Developing Talent: Focus on Young Entrepreneur - Myke Rabar, CEO, Homeboyz Entertainment Group

Valerie | 17 Nov 2009, 09:39

C&binet ambassador comment: Boko Inyundo, Global Sector Manager, Linklaters LLP & Director/Trustee, Africa Centre

“Leadership is to go before and show the way”, a favoured definition of Dee Hock, the Founder and CEO emeritus of VISA, shared in his wonderful book ‘One from Many – VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organisation”, a quote attributed to a centuries-old Scottish dictionary.

The book is about the impressive journey behind the creation of VISA, the global company that operates the world’s largest retail electronic payment network. However, the absorbing and profound aspect of this book is the author’s philosophical reflection on the institutional transformation that was necessary in enabling such a new form of organisation to emerge from the traditional establishment that is the global banking system. VISA was at that time, circa 1969, a new, trans-cultural organisation that balanced cooperation and competition, blended chaos and order and evolved a business model that productively dealt with complexity, diversity and change on a global scale.

There are myriad means of drawing correlations with Dee Hock’s experience in founding VISA and the evolving challenges and opportunities presented by today’s increasingly digital, global and culturally diverse world and the impact of a seemingly inexorable momentum of innovation across multiple arenas including the creative economy.
However, to illustrate what I mean here I purposefully opt not to tell you yet another tale behind the well publicised creation of such major global companies such as Google, Facebook or Spotify. Instead I share with you a more humble, yet for me as a person of mixed Kenyan and British heritage, equally inspiring story about a young Kenyan entrepreneur named Myke Rabar and the relatively nascent growth of his Nairobi-based media company, Homeboyz Entertainment Group.

Myke Rabar and Homeboyz Entertainment’s journey began in 1992 when a small group of music lovers got together to form a small organized DJ-ing outfit. There dream was to give the Entertainment Industry (which hardly existed at the time in Kenya) a fun-filled experience that audiences would always remember. With start-up capital of Kenya Shillings 40,000 (in today’s exchange rate circa £300 GBP) obtained through personal savings, the group initially rented equipment from other suppliers in order to entertain at events such as small house parties or weddings. After paying off the suppliers, the profit from such events was continually re-invested into the company and, in so doing, the group managed to start buying its own equipment. Thus this collective began to lay the foundations for what has now become an inspirational example of the potential for entrepreneurs in Africa’s creative economy.

Homeboyz Entertainment is now East & Central Africa’s biggest and most influential multi-media Entertainment Company, a Vivendi or Walt Disney-equivalent on the African continent. Employing over 40 dedicated staff, Homeboyz Entertainment Group now consists of a portfolio of companies: a DJ agency; a music technology academy; an events organisation; studios; a record label; a radio station; a TV station; an experiential marketing company and advertising production outfit; an acclaimed animation company; as well as, most recently, a company that bottles and retails mineral water!

Notably the growing global profile of this Entertainment group was evidenced in 2008/09 after ‘Tinga Tinga Tales’, a unique 52-episode animated series produced by UK independent television production company Tiger Aspect in association with Homeboyz Entertainment, was commissioned by CBeebies in the UK and Playhouse Disney in the US. In this groundbreaking collaboration, Tiger Aspect partnered with Homeboyz Entertainment to set up the first fully equipped animation studio in Kenya employing local designers, writers, musicians and animators. Based on African folk stories, ‘Tinga Tinga Tales’ now entertains children on a television near you as well as all over the world, telling how children’s favorite animals came to be. Why Lion Roars, Why Crocodile Has A Bumpy Back and Hippo Has No Hair are just a few of the episodes in the series.

This growth from a core business (DJ-ing) to a successful group structure consisting of a portfolio of creative products/interests is testament to a lot of hard work as well as belief in the inherent artistic and dynamic qualities of creative talent in East and Central Africa. The widely acknowledged achievements of Myke Rabar and Homeboyz Entertainment are all the more compelling in that the successes have been delivered in a developing economy such as Kenya. Such economies are yet to fully benefit from such critical contextual influences such as: the levels of technological investments seen in the West (e.g broadband infrastructure investments); the relatively large advertising spend by Corporates seen in developed economies; the relatively high discretionary income of, for example, US consumers; and the less evolved regulatory framework in Africa as compared to Europe or the UK, for example, where those generating or funding the development of creative products enjoy higher degrees of protection over their creative assets.

The success and sustainability of a creative business such as Homeboyz Entertainment is clearly increasingly dependent on the creative partnerships that, with the growing influence of technology, can now be forged by collaborating with artists, investors, producers, distributors, employees, clients and consumers at a global level. As per Dee Hock’s reflections, Myke is already exploring the potential behind cross-cultural creativity and balancing the complementary forces of cooperation and competition.

As the protracted global recessionary climate influences all communities to, I believe mistakenly, err on implementing more parochial strategies in a vain attempt to ensure survival, I hope that leaders/institutions emerge from the current economic crisis with an even clearer sense of the inherent strengths of a global collective spirit. Rather than solely trading with existing partners in developed economies, creative industry executives in the major economies such as the US and Europe should follow in the footsteps of, in this case, Tiger Aspect by listening attentively to the many ‘voices’ of artists and entrepreneurs like Myke in Africa whose inspiration needs to be met by a global creative industry that’s willing to believe in them and buy their skills/products at fair global commercial rates. Like Barack Obama, the US President of Kenyan descent, who mobilised popular support across different communities and campaigned with a philosophy that encouraged us all to believe that ‘yes, we can’ make change happen, for many members of the global African Diaspora’s creative community and beyond, leaders like Myke are living proof of the ‘audacity of hope’.

If “leadership is to go before and show the way”, then Myke and Homeboyz Entertainment are, especially in the context of Africa and its attendant challenges, up there in front showing a generation of young Africans the way to a sustainable future in the global creative economy. Like the mineral water bottling company that Myke’s recently acquired, this is a truly refreshing narrative which, given he’s only in his late 30’s, has only just begun!