Sales and marketing expert and the curator of Evoke, Timothy Bukenya, has revealed that he was inspired to be successful after experiencing failure in his career.
During The Groove Cafe with Crystal Newman on RX Radio, Bukenya said that failure in his previous ventures is what motivated him to become successful in his undertakings.
“The fear of failure is what drives me till today because I like success. From my experience, I tried to learn how to be just that and that is what gets me out of bed every morning to work hard and make sure that I never ever fail,” he said.
He then narrated his career journey that he started as a marketeer during his senior six vacation.
At University, he became a salesperson for NBS Television when it was still a new media house that had just launched. He was tasked to market it together with its sister radio station in Jinja.
After University, Bukenya with a group of friends decided to create their own company called Fine Media Limited. However, soon after the company went into a financial loss due to the lack of experience.
“With a couple of friends, we started creating promotional material because that's what we knew best and just a bit of sales and events. But we didn't understand it because we were young, naive and didn't have capital. All the money we had was used to register the company under URSB so we started off and burnt out ourselves a lot of times,” he narrated.
After running bankrupt with a loan amounting to 24 million, Bukenya narrated how the company was dissolved with him and his friends resorting to employment. Luckily after 6 months, he landed a job at an experiential marketing agency. He acquired two other jobs after that but the desire to revive his company and overwhelming tasks got him quitting the job.
“I didn't settle in quite well, the culture was a bit different from mine, I ran into a bit of trouble and also made up my mind to leave. My mind was already focused on the company we had started before.”
He continued, “At that time, I was in charge of execution for experiential marketing for more than 5 big brands and I was tasked with everything; from reporting and planning to pricing their products countrywide for some very big campaigns. Some of them were the biggest promotions the country had ever seen. I burnt out,” he confessed.
From this experience, Bukenya said it taught him to aim for success.
Now the Head of Evoke, Bukenya says that from his experience and that of his partners, they created an experiential property promoting properties fitting the preferences of youth in fashion, music and technology as indicated by research they carried out in 2016.
In his advice towards how to achieve success, he told the youth to set goals and visions for themselves. “A friend told me that a vision is something you like to achieve but hard to get. And when you achieve it, you change it. Once you align with the vision, it becomes easy for you to keep moving and gives you the direction to go,” he advised.
The Groove Cafe with Crystal Newman airs every Weekday from 4-5pm on RX Radio.
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