Seid Mohammedbirhan was born in 1960 within the city of Adi Awro, in a rural a part of Ethiopia’s northern Tigray area. He was the youthful of two sons in a household of small-scale farmers. Life within the village was austere. There was no electrical energy, clear water needed to be carried from a distance, and the household slept on animal hides laid instantly on the bottom. His schooling amounted to only some years of education between the ages of ten and fourteen. By the point he reached fourth grade, battle within the area pressured the varsity to close its doorways.
Considered one of Seid’s first jobs was at a tailoring store within the small city of Kwiha. A lot of the work concerned repairing folks’s garments, and for every restore he accomplished, he was allowed to maintain half of what the shopper paid. The store proprietor let him keep within the workshop, and Seid slept on the ground to keep away from the price of renting separate lodging. He minimize out all non-essential spending – he didn’t purchase espresso or new garments, and by no means spent cash on something leisure. His focus was merely on working and saving. Inside eleven months, he had put apart 3,000 birr ($1,440 on the time).
Seid used the three,000 birr to start out his personal tailoring enterprise in Mekele. It was 1981, and he was twenty-one years previous. He spent 1,000 birr on a second-hand Necchi stitching machine and used the remaining 2,000 birr to hire a small workshop.
This small store laid the inspiration for a enterprise empire that right now contains clothes, hospitality, and actual property.
Seid credit his enterprise success to twenty% luck and 80% effort, sustaining that onerous work is the one approach to attain the highest.
Learn Seid Mohammedbirhan’s full entrepreneurship journey in our new ebook, How we made it in Africa II. The ebook was launched at Harvard Enterprise Faculty and has been shortlisted for the Enterprise Council for Africa (BCA) African Enterprise E-book of the 12 months Awards 2026.
