Hi, my name is Bilal Hanif, and my company was founded in 1975 by my father and his older brother. They both inherited the knowledge of doing business from my grandfather, which makes me the third business man in the family succession line.
In fact, my wholesale business has been around for more than 35 years (it’s even older than me). I decided to go into this business, mainly because I am the only son and my father was not managing it anymore. I thought to myself, why not continue what my grandfather started and give my son the chance to have something to continue as well?
What does your business offer?
Casa Chacha Lda. is a wholesale company located in Mozambique which offers a great range of products. We started with just five main products including rice, oil, sugar, flour and soap. To this day, they are still our top selling products. However, we are now offering more than one thousand different products including everything from more food related products to cosmetics and hardware. Our company imports most of our products from other countries, while some products also come from local industries. All of this is stored in our two warehouses which are 2,500 square meters combined. That’s about 27,000 square feet!
What are some of the day to day challenges you face?
When I first took over the company, one of the main challenges I had to face was actually organizing the inventory system. At first, it looked impossible to realize my goal of expanding from 200 products to 1000 since all inventory related issues were done manually.
I decided it was in the best interest of my company to have stock balanced and organized by a computer program to streamline the work. At that time, I remember trying many programs including some in written in Portuguese. Once I tried inFlow Inventory, however, it was love at first sight. I instantly understood that it was the answer to my problems. So now here I am, happy and growing as planned, in part thanks to inFlow!
What is your advice for small businesses?
From my experience, the best advice I can give to everyone out there is that anything is possible. You just need to have the will to change and some solid principles like courage, honesty and sense of justice.
If you would like to contact us or know more, please don’t hesitate to visit our online blog, visit us on Facebook casa chacha lda, or by e-mail at chachagrupo@tdm.co.mz.
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