Mr Joseph Thuku considers himself a village boy. He grew up in one of the villages in Kipipiri. This is where he built his work ethos. To rise to the top of the chain, he had to begin as a floor cleaner.
“The reason I keep my schedule is because of my village upbringing. We would wake up early to go to the farm.”
Growing up wasn’t easy, he says. The tough upbringing built his resilience towards success. If you had told him then that today he would be the head of Commercial in the Quick Mart chain of supermarkets, he would have sneered.
He harboured being an engineer or lawyer. In 2010 as he prepared to join university, Joseph landed his first job at Naivas as a shelf-stocker and got promoted to a cashier a year later, thanks to Certified Public Accountant (CPA) qualification he had attained earlier.
"Joseph Thuku is one of the youngest in Quick Mart’s C-Suite that is under the watch of Adenia, an Africa-focused private equity firm."
He moved to the commercial wing, a unit that never existed in Kenya’s retail space 15 years before.
After 12 years with Naivas, he left to start his consulting firm. At the time of his departure, he was head of Commercial at the rival supermarket.
“One of my clients as a consultant happened to be Quickmart. They felt I would be of value to them and so decided they didn’t want just a piece of the pie, but the whole of it. That is how I ended up in this role which I have been in for slightly over a year now.”
Today, he is one of the youngest in Quick Mart’s C-Suite that is under the watch of Adenia, an Africa-focused private equity firm.
In 2018, Adenia bought Tumaini. The following year, after adding five new stores, it acquired the Quick Mart business, rejigging the executive team and board, whose chair, Jérôme Loubère, is a former executive at French retailer Carrefour.