Here is a true story of what happened some years back. A man (lets call him Mandebvu) places an advert in the newspapers inviting prospective lessees interested in leasing his land for commercial purposes. Hundreds of people respond and he invites them to an interview. During the interview he asks each applicant what sort of business they would like to undertake at his 2 hectare land along Simon Mazorodze Road.

Each applicant divulges information of what sort of business they would like to undertake, whether its profitable and how they would like to pay rental fees. At the end of interviews Mr Mandebvu promises all interviewees that he will respond to them in due course and will lease out his land to the best offer.

Two weeks later what does Mr Mandebvu do? Instead of leasing land as per the advert and interviews, he decides to implement the best business idea from one of the people he interviewed!!! He turns his land into a truck inn located along Simon Mazorodze…what a fraud! It turns out that he hoodwinked the public, he was not interested in leasing his land but interested in poaching business ideas from members of the public. He got free business information fraudulently!

Now this unethical business practice is said to be happening even in the banking sector where you submit your business proposal and someone within the banking system sees the potential of your business and they will turn down your credit application and go on and implement your business ideas, your business models or projects.

In some cases you are invited to rent commercial properties, once your business is thriving, goodwill developed, reliable clientele base developed and guess what will happen next? Your terms of lease agreements are altered or you are frustrated to leave so that the owner of the property can take over your business ideas.

Even ZBIN has not been spared. We gave funds to a well-known website developer to develop a website for the forum. Instead of registering www.zbin.co.zw under our name what does he do? He goes on to register www.zbin.co.zw under his name and changes the name of the site from Zimbabwe Business Ideas and Network and names it Zimbabwe Business Investors Network lol. He took all the website ideas and transferred it to this copy website.

He was a member of ZBIN who had followed all discussions, all updates of what we were doing and our dreams and aspirations. He saw the potential and unethically diverted our website. This is why ZBIN’s website is registered in USA under the dot.com address instead of dot.co.zw, someone unethically registered our name. Now the problem with stealing ideas is that your business will not last. If you are unethical then it is going to cost you in the long run. Take for example this rogue website developer, he was probably going to get a lot of mileage by associating with us. I had told him to do an excellent job so that more ZBIN members will be inspired and engage his services-so he will not get any positive mileage from us.

So we will encourage our members to exercise caution when conducting business activities be it interviews, potential partnerships or rent agreement negotiations. There are a lot of sharks out there who are looking at poaching business ideas. In next instalment I will talk about intellectual property and registering patents.

So we are coming to the end of year and this period is planning period for the group. One area we are looking at is what have we achieved? We are beginning to look closely at the results versus what we had planned. The successes and the failures and lessons learnt and what needs to be corrected in 2017.

One group we would like to analyse is ZBIN Poultry Group Number 4. This is our best performing group. A lot of information has been shared, business has been generated for members, a lot of resources have been produced and shared. The icing on the cake was the setting up of the poultry website unfortunately the existence of the website was short-lived as the website was pulled down by unscrupulous website developers.

Current major Challenges

1. Marketing: Most members are still encountering problems when marketing their chickens leading to excess stock of chickens and other poultry products
2. High cost of production: The industry is being negatively affected  by high costs of production leading to little profit margins
3. No exports: Few Zim farmers are producing chickens with the export in mind
4. Lack of one voice: Looks like there is no one effective voice that speaks about Poultry in Zimbabwe. One voice that advocates for favourable policies and terms.
5. Lack of Information: With the Economy facing challenges, this sector is encountering the highest number of new entrants. The new entrants have no one place to access information for free or at little cost and this is resulting in hefty losses for most new entrants.

Proposed Solutions

We believe that the 5 problems mentioned above can be partly solved by having a registered trust or company for the group. A ZBIN company made up of the 256 members of the group should be able to have one voice that engages the private sector and other formal bodies in the marketing of our chickens. One group approaching retailers with branded chickens should result in us solving the market issues.

Members operating under one banner should unlock value in terms of economies of scale in production, marketing and promotion. One central place with all resources available should drastically reduce mortality and losses being encountered by members.

So far information is available in a haphazard manner with some of it outdated such that it serves no purpose to our members. Most of the information shared on Watsapp is not saved anywhere for future reference by members. So we are looking at redesigning our website so that we can have a Poultry section where members have access to up to date resources.

Munemo is not looking at heading this company, I have little experience on chicken rearing, we are looking at the active members of the group to come together and elect leadership that will drive the formal body to be established. Iam looking forward to the facilitation of the registration process, we will help you in terms fundraising for an administrator of the company or trust.

Conclusion

So there you are ZBIN Group Number 4, our flagship, our best ZBIN forum we need to move forward and solve the problems we are facing. Our number 1 problem being Market and we believe that by working together as a group we will achieve more. By having one voice that speaks about Poultry Issues in Zimbabwe, we will unlock more opportunities. Marketing Challenges must fall in 2017. More updates on the way forward to be shared on a bi-weekly basis.