One should be willing to lose themselves for their vision. Many young people today are too fancy to do some things that can advance them...
“One should be willing to lose themselves for their vision. Many young people today are too fancy to do some things that can advance them,” said Duncan Mubonderi. He is a business person with humble beginnings but his hunger to succeed saw him taking on despised roles in a quest to realise his dreams. Today he is the Founder and Director of The Pop-up Bar and Restaurant in Harare, Zimbabwe.
Duncan is a 33 year old man who discovered his passion for entrepreneurship back in high school. From as early as form 3, he joined other young men who traded sugar from Zimbabwe in Mozambique during school holidays. Later in high school at St Mary’s Magdalene, he joined the Entrepreneurship club which gave him a platform to sharpen his business skills through various income generating activities they undertook. “I was nicknamed Gono at school (the former Governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe) because of my business acumen,” he said.
We stayed like street kids at the refugee camp without blankets or proper food
After high school Duncan enrolled at the Midlands State University (MSU) for the Computer Science degree in 2008. The country was undergoing a hyper-inflationary period which forced universities to go on indefinite closure. Faced with this situation and general economic challenges Duncan and his friend Clive Mandimutsira, decided to skip the country to South Africa in search of greener pastures. They spent the first 2 months at a refugee camp in the bordering town, Musina seeking asylum papers since they did not have any travel documentation. “We stayed like street kids at the refugee camp without blankets or proper food until we secured the asylum papers,” he said.
I told myself that I was bigger and better than this and I had to change
Further disappointment awaited when they arrived in Johannesburg when he discovered that jobs were not readily available as they thought. The option available was for him to join other young men who stood at traffic lights awaiting to be hired for manual labour. Duncan reveals that some of the duties were denigrating. His first job was to pick dog waste around someone’s yard. For a year he kept sustaining himself through the menial jobs but he knew that if he kept on this way, he was never going to advance in life. “I told myself that I was bigger and better than this and I had to change,” he stated. He resolved to start a business whereby he would find construction contracts for the man by the traffic lights then hire them as contract employees.
With this new idea in mind, he invested in formal wear then started going around residential areas seeking contracts calling his company Phenom Property Developers. “I would look for contracts, charge a higher price then pay the contract workers R100 per day each,” he said. Although he was not getting many contracts, this initiative was more decent and yielded higher returns than manual labour. One day in his pursuit of contracts, he got hired to paint a French restaurant before its official opening. The restaurant owner was impressed by how he showed up for the painting job formally dressed before changing into overalls. When the restaurant opened the owner decided to employ him as a waiter.
Being employed in the restaurant offered a steady income and Duncan grabbed this opportunity with a willing heart. He became the highest selling waiter in the first week of commencing duties and in just 4 months he had been promoted to a shift supervisor. After 3 years of working in the catering industry in South Africa, he felt he had gained adequate knowledge and resources to return to Zimbabwe and start his own catering business whilst completing his studies.
Upon his return in 2012, he secured a bank loan to purchase a food trailer to service the MSU community. Partnering with his then girlfriend now wife, they started offering fast food on campus in the food trailer which they named “The Duncans”. The business was lucrative for 3 years until the Zimbabwean economy started taking a downturn leading to less disposable incomes. Furthermore, other players were now coming on board making the once niche market highly competitive. In 2015, they decided to leave Gweru to operate in Harare. They expected for better business in a bigger city but the business failed to take-off as they hoped for.
Being a struggling business person and having dropped out of school for the second time, Duncan had to find a way to make an income. He was fortunate to be hired as a waiter at NewsCafe which had commenced operations in Zimbabwe. His prior experience and drive saw him getting promoted to a shift manager within a year. “I told myself that I was not joining NewsCafe for the money but for the business lessons. I admired their culture and had a desire to understand how they ran the business so that I could apply it in my own venture,” he said. As a shift manager he was entrusted by the General Manager to attend meetings in which they presented to the company Director Dr. Shingi Munyeza. In 2018, he left NewsCafe to join another establishment as a General Manager where he served briefly then left to start The Pop-up restaurant and bar.
The Pop-up bar has is the official bar for popular events such as Unplugged, The Cook-Out and Kariba Festival
The pop-up trend is still novel in the world and it is whereby a restaurant or bar is hosted temporarily at a designated place and clients are informed in advance so they can patronise the service. This set-up has an advantage in that it cuts on overhead costs in times when general restaurant business is low. Duncan made use of a database of his former clients at NewsCafe. His pop-up restaurant and bar resembled a NewsCafe experience which had since closed. Currently, he has refocused his business model to offer pop-up bar service and catering services are for events, corporates and embassies not as a pop-up restaurant. The Pop-up bar has is the official bar for popular events such as Unplugged, The Cook-Out and Kariba Festival. They are also the hosts of the Nyanga Carnival. He targets to expand the business in the Southern-African region in the next 5 years also hosting one of the biggest festivals.
Be mindful of how you dress as it affects how you are addressed
Duncan’s successes would not have been possible had he not swallowed his pride to take menial jobs to advance his life. Even after his food trailer business collapsed he was humble enough to go back to being a waiter. He revealed that at some point he sold burgers at the bus-rank with his wife to make ends meet. In his opinion young people should start where they are with the little that they have. He also stresses that young people should be mindful of how they dress as it affects how they are addressed. Duncan draws inspiration from other entrepreneurs and his wife Tafadzwa Zhawari who has been through a lot with him. He is part of a mountain bike cycling club, Chova which helps him to relax.
