Andrew
Sunday Mail Reporter
Samuelle Dimairho made a small fortune from IT and turning Zimbabwe’s stock exchange electronic before he was 30. Here are a few fruits of his hour-long chat with Billionaire Talks about life and wealth creation.
- Don’t chase money
“My father exposed me to a business book that I read ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad’, which opened up my mind that I must not just chase making money, but chase the purpose. Whenever you chase the purpose, you solve the problem. Money is a natural consequence. If you are chasing money, you will never make it. Try chasing a cause and solving a problem and see how much money you make.”
- Listen to your parents.
“Our parents did the best they could under the circumstances. They taught us principles:
Life is not about where you start, it is where you finish. You eat what you kill. No work, no food — simple things like that. We learned from a very young age. They took us to the best schools…
We were those kids whose fees were periodically not paid and then they will struggle and make ends meet and get us back in school. So, they tried to give us a good education but at no point did I think about being a professor or an academic or work for somebody, never crossed my mind.”
- What made you a successful entrepreneur?
“I think that simple statement. ‘You don’t work; you don’t eat’. As simple as that. It taught me to have a work ethic and to know that for everything…If I expect to eat tomorrow, I need to work today.”
- How do you survive as an entrepreneur in Zimbabwe
“Every three months you got to be reviewing your policies and the way you operate to make sure that you are relevant and survive. You have to be reinventing yourself but at the same time as challenging as it is. I think it is also good in the sense that you are always ahead. All the other markets that expanded beyond Zimbabwe, has made it a lot easier because it taught us to survive and thrive in a difficult environment.”
- How to use bootstrapping to build your business.
“I would like to say, money is always attracted to good ideas. In fact, in this world, there is too much money and not enough good ideas. Sometimes when your idea is not attracting money, maybe it is not good enough yet. Not good enough to attract the money that is available.
My philosophy was to do what you can with what you have where you are. I was broke, I didn’t come from a rich family full of a pool of capital from anywhere. I just bootstrapped the thing, because it was a service it was more of human effort required than the physical outlay of money.
So, I figured I’m going to bootstrap this to the point where initially we were supposed to supply software so I said I will bootstrap this, we will find the people who can build this, but it will not be on a salary, we partner together and if this succeeds we make money and if we don’t no one gets anything.
So we were doing everything on a success basis, so we bootstrapped, we used the few resources that we had to work toward getting known, and working towards building a system.”
Online Reporter