When people hear "digital transformation" they picture a bank or a telco. We think of a shop in Nakuru that sells board games.
It is a small business with loyal customers, the kind of place where the owner knows which family comes in for which game. When we first walked in, everything about it ran on three things: a notebook, a phone and the owner's memory.
This is the story of what we changed, in the order we changed it. If you run a small business anywhere in Kenya, most of it will sound familiar.
What we found
Nothing was broken, exactly. The shop was selling. But the same problems came up every week.
- Stock lived in the owner's head. Whether a game was available meant walking to the shelf to look.
- Sales went into a notebook, and the notebook was added up at the end of the day, when there was time.
- Customers paid by M-Pesa and then showed their phone, and matching those messages to sales at night was a job of its own.
- Orders came in through WhatsApp, Instagram and phone calls, and now and then one was missed.
- Nobody could say with confidence which games made money and which only took up space.
None of this is unusual. It is how most small shops in the country run. The cost is hidden, because you cannot see a sale you lost when a customer was told "let me check and call you back" and went elsewhere.
We started with stock, not a website
The owner's first request was a website. It was a reasonable thing to ask for, and we said not yet.
A website that shows games you do not have, or hides games you do, makes things worse. So the first job was the least glamorous one: getting every item in the shop into a system, with a name, a price, a cost and a count.
It took time, and it was worth it. For the first time there was one place that could answer the question "do we have it?" without anyone leaving the counter.
Then the till
Next we replaced the notebook. Each sale is now recorded as it happens, on a simple point of sale screen, and the stock count goes down by itself.
M-Pesa payments arrive in the same system and are matched to the sale. The evening routine of scrolling through messages with a pen in hand simply stopped.
This is the step where the team felt the difference. It is the same idea behind our retail and wholesale system: capture a sale once and let everything else follow from it.
Then the customers
Only when stock and sales were dependable did we turn to the front of the business.
Now a customer can see what is actually available before they ask. Orders from WhatsApp and social media go into one list, so nothing depends on someone remembering a message they read while serving another person.
Because the catalogue comes from the same stock records the shop uses, it is never out of date. That is the reason we did things in this order.
What changed for the owner
The biggest change was not speed. It was knowing.
The owner can now open a report on any day and see what sold, what is running low and which games have been sitting on the shelf for months. Buying decisions that used to be a feeling are now based on what the shop has actually sold.
The shop can also be left in someone else's hands for a day, because the business no longer lives in one person's head.
The technology was the easy part. The real work was getting the business out of the notebook.
What any small business can take from this
You do not need to sell board games for this to apply.
- Start with your records, not your marketing. Fix what you know about your own stock and sales first.
- Capture each thing once. If a sale is written down twice, one of the copies will be wrong.
- Let payments match themselves. Time spent reconciling M-Pesa by hand is time taken from customers.
- Add the customer-facing part last, and build it on top of the records you already trust.
- Go in steps. Nobody closed the shop for a month. Each change was small enough to absorb.
If your business still runs on a notebook and a good memory, that is not a failing. It got you this far. But there comes a point where it is the thing holding you back, and getting past it is less painful than most owners expect.
If you would like to talk through what that could look like for your business, get in touch. We are happy to start with a conversation.
