Running a Business
Senior 3 · English
Running a Business
Lesson 1 of 5
25 min
Let's begin
Most Rwandan families buy and sell something every week: milk, tomatoes, phone credit, a goat. Running a business turns that everyday trade into a system with its own words and its own rules. Here you read how one young woman turned a basket of mandazi into a bakery, and what she learned about money, buying and trust on the way.
A magazine profile. Sandrine and her bakery are imagined; the figures are illustrative.
1 At half past five in the morning, the bus park in Nyamata smells of diesel and frying dough. Seven years ago, some of that smell came from a single basket. Mahoro Sandrine, then nineteen, walked between the buses selling mandazi at 100 francs each. Today she owns a small bakery on the main road, employs four people and supplies bread to two schools. "Nobody gave me a loan," she says. "I started with 20,000 francs that I had saved from braiding hair."
2 Her first lesson was about money. In the first months she sold every mandazi and still had nothing at the end of the week. "I was spending the business money on the household: sugar for my mother, airtime, transport. The business was feeding everyone except itself." A teacher at her church showed her how to keep a notebook with two columns, money in and money out. When she wrote down every franc, she discovered that a full basket of 200 mandazi brought in 20,000 francs but cost her 14,000 francs in flour, oil, sugar and charcoal. Her profit was 6,000 francs a day, and she had been spending most of it.
3 Her second lesson was about buying. Instead of buying flour by the kilogram at the shop next door, she began to buy it by the 25-kilogram sack from a wholesaler in town. The price per kilogram fell, but she learned to be careful. "Once a supplier sold me a sack that was damp inside. Now I open the sack before I pay, I check the date on the label, and I always ask for a receipt. If there is a problem, the receipt is my proof."
4 Her third lesson was the hardest: credit. Friends and neighbours asked to "pay tomorrow", and tomorrow often never came. At one point her customers owed her more than a week's profit. "Selling on credit felt kind, but it was killing the business." Now she gives credit only to the two schools, which receive an invoice and pay at the end of each month.
5 What she values most, though, is trust. A mandazi that is smaller than yesterday's, she says, is a lie that customers can taste. When the price of flour rose last year, she did not secretly make her loaves smaller. She put up a notice explaining the new price. "Some people complained. Most of them came back. People forgive a higher price; they do not forgive a trick."
6 Every month Sandrine puts part of the profit back into the business. That is how the basket became a stall, the stall became a shop, and the shop became a bakery with an oven. Her next plan is a second oven. She is saving for it now, franc by franc, in a notebook that has grown into a whole shelf of notebooks.
Definition
Glossary
Sandrine's notebook did one thing: it separated the money that came in from the money that went out. Paragraph 2 gives the figures for one day.
Questions 1 to 5 ask what the text says; 6 to 8 ask what it means.
| Group | Words | Example |
|---|---|---|
| People | entrepreneur, supplier, wholesaler, retailer, customer, client, employee | An entrepreneur is a person who starts a business and takes the risk. |
| Money | capital, income, costs (expenses), profit, loss, loan, interest, debt | A loan must be repaid with interest, an extra amount. |
| Documents | receipt, invoice, price list, accounts | The invoice comes before payment; the receipt comes after. |
| Actions | buy wholesale, sell retail, bargain, advertise, reinvest, stock | The shop stocks flour, sugar and oil. |
| Verb | Person | Thing or idea | Adjective |
|---|---|---|---|
| produce | producer | product, production | productive |
| supply | supplier | supply, supplies | — |
| employ | employer, employee | employment | employed, unemployed |
| profit | — | profit | profitable |
| compete | competitor | competition | competitive |
Worked example
Profit, loss or breaking even: the language of results
Sandrine's costs for one basket are 14,000 francs, and she sells each mandazi for 100 francs. What happens if she sells (a) 150, (b) 140, (c) 130?
Note the verbs: we make a profit or a loss; we never "do" one.
Worked example
Choosing the right form from a word family
Complete: Sandrine's bakery is now very ___ (profit).
Try: The ___ (employ) were paid on Friday. The gap follows the and the verb is plural (were), so we need a plural noun for people who are paid: employees.
Tip
Invoice first, receipt last. Put them in alphabetical order, i before r, and you have the order they arrive in: the invoice asks you to pay; the receipt proves you have paid.
Warning
Why are prices going up? 6 Minute English, from BBC Learning English (about 6 minutes). Listen for the words the presenters use to talk about prices, and compare their explanation with what Sandrine did when the price of flour rose.
Practice
Sources and credits
Written by Ganzaa.
