Kampala’s miss fix-it

Beatrice Olakha’s phonebook is her most treasured possession because it is the biggest component of her career. She is known as the fixer among her clients and friends. She takes on jobs of all sizes and shapes from taking you to the place with the best katogo in Kampala to providing equipment for a mega music concert.
“It started as something I would do for my friends and relatives. I was their go-to fixer for anything. Soon, other people were calling looking for people to fix their TV sets, a nearby coffee shop and food,” she says.

Olakha did not set out to become a fixer, in fact, her dream was to work in the tourism industry since she had a passion for travel. She even pursued a Bachelor of Travel and Tourism Management at Makerere University Business School from 2012 to 2015, starting out her career as a manager at Kesh Hotel in Namugongo where she worked for a few months before crossing to Satellite Hotel in Ntinda as a marketing manager.
Olakha’s career as a fixer blossomed during her time as a marketing executive since she came into contact with many people from different walks of life while doing her job. “I realised I was actually helping fix many people’s problems and thus considered earning from it, although as a side job. I also realised I was dealing with many things and I needed to streamline what I was doing,” Olakha relates.

Humble beginnings
Her energetic personality, availability and enviable connections turned her into a one woman centre of nightlife, social media and marketing. In 2017, she set up Errands Solutions, a marketing firm that earns on commission from linking people to service providers as well as marketing events.
“I wanted my company to grow beyond the client base of family and relatives I already had on board. To bring in new people, I started volunteering at events where I could easily network with potential clients,” she says.

Last year, Olakha set out to volunteer with KQ, an arts and culture collective that brings creative people together through collaborations. She was volunteering in one of their talks about festivals. At this talk, she met with Anthony Thompson of Creative Tribe and the organisers of the Jinja Film Festival, Jinja Adventure Week and StoneFest among others. She also met the organisers of Nyege Nyege as well as Bayimba.
“As I was talking to Thompson, he told me more about their event and it sounded interesting, so I asked him how I could help,” she says.
That was the time she started working as a volunteer to promote their events in Jinja and beyond, one of the things the Adventure Week was targeting was involving the Busoga Tourism Board in their activities and they achieved that. Today, Olakha is a partner at the Creative Tribe.

From KQ to Bayimba
At the same KQ talk, she talked to one of the representatives of Bayimba Foundation; “Then, they were putting together their first festival edition on an island and many things were yet to be sorted,” she says.
It was during the conversation that she asked about their camping options. She realised they only had tents for artistes and media; “They believed all the other people would carry their own tents.”
And that was when she floated an idea of having tents for hire, an idea that was quickly bought. They asked her if she could help with the tents and she readily agreed even though she did not own either a tent or a mattress.

“I needed tents but all my contacts came up blank. Finally, after a long and frustrating search, I was connected to someone who had been working with a travel company and had imported a number of tents and inflatable mattresses.”
This was her big break where she provided all artistes and media with mattresses and about 40 tents on the first day. On realising that she was out of tents, she went back to pick more since the demand kept increasing.
“After Bayimba, word had gone out and people had started contacting me about getting them camping gear,” she recounts.

Landing Nyege Nyege
But the most surprising call was yet from Jinja at the beginning of September; “The gentleman that had the tender to supply tents at Nyege Nyege was panicking, he needed more tents and had no idea where they were going to come from.”
Much as transportation of tents to Jinja was not complicated, Olakha had no idea of how and where she was going to more than 600 tents and about 1,000 mattresses.
And these were just days to the festival; “But you will be shocked by the things Ugandans keep in their garages and stores, you could find someone with about 200 mattresses at home,” she says adding that, from one connection to the other she managed to get even more than what the festival needed.

She used the extra tents and mattresses to supply a camping site that had been set up in a private home outside the festival grounds and others to people that called her seeking for camping gear solutions.
Altogether, she says they made Shs2m after clearing all the expenses of transport and damages.
Today, Errands Solution has a monthly booking to provide mattresses and tents, since they get a lot of business on weekends, they charge per two days with a double tent and mattress going for shs50,000, bigger ones are hired out at shs80,000 to shs150,000.
She says that if people are camping for a day, bigger tents go for a uniform Shs50,000 and the smallest from Shs30,000.

Challenges
Today, Olakha receives calls from people that are planning getaways, workplaces planning retreats and of course she says her network is bigger.
But she had had some challenges, for instance, slightly after Nyege Nyege, she accepted to supply tents to DJ Rachel’s Rapture Rave at Lunkulu Island, unfortunately, they overestimated the turn up and incurred losses and lost mattresses.
At Bayimba, she notes that a mattress got lost while at Nyege Nyege, some tents and 12 mattresses got lost. And of course, since camping is a new thing to many Ugandans, most believe it is meant to be very cheap and thus are willing to offer so little.

For the future though, Olakha is looking at buying her own tents and mattresses because hiring is costly; “I hope that having my own will make me more competitive and available,” she says adding that now that it is a growing business, she knows people will be working to cut her out of the connection.
Currently, she works with five people and at events, she says each one of them is usually in charge of 50 tents, she believes with her own equipment in future, she will be able to widen her team too.