George Wachiuri is the founder and CEO of Optiven Group, a real estate firm with a portfolio that spans from Kenya to the USA.
In a previous interview, the accomplished CEO described the not-so-rosy origins that led him to a life of suffering before striking gold in real estate.
“I was born into a poor family, and my father died when I was quite young. My mother was a peasant farmer in Nyeri, and we were a family of eight, so we grew up in poor circumstances. We had to till the land to make a living,” he explained.
These problems lasted throughout his education, with him describing how he would spend half his time in school and half his time at home owing to a lack of tuition – a predicament that he pondered a lot, with the future appearing grim.
“In university, I washed people’s clothes and took photographs to earn money. I was a rural boy, therefore I went to the Kabete campus and observed really clean individuals. I was a rural youngster who was feeling under the weather. When I saw these immaculate folks, I thought, “What can I do for them to help me pay my school fees?” he added.
Wachiuri explained that he then bought a camera and would shoot photos during Christian Union (CU) outings and sold them for Ksh 10.
He subsequently converted his room into a modest library, complete with magazines, for which students paid Ksh 1.
To supplement his photographic revenue, Wachiuri washed and ironed people’s clothes in an effort to increase fees.
After university, he recalls hand-writing three hundred application letters and dropping them off at various offices with a group of his buddies, which resulted in four interviews and his first job.
Wachiuri lost his first job shortly after, but secured another as an accountant thanks to his skills in commerce, before moving on to Kakuma, British charity World Vision, and Unicef, before founding Optiven Group in 2013.
Prior to Optiven, he estimated that he had tried many other enterprises, including supplying stationery and water, the majority of which failed.
“I recall there was a point when I was running safari business and couldn’t pay my loan. The bank came and repossessed all of my autos
“I was in the office when I was called and told that the auctioneers had evicted the tourists,” he said.
While he stopped the business, Wachiuri used the lessons learned to his multibillion-dollar real estate endeavor, which is creating ripples in the sector.
Through catastrophic mistakes that saw him lose Ksh 5 million and return to where he had started, his firm has expanded wings all the way to Kansas, USA, where he targets over 100,000 Kenyans in the diaspora with affordable housing programmes.
