Hannah Karanja is the co-founder of Hacyna Training and Consultancy, a corporate training business.
She established the company which has majored in customer service and finance alongside her husband in 2021.
Karanja was initially engaged in in-house training at her workplace before she went on to establish her own business.
Here is her story as told by WoK.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Hannah ran a successful training consultancy firm that, unfortunately, went out of business.
At the time, she mainly did in-house training and offered a lot of training sessions at her former workplace.
“Whilst working, I became an in-house trainer and fell in love with training. I love seeing the transformations that people go through after attending a training session,” Hannah shared .
Come April 2021, she teamed up with her husband to establish Hacyna Training and Consultancy.
Although they started with almost zero capital, Hannah explained that it did not take long to break even.
“All you need these days is a laptop and an internet connection. The main challenges has been reaching out to businesses,” she reflected.
In an interview with Nation, Hannah also shared money lessons that she has learnt in the course of his entrepreneurial journey.
The biggest of them all, she pointed out, was buying online subscriptions she thought she could use in her business.
“An example is when I subscribed to an email marketing tool that I barely knew how to use. But because I’d heard that every business should have an email list, I jumped right in and subscribed
“My lesson from this was not to always jump in and do what everyone else is doing. I realized that I’m learning to curve everything,” Hannah said.
Hannah also mentioned that she is working on her money management by considering investments and saving in locked accounts.
“I have a locked savings account that I transfer 10 percent of the money that I make from my workshops. For bigger savings, I use a Money Market Fund,” she added.
Hannah also held the opinion that business and employment will always go hand in hand.
“I will always advise young graduates to get into employment first because there is a lot to learn about the processes from a well-established business
“When I was employed, I had stable salary even when I was sick or on leave but that is not the case with entrepreneurship,” she explained.
Hannah holds a Bachelor’s degree in International Relations from the United States International University – Africa.
She also holds a Master’s degree in Air Transport Management from University of London.
