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Zachary Aldwin Milkshake in the Boardroom
I have not heard too many people ever singing the praises of a kombi (the pervasive minivan taxis that serve as public transport in Zimbabwe) ride.
When was the last time you heard someone say ‘‘that trip was amazing; I felt safe and secure the whole way’’?
The kombis’ reputation is often associated with safety concerns such as bad driving and unreliable service.
Kombis appeal at the lowest common denominator-they have a captive audience who have little alternative in terms of affordable transport.
When there is little to differentiate from one bus to another and limited ways of telling which gives the better service then it becomes a race to the bottom in terms of service provision. There is also often owner-business dissociation.
Many owners just demand a flat rate at the end of the day (there is no way of checking how many clients were served so this is the default way of getting profit) and do not really care how the driver gets it.
Any balance over the daily quota goes to the driver and conductor. How much better would it be if you knew the time the bus was going to arrive, that it would get you to your destination without deviation to avoid the police, that driving would be safe, and that even if it took a little longer than usual you would get there at a reasonable time?
Even if you could be guaranteed one of these things would you be more willing to use an identifiable transport system-chances are the answer is yes.
If the bright green branded kombis, for example, were known for impeccable driving habits, polite touts and cleanliness would people be more willing to wait for them instead of using the others.
Chances are there are a group of people who would be willing to use them preferentially. In Kenya, where they are known as Matatus and commuting can take hours, free wifi was installed on select branded taxis. Guess which bus people wanted to take to work.
We can relate to kombis because we have all used them (and if you have not then you really should just for the experience).
While it is easy to point fingers at the kombi system we need to be careful that we are not committing the same errors in our own lives.
Employer dissociation means that drivers can work long unregulated shifts-shifts that may extend far beyond what is safe.
Running your employees into the ground or failing to care for them is a quick way to wreck your business.
At the end of the day you create an unhealthy business culture where there is little motivation and little true care for customers.
Any married man will tell you that the mantra ‘‘Happy wife, Happy life’’ holds true. The similarity in business is happy staff, happy company.
A corporate culture founded on trust, respect and care for each other will translate into the way your staff treat clients.
There is a tendency to want to treat all customers as equal. Placing your entire market into one basket without appreciating the subtle differences that could allow you to differentiate from others means that you end up trying to please everyone by offering the bare minimum.
This is like serving vanilla ice-cream at your birthday party because everyone likes vanilla (well maybe not but they will at least eat it).
Offering vanilla is far cheaper and easier than offering a selection of flavours-flavours that you may have found out that your friends like before you invited them round.
Not everyone may want free Wi-Fi in their taxi-but enough will for you to tap into that. Not everyone will want to take an extra 10 minutes to get somewhere safely but enough might to make it worthwhile.
Failure to change to circumstances, to the shifts in the market, will leave you stranded. Mxit, the phone based social networking system that once stood toe to toe with Facebook, shut its activities this last week.
Their fault was that they failed to appreciate the effect the cheap smartphone would have on their business and lost market share to more popular apps.
One day kombis may find themselves under threat from a better public transport system, or see their market share being taken by those operators who want to listen to their clients. You cannot live with your head in the sand and ignore what is happening around you-even if all is going well.
The ability to continue to succeed relies on continuing to pay the price that it took to make your company great and sometimes paying it on a larger scale.
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