Diana Orembe
For Diana Orembe, co-founder and chief executive of NovFeed – a Tanzanian fish feed and organic fertiliser company – one of the core lessons of entrepreneurship is that all businesses are hard.
“If you talk to a woman selling vegetables on the markets, she will tell you how hard it is to run her business. If you talk to a person running a conglomerate, he will just say the same [about] how difficult it is to run that very huge, big business. If you talk to a medium-scale business person who is even running just a store, they will tell you the same [about] how it’s difficult. So what I was just reminding myself this morning is that all businesses are difficult,” she explains.
Instead of searching for an easier path, Orembe keeps in mind that the grass isn’t greener elsewhere – every type of enterprise comes with its own set of problems.
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Despite the recent revenue growth and the new factory, Orembe points out that the challenges never stop. She cites recruitment – acquiring the right talent and managing them – as one of the hardest parts of her job.
But her biggest immediate concern is selling the sheer volume of product the company is now capable of making.
“I’ve never been able to produce 20 tonnes of feed per day … Now where am I going to look for a customer who can access that per day?” she wonders, adding that she worries about whether older leads have already found other suppliers. “All these things have been running into my mind.”
“Being able to produce [is] just one thing,” she adds. “But at the end of the day, you have to sell. That’s the most, most difficult part.”
Watch our full interview with Diana Orembe: The Tanzanian businesswoman seeing millions in fish feed
