Welcome to informationhood. On this post we’ll be talking about how to start egg poultry business in Nigeria and Ghana, Hope you take your time to read this article to an end. Protein is one of the major types of food and permit me to say it is one of the most important at that and poultry supplies two of the major sources of protein; eggs and chicken meat.
p.s if you believe that your funds are not enough to establish this business, do yourself some good by staying till the end because at the end I will be sharing a more budget approach to this business.
HOW TO START A SUCCESSFUL EGG POULTRY BUSINESS IN NIGERIA
In today’s article, we are going to be taking a look at the livestock sector of business; specifically poultry, we would be sharing some tips and tricks as well as some personal experience along with important things like capital, cost of operation and of course; possible profit. In other words reading this would be doing you a whole universe of good, without any further ado, lets jump into it;
Back in 2020, or was it 2019? , whichever it was; I can remember vividly my father telling myself and my younger brother that he was thinking of trying poultry farming, my brother was entirely thrilled by the idea and backed it. I on the other hand; not so much, because I honestly do not like animals at all not even pets like dogs or cats. The decision was final; we were going to be poultry farmers.
Chicken Cage
The first thing that we would have to take care of was the cage where the chickens would reside; we wanted to cut cost as much as was possible and being a family of handy people, we decided that we would be building the chicken cage ourselves, I’m good with designs so I more often than not am always the one taking care of design in all of our projects ; I got to work and designed a nice 3 step chicken cage, that was when dad had idea; a way of taking care of the excreta of the chicks, our cage had no permanent floor, crazy as it may seem the chicks would have to stand on a metal wire mesh while the excreta would drop to a plastic tray below which we could take out, clean and replace at any convenient time; it was like a miracle.
The next day dad went to the saw mill and returned with lots of wood; we took about 3-4 days finishing the cage, due to the fact that neither of us were professional carpenters, the cage was quite wobbly as you would expect but everything worked perfectly fine, we ordered for a carton of 50 day old chicks and we began the journey; safe to say we started terribly as over 90% of our chicks died along the way, that was when it hit us the we should have tried learning about the business before diving head first into it, but after learning our lesson we soon became experts at the job and began to make some profits and still have enough chickens to eat at the end of the day
Moral lesson? Prepare adequately and learn before jumping into the business or any business at all, but luckily for you, that’s why I’m here to share with you my experience with poultry farming, the do’s and the do’s and the don’ts of the poultry industry.
If you are someone who is totally new to this business and all you have is some money to begin; you would first need to consider your;
"Give thanks to the Lord for He is good: His love endures forever."
WORKING SPACE
This is very important as this is the space in which you will train you egg laying hens, your space doesn’t have to be impossibly big, a quarter plot of land or less would easily do the trick, your space should be a good space clear of any toxic gases or fumes from any industries or what so ever as this can affect the health of yours hens and cause fatality, you also have to make sure that your working space is close to your office space for obvious reasons, also; they do not have to be on the exact same piece of land.
OFFICE SPACE
This is where proper work would be done like collaborations, marketing, employment of staff and would be the address that prospective clients and clients would identify you by so you would be better off if your office area is located somewhere easily accessible in a city or town but remember ; not too far from your working area
BRANDING
In order to give your business a lasting name and create an impression in people’s minds, you would have to properly choose a brand name; one that’s easy to remember and if possibly very catchy, the idea of using jingles to create awareness is also under branding though advertisement as it is; one people hear the tune of the jingle, they’re instantly reminded of your brand. This way you have created a mental impression so that whenever they think poultry, they think of your brand just like whenever we Nigerians think of online shopping, we think of JUMIA.
REGISTRATION OF BUSINESS
This is so crucial that I cannot stress the importance enough! You have to get your business registered with the CAC or Ghana RGD in order to legally run your business around the country.
STAFF
This is crucial as you would not need that many staff to begin with; the most a driver to drive your produce from place to place, a person in charge of your socials and advertisement , and someone in charge of finances going in and out of the company.
PROPER FINANCE MANAGEMENT
This is very essential as doing this wrongly would ultimately lead to the doom of your newly found company, first thing you should do is to open about two bank accounts with two different reliable bank, if your company has only one bank account, in a case where the bank begins to misbehave, both you and your company are screwed because operations would have to pause unless you want to take the risk of using a personal account to receive payment which would put your clients at risk of being scammed because the scammers can receive your payment in your place with their own personal accounts because your client would already believe that you sometimes use a personal account on behalf of your company; to avoid this, keep your payments strictly in the business account
EQUIPMENTS
When trying to start a business like this, it’s a bit obvious that you would at least need some equipment like the feeding troughs, water supply, a chicken cage[obviously] and others, we would cover that properly at the end when we begin to talk cost
LOGISTICS
To be honest it would save you a whole lot of future cost if you cover it at the beginning rather than depend on a logistics company,
Now to answer some of the most common questions about this business
WHAT ARE THE CHALLENGES I WOULD FACE AS A BEGINNER IN THIS BUSINESS?
ANS; The major challenge a lot of beginner face and which I also faced is taking care of the health of your chicks\chickens, to avoid this make sure you buy healthy poultry, how can you be sure the poultry Is healthy? Just buy from a certified poultry dealer and make sure they have a vet, this way you can be sure you are getting healthy chicks, another thing is when there’s an outbreak of an infection among the chickens; you are to immediately transfer the uninfected chicks to a clean new environment, quarantine sick chicks and request the services of a vet immediately to diagnose and administer treatment
WHO IS MY TARGETED AUDIENCE?
ANS; Your targeted audience would be; big super markets, restaurants, and distributors rather than smaller retail shops, you should approach the bigger dealers to see if perhaps they need a supplier and you just might be lucky
WHAT IS THE BEST LOCATION?
ANS; your office should be located somewhere that’s most easily accessible from all over the state, the your working space shouldn’t be too far away from that location
HOW WOULD I MARKET MY GOODS?
ANS; Social media is as of now one of the most reliable and fastest ways to market your produce, you can run sponsored posts on instagram or Facebook or even better but more costly; you can pay an influencer to talk about your brand to their audience, all of these can be made even better by adding affluent and responsive website where clients can place order, pay directly and receive their goods within a short amount of time, with time people will come to enjoy your services and refer their friends and family to you and you should know that word of mouth advertisement is the best kind of advertisement because it is much more dependable. Read our article on how to do profitable marketing in Nigeria here.
WILL I SELL? WILL I MAKE PROFIT?
ANS ; That’s on you and your GOD because though I can give you the strategies, I absolutely can’t guarantee your success, what I can tell you however is that many big players in the industry have used this strategies.
Now let’s talk about the business plan and the costs
Firstly you would need a battery cage as this is the best type of cage to use in poultry- farming as it avails you the ease of collecting the laid eggs stress-free; a battery cage generally costs about 100,000 naira per cage and you should be needing about three to start up’’’ if not more, but the average cage has three rows on either side of it, most battery cages come with an already in place automated water delivery system so your birds never run out of water,
So; the cages would set you back to about 300,000. Logistics would set you back around 1.5 million to 2 million naira as I would recommend that you buy a Toyota sienna rather than a regular delivery van as it is cheaper and does the job just as efficiently
Workspace should set you back to about 200,000 annually and office space would set you back to about 700,000 annually
You would pay your staff anywhere from 200,000-300,000 monthly
Total cost would be about 3.6 – 4 million naira to start up a proper poultry business
HOW ARE THE PROFITS?
A CAGE HAS A CAPACITY OF 95 BIRDS MULTIPLIED BY YOUR 3 CAGES THAT’S ABOUT 285 BIRDS
A BIRD LAYS AN EGG EACH DAY
THAT’S 285 EGGS EACH DAY, Now an egg would generally sell for about forty naira since it’s in bulk
40 multiplied by 280, I’ll leave you to do the math.
Thanks for reading this far, and I hope I’ve been able to show you the immense value in a poultry business. If you need more regarding this business, kindly email us at informationhood @ gmail . com for one on one consultation.
