Providing home care services at a fee

With a toughening economy and an increased need for everyone to jump in and contribute to the family’s survival, the economic trenches are getting fast-paced as men and women alike join the wagon to press for a dollar. This is a changing trend which 26-year-old Martin Muganzi is aware of. If there is anything he knows too well, it is the effect such a trend is posing on the modern family.
“The number of working mothers is increasing exponentially, and this can only mean that homes are not as well tended as the case was in the past. Yet people still need their homes well organised and their children well taken care of,” Muganzi highlights.
On realising this gap, the Makerere University graduate of Biomedical Laboratory Science, now turned entrepreneur, conceived the idea of starting up a company that offers essential domestic services to modern working families.
“Furthermore, I had realised that there was a lot of disorganisation in the domestic service industry, with many cases of exploited care-takers and sometimes connig employers cropping up every other day,” Muganzi notes.
The tipping point for Muganzi, however, came in November 2014, with the famous case of Jolly Tumuhiirwe, a Kampala maid who assaulted a toddler. This confirmed the need for quality, safe and trusted domestic services. That is when he decided to get serious about bringing his business idea to life, and subsequently, Essential Home Services, the company, was born.

Offering varied services
Essential Home Services harbours a wide range of skilled service providers who are referred to as care-givers.
“The service providers we house offer six main classes of domestic services which include nanny and care services where we basically do baby-sitting and general children’s care. On top of that, we offer household assistance services where we do house-sitting for clients that intend to travel but wish to have someone stay and look after their home. We do laundry, pet care, transportation and errands under the same category of household assistance,” Muganzi explains.
They also have professional and technical service providers such as drivers, plumbers, apartment managers and movers. They also provide green living, cleaning and events management services.

Using a website as the market place
But for this quickly growing start-up, most of their clients do not come through office-walk-ins, rather the variety of their business dealings are finalised online.
“We run a website, www.ehs.ug, and our business is built in such a way that our website serves as the company’s core,” Muganzi reveals. He does not look at his company as an employer of the different home service providers, but rather a middleman that only plays a brokerage role to ensure that both the employer and domestic care-giver benefit.
“How we operate is that, through our website, the domestic service provider and an interested employer get to meet. We upload various profiles of different care-givers on the website. This is always after conducting a rigorous background check, capturing as much information as we can about the particular service provider and retaining it with us, and offering further training. Only then do we upload a person’s profile as a certified service provider,” he notes.
The interested client looking to hire someone for a particular service has to visit the website and specify the service they are interested in. Then a list of profiles of service providers will pop up for them to make their pick, after which they are required to fill in a booking form and follow the subsequent quick steps, then sit back and wait for the care-giver to show up at their doorstep in a couple of minutes.
“One has the option of either paying through cash on delivery, or effecting the payment online through mobile money and credit card facilities,” Muganzi says.

Reaping a decent return
Starting out, the biggest part of their investment had to go into website development, which Muganzi says has taken more than Shs18 million from its building through the various upgrades and maintenance. But it is not a figure that scares him since the company is growing fast and the benefits are trickling in.
He does not point out the figure they rave in as monthly returns because for them, the amount of business that comes home varies. For a day’s work, however, their service providers charge Shs20,000.
“This amount varies depending on the number of days one wishes to contract the service provider for,” he says.
Their website currently harbours tens of service providers. Going through the hundreds of service provider files they have, one wonders why they haven’t uploaded hundreds more people onto the site already.
“Our goal is not to have a huge number of service providers on the site but have those we trust to do a good job. Many have brought their files to us but we take months vetting and training them before we give them a shot on the website,” he reveals.
They do most of their marketing online by running Facebook and Twitter platforms under the company’s name, and of course, the website. They also do direct home-to-home marketing in some of the residential neighborhoods around Kampala and Entebbe as these are the places where they currently base their services.

Challenges and future prospects
According to Ronald Tumusiime, the chief operations officer, Essential Home Services, the market response they have got to this point could not be any better, with many people wowed by the idea alone.
Nonetheless, they still have challenges plaguing their operations. One of those, as Tumusiime highlights, is the negativity already associated with domestic services in the country.
“People have a bias against maids considering the bad history of the proverbial bad maids. But away from that, some look at our services as being a tad too expensive and are thus not quick to warm up to them.”
Muganzi has no doubt the company’s future is bright. “I envision us even having a computer application in the next five years and continue linking service providers and clients on a larger scale.”
Asked to let rip of his business secret, the passionate Muganzi does not dwell much on the words. He simply recommends a book for all the young entrepreneurs. “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries; it is a book every young entrepreneur should read. Also remember that an entrepreneur is never there. You are never where you want to be. So keep working, inventing and innovating.”