This Entrepreneur’s Commitment to Outstanding Service

Ananias Kavutse, Founder of K&A Technology & General Business Ltd. specializes in IT and electronics. Since partnering with Kountable, a global trade marketplace, he’s supplied nearly a half of million dollars worth of goods and to end payors such as The National Bank of Rwanda, Rwanda Native Authority and The Rwanda Biomedical Center.

“Ever since I started working with Kountable,” said Kavutse, “I have achieved outstanding progress.”

Kountable assisted Kavutse by purchasing the goods required in his contracts, which allowed him to take on multiple projects at the same time.

“If you don’t have a big guarantee that is equivalent to the size of the project you have,” said Kavutse, “then you have a challenge. You want to have financing. That’s how it was before and when I met Kountable, things changed, because each project is financed individually and the conditions are not that hard to comply. That’s how I managed to achieve four projects in a short amount of time.”

Kavutse’s utilization of key partnerships in his business has been instrumental to his success. He applies this to product knowledge and never takes on a project where he doesn’t have product expertise onboard.

“When you are looking at the requirements of a client, you know what he wants. You know the particular area of goods or the quality of the goods that you want,” said Kavutse. “All projects in Rwanda go through public tendering and there are requirements and condition terms that you want in the tendering process. You make sure that you qualify, so either I qualify by my experience, or if I don’t qualify, I partner.

“If I’m going to do a project, I partner with someone who is directly linked to the type of the product I’m going to supply. [Then] I know 100% that the implementation won’t fail because either the product I use is from your factory or you are a legal distributor who is registered by that company who can even ask information from the manufacturer.”

Ensuring that a product is properly installed and implemented is a guarantee for Kavutse. In fact, so much so, he has worked for free to make it happen. When he was commissioned to supply a data center cooling system, he found upon delivery of the system, that the data center wasn’t set up for the system to be effective.

“It required the destruction of everything, because the data center itself was not well structured, not well organized and the cables were mixed up,” said Kavutse. “Me and my partner, we decided to do a free service, because it wasn’t in our terms of contract to fix it, and showed them how it should look. We knew that someone else [would] come and note the difference.

Kavutse added, “We needed to show them that even if we leave, they could remember how to run things. They [were] very happy for what we did.”

With customer service at that level, it’s no surprise that K&A Technology & General Business Ltd. has had repeat business.

“The first project determines whether you’ll stay or not, because the impression you give at the initial project actually builds the relationship with that institution,” Kavutse explained. “You have to commit a lot of effort so that when you come next time they start seeing you as if you are going to win the project when you haven’t even competed.”

For Kavutse, excellence in customer service is not only about delivering on the promise of quality work but also about following up. Since 2014 and with the assistance of Kountable, K&A Technology & General Business Ltd. has supplied check book printing machines to The National Bank of Rwanda. He has a full maintenance contract as well for the upkeep of the machines.

“Ever since the machine came they have never had any problem of supplying checks to the government,” said Kavutse, “because I dedicated my time and do quality work and also make sure that service is always continuous. It’s not blocked.

“When they say there is a problem,” he added, “I stop everything I’m doing and rush over. Maybe it only takes even one minute to address. But that service is valuable.”

Kavutse knows that being a successful supplier is more than just getting the required goods to the end customer. “My commitment may be not focusing on the profit, but in focusing on the quality of work, the future is going to get me something better.”