13th Annual International Management Conference Proceeding

PRACTICAL ANALYSIS TO RESOLVING KEY OBSTACLES
A quick transect walk across the city of Nairobi as well as other peri urban centres reveals a mushrooming of vendors.
And given the governments recognition of the vital role of the mobile telephone service providers in employment
creation, there is need for targeted measures to address the challenges that such emerging business persons are facing in
terms of management and leadership skills. For instance, pertinent question would be, how many of these business
enterprises have a vision or a mission or which businesses have registered remarkable success in their operations to act as
case studies? Considering that the service offered is technology based and most customers find these outlets the first
point of contact, this demands that they must ideally operate on the basis of the P.O.L.I.C.E. model.
As earlier noted, without evidence based factual information on entry and exit traffic and the reasons for or against,
success stories that can be used for mentoring may not be easily identified unlike in the agricultural sector where success
models are well documented. This may also make it quite tricky in terms of providing tools for guidance to successfully
plan and manage such businesses within the framework of entrepreneurial funnel as modified by Techno serve. Within
the mobile telephone services provision, most of the businesses according the funnel framework are at their infancy
stages or what is called start up stage as emerging entrepreneurs. However at the narrowest point of the funnel is what is
called established entrepreneurs and these are normally dealers sub contracted by mobile phone providers. They are also
fully registered with well established business premises and can only be found in major towns and cities in Kenya. To
incrementally grow in portfolio, they need in depth industry wide and value chain based technical assistance as well as up
scaling services and access to seed money. For the established businesses, there may be need for benchmarking outside the
local market niche
CONCLUSIONS
The paper has explored the realities of change as occasioned by the introduction of the mobile telephony services in
Kenya. The potency of many businesses to keep abreast with this fast and technology based market niche can at best be
described as ingenious going by the number of business installations that can be seen in many urban centers. The
confidence exhibited by consumers through their unique consumption habits that border on impulse buying portend a
number of leadership and management challenges to this first growing business. The paper shows that the efficiency of
these enterprises will first and foremost be enhanced through collection of analysis of evidenced based data and
information on trends and emerging challenges. The paper has brought out the issue of capacity as an important
constraint that can be address by either building their own capacity or having targeted measures aimed at deepening the
concept of mentoring particularly at entry level. This is because the challenges they are facing diverse and technology
laden particularly as regards the kind of services requested by clients. Another option could be use of volunteer
internships.
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