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‘Starting a company doesn’t always require loans’
2005-04-08 01:06:05
By Perege Gumbo
Tourism is a fast growing industry, generating foreign currency for the national economy. Explores the situation in this interview, with. Gaudentia Mkulo , the director of sales and marketing for ABC Travel and Tours.
Q. Your company was established with some specific objectives. Can you highlight them?
A. When we were setting up this company, we had in mind the needs of public institutions, ministries , parastatals and companies which needed air transport in and outside the country.
The idea was to attend to passengers who were outside Dar es Salaam by selling them pre-paid tickets, with payment made here in Tanzania.
Q. What are the achievements so far?
A. When we started the company in June 2001, we didn’t have an internationally accepted license, issued by the International Air Transportation Association (IATA).
In March 2003, the company managed to acquire that license.
This gave us trust of international airlines to sell tickets on their behalf.
The company buys tickets from various international airlines on credit and sells them.
We effect payments for the tickets at midmonth and end month dates, routinely.
Q. Was it not difficult to acquire IATA accreditation?
A. Not really, but you know with international bodies, certain procedures have to be followed, and specific requirements fulfilled before that trust can be extended.
Once IATA is satisfied that you are trustworthy, the matter is done.
Q. What challenges does ABC Travel and Tours face and how are you handling them?
A. One such challenge is stiff competition, which compels every company to tune its attitude to customers, to meet their demands.
Many customers would come to us with the intention of getting our services on credit.
But as a company we are required to make sure we have paid for the tickets accredited to us by all international airlines on time, but getting customers to understand this situation is difficult.
Again, travel and tour companies tend to increase with time, thus forcing even greater courtesy for customers on the part of any operator, so as to survive.
Q. Many companies complain about difficulty in accessing loans. Did you experience the same hurdles?
A. Not at all.
In fact we did not seek for a loan from any bank. On the contrary, the company has been running using our members’ monies. The company has nine members, three of them women.
Q. With what assets did you start the company, and what is the situation now?
A. When we started the company had no assets. Later we managed to get an office, located in a prime business area as you can see.
We have computers to satisfy all our travel and tour business.
Q. There are notions among Tanzanians that you cannot start a business until you have accumulated a lot of money as initial capital.
Did you experience this situation?
A. Tanzanians should change their mind-set about initial capital.
In fact when we started our company each of six starting members contributed some amount of money, adding up to less than ten million. But we went ahead and now the company has stabilized.
People should not hesitate to start businesses, so long as have done a market survey and other essential requirements.
They should think wide and seek to forge partnerships with their others with whom they share an ambition and determination.
Q. How many employees does the company have?
A. Apart from the six we started with, we employed other four workers from different professional backgrounds to improve customer services, bringing the total staff to ten.
Q. What is the company’s future plans?
A. We have plans to open branches upcountry, depending on business viability of the specific region.
The idea is to nurture the company to become a large firm to the extent that even in our absence, our children would be able to run it.
It could further act as an employment provider to our children. These are our dreams, which we are working hard to turn them into reality.
Q. As a woman, how do you feel to lead a company like this, in other words, how challenging is the job?
A. I have learnt a lot since I became the leader of this company.
One lesson is the need for confidence, another being that any person can make a good leader regardless of sex, color or religion.
This explains the fact that our girl children require education, enabling them to make good leaders in the future; without education leadership is out of reach.
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