Margaret Muigai Ng'ang'a is a techpreneur, who is the co-founded and director of Marvel Africa Technologies (MAT), a technology firm focusing on providing innovative business solutions.
She is very passionate about offering innovative solutions and her IT distribution company has bagged partnership awards with global brands like HP, Asus, Dell, APC, Intel, Lenovo and Transcend.
But her journey to the top of the IT distribution food chain is replete with passion, ambition and strife for excellence, a trip that was ignited while still in her teens back in high school.
She is a CPAK and her first love was Finance and Accounting and she later took Bachelor of Commerce majoring in supply chain management that landed her her first job at only 18.
After launching her career in procurement in an IT company in Kenya in the year 2009, her passion for sales and the intrigues around IT was discovered and adequately nurtured.
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However, it is her parents who pushed towards finance and accounts and her initial days saw her combine studies with working at her father’s office at a fertilizer company.
“When I was in high school I basically wanted to be an engineer. I’ve always been a very hands-on person, so, I wanted to do Chemical Engineering. I had a lot of passion in Chemistry so I thought I would be so good in Chemistry,” she said.
It was at the IT Department at her father’s job that her passion for technology saw the office “IT Guy” refer her to an IT entrepreneur that landed her her first job while still in school.
“I think it was very fortunate for me to get into the entrepreneurship space at a very young age because at that time you have a very high learning capacity. I was learning things very fast.”
Margaret worked at the IT firm for eight months tapping into the IT distribution space, leading her to her next job with HP dealers at a time when Kenya started embracing tech and innovations.
“We used to have a lot of discussions about starting businesses, just as how young people discuss starting businesses.”
It was at that time that she met George Ng'ang'a Njoroge (who would later become her husband), who ran a photocopy shop and was also keen on them starting a company together as friends.
“He came up with the name Marvel Africa Technologies. We were looking at something that would look like Africa. He was in the corporate world and I had not actually graduated. He told me ‘the capacity you have and the potential you have I think we can have a business.’”
The then good friends believed it was good to start a business at a young age so that in case their startup company failed they would have sufficient time to go back to employment.
“That is how I stepped out of employment and stepped into the business space. That was at the end of 2010.”
She says, as friends, they were open and candid with each other that should the business fail she should be ready to return to a formal job but she felt that it was the best timing.
“I think I am a natural risk-taker. So, when we discussed that idea, even most of his friends believed in me – they used to see my potential more than I was seeing it. Being a risk-taker, I think I am a natural entrepreneur-minded person.”
The techpreneur, who is a market leader in IT distribution, believes her experience had prepared her adequately for the Herculean task ahead of starting a company from scratch.
“Starting a business when you are young is the best thing that can ever happen to any young mind because you don’t have responsibilities, you don’t have a lot of obligations, so, the level which you are taking risks, you are not thinking too much or overthinking everything.”
She says the rollercoaster journey has offered her quite an experience given she started the business without any solid capital and relied on goodwill from her previous clients to get her new baby off the ground.
“The unfortunate thing is that, in our market, nobody tells you how things look like. So, you just get in without a plan, you don’t have a business plan. You just get in hoping that that whatever you’ll build something. It was not an ideal situation.”
She says her commitment to see the business succeed, believing in her big dreams and her experience from the past two companies helped her move with her clients to her new firm.
“They were very dependent on my knowledge. They did not mind about where I left and what I am doing, everybody concentered on the solution.”
Her work entails sourcing anything IT, including servers, printers and laptops from manufacturers and distributing them to resellers and those trading with Kenya government.
MAT also executes tenders on behalf of companies, which it has engaged in for almost a decade now, but her trip journey minus the huge initial capital needed did not bog her down and she has grown the firm to be moving goods worth hundreds of millions of shillings monthly.
“I would talk to other entrepreneurs and other partners who had companies and they would say ‘if you want to get into IT business, you must have a minimum of Sh10 million” but that did not bother me because I knew the knowledge that I had and the way people were depending on me, I believed so much in myself.”
Initially, she would sell up to 10 laptops per day and Eldoret, Mombasa and Kericho were her biggest markets with the goods sent to buyers through available courier services.
At the time, she did not have any relationship with any financial institution so she relied on the little cash she had saved while employed boosted by finances from her now husband.
“Our business started with almost no capital but grew with the knowledge and goodwill from people.”
She would later open an account with her international distributors and build trust over time to enable her get the merchandise and pay once they are sold as she kept the profits.
She started her company while operating a small shop in a space donated by a friend as her other close friends helped with deliveries without asking for any form of payment in return.
But, like in any other business, she has learnt critical and lasting lessons from her experience while setting up shop.
“The biggest mistake I made, and almost every entrepreneur is making, is starting a business without a business plan. It doesn’t matter whether you have capital or not. I’d give advice to anyone starting a business, young or not, is to make sure you write down your business plan and make sure it is something you can be able to achieve and also put systems in place. It will guide you to make decisions and it will reduce the mistakes that you are making.”
When Marvel Africa Technologies (MAT) started in 2011, about 80 per cent of the business was to resellers for close to two years but by 2015 purchases via resellers and walk-ins were 50-50 at the shop based at the ground floor of Veteran House along Moi Avenue, Nairobi.
The company also serves the corporate world through tendering and long-term contracts and is registered with IFMIS and AGPO and distributes IT items to the national and county governments as well as blue chip companies and NGOs.
And in the current fast-changing world MAT has been forced to adapt to changing trends among hardware and software consumers globally and is now also leveraging e-commerce.
“We are now tapping the digital market where we are doing 20 to 30 per cent of our monthly business on the e-commerce platform on our website. The speed at which technology moves is very fast, so if you don’t align with the changes that come in you will be left behind.
“You can find a product that was produced in January and by the second quarter they have already changed the generation and the model name. so, we have learnt to move very fast.”
Margaret noted that many people moved onto the digital space following the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 prompting her firm to partner with fulfillment and data companies to enable her to better serve her customers in the e-commerce business era.
She has also gone back to class to equip herself with the knowledge relevant to her trade and the current online business space that heavily relies on data to better serve her clients.
“I went back to take Bachelor of Science degree, I am doing data science and analytics at USIU. I am in my second year. The reason I am taking data science is because I felt the need where people are no longer wanting to have a one on one interaction when they are making their decision. So, people want to interact with their needs.”
The Kenyan techpreneur feels that with the newly acquired skills she will be able to satisfy the needs of her growing clients from the Marvel Africa Technologies e-commerce platform.
“You are able to see what you are selling to them and you are able to give them a lot of information before they make their decision. So, we are empowered as partners. By the time I’m giving you a good as a consumer, I already know much detail about the good, so we sell a solution and not just the product.”
The family woman, who believes in the value of hard work, notes that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the growing currency into the future and that her company will not be left behind.
“We want to align ourselves with digital. We want to major in Artificial Intelligence. This is where I am able to understand your need as you just visit out platform and we are able to see what you interacting with in our platform then I am able to understand what exactly you are looking for. We are able to provide a solution ahead of you without interacting with you.”
She says MAT has already initiated the relevant AI infrastructure that will give the IT distribution company an upper edge over other players in the crowded market in Kenya.
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