Pinehas Nakaziko
Windhoek-Growing up as a child the one thing that Zenao Angula hated most was the frequent changing of schools and the fact that she had to start over again making new friends at the new school. She did however end up striking an enduring friendship, which was the experience that perhaps helped her to decide on pursuing a career in marketing.
“All that changed when I met a girl called Ilke Platt Akwenye, who then became my best friend. I didn’t really have to overcome anything, all I needed was a friend that I could connect with and relate to,” Angula says of her reservations to make new friends.
Angula owns CH Growth Advertising, a marketing and advertising agency focused on building strong brand relations for clients with modest budgets.
“We provide services such as advertising, branding, creative service, account management, media service, digital marketing, activations, trade shows and festival marketing campaigns,” she says.
“Running my own company comes with many challenges, including identifying the suitable people who understand my vision, and to work with,” says Zenao.
She remembers her first venture in 2005, which was a marketing website for the entertainment industry called Nammusic.Com. “With the website, I collected artists’ albums, wrote their biographies, took pictures of them and covered their events as content for the website and gave artists exposure through the internet,” she says. The site won the ‘Best Music Website’ in the then Sanlam/NBC Music Awards 2006, the predecessor to what is today the Namibian Music Awards.
After her studies in 2009, Angula worked for Advantage |Y&R from 2010 to 2014. Angula describes the four-year period as one in which she discovered her strengths, capabilities and creativity. “Advantage |Y&R equipped me with all that I needed to go out there and venture on my own,” she says.
“I would say, taking the decision to become an entrepreneur was also a defining moment for me,” she says, adding that having a new business and getting clients are also challenges, as you have no portfolio of work previously done.
“I was able to overcome these challenges by approaching people within the corporate world that had worked with me previously. I also lost a great deal of money through wrong partnerships, but I did not allow that to break me.”
“As a new business owner, every day I learn something new, either about the business operation or the people I am working with. My reputation as a previous employee from other companies has helped me with getting jobs and growing my business. Promoting my work and marketing my brand on social media has helped me a great deal to have the clients I am currently doing work for,” explained Angula.
“Life has a lot of ups and downs, but success comes from a place of passion. Identify what your passion is and turn that into a career that you can live off. As a person who has been on my own for the past three years as an entrepreneur, I have evolved and grown as a businesswoman, a mother, and socially. I have been beaten down more times than I can count, but one thing I have learned is to brush myself off and get back up,” says Angula. She adds that it’s important for people to surround themselves with the right people and have a very strong spiritual foundation.