Don’t Be Afraid to Start Small or Start Over

If I could give my younger self any advice, I would say, “Don’t be afraid to start small or over.” I am not sure whether a younger me would have listened, but either way, it is the advice I needed to hear then and even now. When I came to the scene in April 2021, I was so full of energy and in love with Kenyan music. I had been living outside Kenya for close to ten years, and the COVID-19 pandemic made me realize that it was time to go home and see what Kenya had in store for me. I remember speaking to my brother, who was living in Kenya at the time, and he would always talk about the crab-in-a-bucket mentality that Kenyans have, but I had been away from home for so long that I just missed home and had forgotten how Kenya and Kenyans are. When Radio 254 started, I was doing live shows from the comfort of my mum’s house, and If I knew what I know now, I would have kept doing live shows from home until it made financial sense to get a studio. But at the time, I also did not want everybody to know where I lived, but genuinely, there was no need for a studio, at least not at that point. We were not making any money from the radio, and opening a studio just created a hangout for people to come and chill. I don’t regret any of it, but eventually, we had to move studios because we could not keep up with the demands of our first location. After fundraising, we managed to get a second studio space, but even that did not last because we had not figured out how to make sure that Radio 254 was sustainable. To anybody reading this, before you start any business, please make sure that you figure out how the business will be sustainable. Passion will not sustain your business. Throughout this journey, the constant has been starting over, but I have to be honest and say that there would not have been a need to start over had we started small. From the very beginning, we were incurring costs such as rent, wifi, electricity, water, etc., which should have given me the pressure of figuring out how the bills would be paid. But I ignored that and focused on growing the station and brand and not how to sustain it. Five years later, I am starting over again, this time smaller and slower, having learned from the past. The important thing is to start and pick yourself up when you fall.