted places, what was I being scared about?

With his mind made up, he says he channeled his energy into his business dubbed Cross Business Solutions which within the two years that it has been in business he has been able to acquire a fleet of cars which range from Chryslers to Range Rovers and even though he is shy about putting a number on how much he makes in a month he says, “So far so good, I can’t complain.” He however discloses that some of his esteemed clients are a number of embassies in Kenya such as the Canadian embassy and the Ministry of Defense.

Acknowledging that car hire business and dealing with car accessories is on the higher side as far as starting capital is concerned, he advises that, “it doesn’t matter even if your side hustles gives you Ksh5,000 a month, stick with it as you may not know what the future holds as far as employment is concerned.

To wrap it up and in effort to show the importance of always having a plan B,  he recalls seeing a wise bumper sticker at his former place of work which read, “Fall in love with your job, not your employer. Because the day your employer stops falling in love with you, you will look stupid.”

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