The lady who went from the reception to the corner office
Meet Patricia Kiwanuka, executive director of Old Mutual Investments Group who was a former Pension Advisor for East African Community Secretariat and used to be head of Business Development at PineBridge Investments East Africa and AIG Global Investment Group.
She is half Ugandan and half Kenyan, with her dad, a doctor by profession having moved to Kenya at the height of Idi Amin’s tyranny. She was raised up in Embu where her parents had settled and attended Kenya High where you never quite felt the pressure to excel in education, where she was given the choice to pursue other disciplines. Thereafter, she joined University of Nairobi to do Actuarial Science after failing to attain the necessary points for medicine.
The brilliant and ambitious lady started from working as a receptionist at Hyman’s Robertson (now Alexander Forbes) . It was a humbling experience for her coming from crunching huge mathematical sums to sitting at the reception for seven years! She was not allowed to meet a client while at the firm for her first five years, meaning she had to keep her head low and learn from other professionals. Looking back, she advices that it is important to learn the ropes of any market and that experience will bear fruit eventually, something that people shun upon once they start their careers. Therefore, one had to do their time.
Meet the players rising from dukawallahs to big hoteliers
Several entrepreneurs have realised that there is money to be made in business travel and have invested wisely to bring that experience to Kenya. For example, VillaRosa Kempinski, Hilton Garden Inn, Nairobi, and Best WesternPlus, Mombasa, are some. There owners have partnered with well-known and respected international hotel brands in the world to bring that experience to Kenya. The proprietor of the Kenyan VillaRosa Kempinski, Adil Popat’s has always loved the hospitality industry where he has worked on and off for about three decades. He worked at a Hilton hotel before joining a hotel chain in Portugal and later in South Africa where he started his own business with an Ocean Basket franchise. So when the idea of owning a hotel came about eight years ago, the chief executive of Simba Corporation Ltd was certain that the time was right. In 2009, he embarked on the journey to bring one of the world’s oldest luxury hotel brands in Kenya – the Villa Rosa Kempinski. While Popat could have worked with a brand like Hilton which he had worked for while abroad, he chose a brand that was not that well-known locally. Popat was eager to have a stand-alone master architectural design that would be in a class of its own and Kempinski’s profile and his intended location for the hotel fit in best. The hotel’s architecture is very European and its look and feel is very classical. Popat is happy to have achieved his dream. His company is now working on its growth plan of establishing hotels in Naivasha and Kisumu. Popat says the firm’s focus is not on leisure but business travel. these entrepreneurs who have evaded the slump that is seen in the tourist-oriented properties.