Choosing a trade that actually sells where you live

Most women arrive at a livelihoods course already knowing what they want to do. On the twelve-week trade course Seeds of Hope runs in Wakiso, Kamuli and Napak it is usually tailoring, hairdressing or produce trading, because those are the trades they have seen a neighbour succeed at, and seeing somebody succeed is a powerful thing.

The trouble is that the neighbour succeeded in a particular trading centre, at a particular time, often before four other people started doing the same thing. What you actually saw was one person meeting demand that was there then. Whether it is still there now is a separate question and it has an answer you can go and find.

None of this means abandoning a trade you are good at. It means checking, before the money is committed, that the thing you can do is a thing people near you are buying.

Go to the trading centre on a market day and stand there. Not to sell and not to ask questions yet. Count how many people are selling each thing you are considering, and count again on an ordinary day, because a trading centre with twelve produce sellers on market day and two on a Tuesday is really two different businesses.

Then watch customers rather than sellers. How long does somebody stand at a stall before buying. Which stalls have people waiting and which have the seller looking at the road. What do customers ask for and not find, because that question is the whole exercise. A woman asking three sellers for children's underwear and leaving without any is telling you something no advice can.

Write it down that evening while you still remember. Two market days of counting, honestly written down, is better research than most small businesses in any country ever do.

Buy something from her first. A trader who has just sold you something will talk to you, and a stranger asking about her business without buying will get the polite answer.

Then ask questions with numbers in them. How many did you sell last market day. What do you do with what does not sell. Where do you buy from and how long does it take you to get there. Which month of the year is worst. What would you sell instead if you started again.

The question to avoid is whether the business is good, because it invites a yes or a warning-off, and neither tells you anything. Ask three traders the same five questions and the pattern between their answers is what you are after.

Full trades give themselves away in ways you can see from where you are standing.

The clearest sign is sellers cutting prices in the afternoon to clear stock, week after week. That is not a bargain, that is several people who all bought the same goods and cannot all sell them.

Every trading centre has a rhythm and it is not flat. Harvest brings cash in, planting takes it out, school terms pull money out of households in a lump three times a year, and the weeks before a harvest are when everybody is short at the same time.

So ask a second question of any trade: what happens to it in the lean weeks. Households keep buying paraffin, salt, soap, matches, small measures of sugar and small amounts of charcoal, because those are the things a home cannot go without. They stop buying new clothes, salon services and meat first.

That does not make soap a better trade than tailoring. It means a trade with a hungry season needs either something else beside it or a deliberate cushion saved during the good months. Tailors who survive know that uniforms come before a term and repairs come all year, and they plan for both.

Buy one basin, or one bundle, or take one order. Sell it. Write down everything it cost, including the boda that carried you, the boda that carried the goods, the table fee at the market, whatever spoiled, and whatever you gave away to relatives. Then write down what you actually collected.

Do that four times. Once is luck, four times is a pattern, and a month is short enough that a bad answer costs you very little.

The rule that follows is unpopular and true. If a trade does not work at one basin, it will not work at ten. Volume multiplies whatever the arithmetic already is, and if the arithmetic is negative, volume makes you busier and poorer at the same time.

Your day is already full. Water, firewood, the garden, cooking, a child who needs to be carried to the health centre. A trade has to fit into that, and the trades that fail quietly are usually the ones that never could.

A trade that needs you at the market from six in the morning is a completely different decision from one you do at home between other work. Selling in a market means fixed hours away from the household. Tailoring or making something at home means the work can be picked up and put down, but it also means customers must come to you, which depends entirely on whether people walk past your door.

Poultry and other trades with a long wait before the first sale are the ones to be most careful about. Months of feeding before anything is sold is a good business for a household with a cushion and a hard first trade for a household without one.

Selling goods ties up money. Every item on your table is money you cannot spend, and some of it will spoil, break or go out of fashion. The advantage is that the money comes back quickly and you can stop any week you choose.

Selling a skill ties up time instead. A tailor, a hairdresser or a baker turns hours into money without holding much stock, but the skill needs equipment, it needs somewhere people pass, and it needs customers who can pay for something they could do without.

Many of the steadiest small businesses do both. A tailor who also sells thread, buttons and fabric offcuts is selling to the customer already standing in front of her, and the second line carries her through the weeks when nobody is ordering a dress.

It happens in every intake. Six women choose tailoring, train together, finish together, and then all open in the same trading centre in the same month. Within a season two have closed and none of them are earning what they expected.

Sort it out during the course, not afterwards, while everyone is still talking to each other. There are three workable answers and all of them need agreeing in advance.