Chigwell Holdings Limited managing director Nirish Shah during the interview at his office in Nairobi. Photo/SALATON NJAU
By SIMON CIURI, sciuri@ke.nationmedia.com
In Summary
- Real estate developer overcomes business hurdles to build a business empire in the booming sector.
When Nirish Shah made his first million, he was
barely 28, a few years after he had cleared his studies at Technical
High School in Mombasa.
He earned the money from importing and selling
toys and consumer products at a profit in Mombasa. The capital for the
venture came from his parents who had noticed his business acumen while
he was still a student.
“I asked for Sh250,000 from my parents. Since I
had worked in the family business for a reasonable time, I had made
necessary contacts that I later used to start my own business,’’ Mr
Shah, a real estate developer and managing director at Chigwell Holdings
Limited, told the Business Daily in Westlands, Nairobi, last week.
With growth of the business, Mr Shah diversified
his enterprise and opened a hardware shop at the coastal city, targeting
the real estate sector.
“The business did very well that I later made up
my mind to relocate to Nairobi and left the enterprise under my uncle,”
he says.
“He had taught me how to do serious and successful
business and I felt it was worthwhile reciprocate in the same capacity,
the business still exists to-date.”
This was back in 1998, the same time when a close friend advised him to invest in the real estate sector.
“It was a challenging investment given the sector
is associated with people who are well oiled and here were two
start-ups trying to break the norm, it was humbling experience that came
with hard lessons that almost saw us drop the idea,’’ Mr Shah told the
Business Daily.
“We decided to contact banks for financing but
‘(we need) collateral’ become the common phrase. We opted to seek
alternative funding.’’
However, he maintains that he had made up his mind to soldier on despite the pitfalls.
“It’s good to have a brilliant idea that sometimes
end up requiring a lot of capital to implement, but is also wiser to
start with what you have no matter how small it is,” he says.
He started by buying small parcels of land in the
upmarket Runda Estate in Nairobi for sale at a profit. He ploughed the
earnings back into his venture, taking it to a higher level.
“Real entrepreneurship is about providing a
solution to a problem. You don’t run away, instead you create solutions
to avert the situation. Entrepreneurship is also more of taking risks,”
says Mr Shah.
With the savings from the land business, he sought
two partners and bought a piece of land in Lang’ata, Nairobi, in 2005
for real estate project that kicked off in 2007.
He declined to comment on how much each one of
them contributed to the project because they have a binding agreement on
confidentiality
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