What happens when the lessons from the lecture hall meet the realities of running a business? For many students, the two worlds rarely intersect. But for Nelly Kinuthia, they collide every day in ways that continually reshape both her entrepreneurial journey and her understanding of business.

Nelly Kinuthia

As a fourth-year Bachelor of Commerce (Finance) student at Strathmore Business School and the founder of Ricordi, a business dedicated to preserving life’s memories through personalised keepsakes, Nelly has discovered that some of her most valuable lessons are learned not by choosing between entrepreneurship and education, but by allowing each to sharpen the other.

In this reflection, she shares how one seemingly ordinary classroom assignment became an unexpected turning point, challenging her to see her own business through a strategic lens and proving that the best business education often begins when theory meets practice.

I did not expect one of the most refreshing moments of my degree to come out of a group assignment. But that is exactly what happened when my strategic management course lecturer, Dr. Faith Njaramba, put us into groups, assigned each group a business strategy to study, and asked us to find a real entrepreneur whose business lives out that strategy, record an interview with them, and play the video for the whole class.

I am a fourth-year Bachelor of Commerce (Finance) student at Strathmore Business School, and alongside my degree, I run Ricordi, a Nairobi-based business built around personalised photo books, custom magazines, prints, and playing cards. The name comes from the Italian word for memories, which is really what the business is about, turning photographs people already have into something they will actually keep.

Our group was assigned a differentiation strategy, businesses that win not by being cheapest or fastest, but by being different in ways customers genuinely value. The task seemed simple enough on paper: find an entrepreneur who fits that description, record a proper interview with them, and let the video speak for itself in front of the class. Most groups went looking outward, to entrepreneurs they knew through family, friends, or referrals.

I realised I did not need to look very far. I decided to be my own subject, and sat down in front of a camera as the founder of Ricordi, treating my own business as the case study. It still makes me smile that coursework gave me the excuse to sit in front of a camera and really study my own business the way you would study any company in a textbook. I had to answer questions I usually only think about in passing: what actually makes Ricordi different, why customers choose it over something cheaper or faster, and whether that would still hold up if someone tried to copy it?

There is something particularly exposing about a recorded interview. Unlike a live presentation, there was no adjusting on the spot once something did not land quite right, no reading the room and self correcting. Whatever I said was what my lecturer and classmates would watch, unedited, on the day it was played. It was, honestly, one of the more nerve-wracking things I have done for coursework. But it was also one of the most rewarding, because for the first time, I was not just running Ricordi on instinct. I was proving, on camera and under pressure, why it works.

What stayed with me afterwards was how naturally the two sides of my life fed into one another. My coursework became more interesting because I was applying real strategic thinking to something I had built, not to a hypothetical company from a textbook. And Ricordi came out sharper, because school gave me the structure and the excuse to interrogate a business I usually run on gut feeling and late-night decisions.

That clarity has not stayed confined to one video either. I have since carried the same thinking into how Ricordi speaks to customers, how I frame new product lines, and how I respond to collaboration inquiries, always coming back to the same simple question the assignment forced me to answer honestly on camera: is this actually different in a way my customers care about, or am I just assuming it is.

Looking back, this is exactly the kind of moment that makes being a student entrepreneur worth it. Most days, running a business alongside a full degree feels like keeping two separate plates spinning. Every so often, an assignment comes along that lets those two worlds collide in the best possible way, and you walk away better at both.

I am genuinely grateful to be at a school that treats education as something meant to be lived out, not just studied. Being trusted to bring an actual business into an assignment and then take what I learned straight back into running that business is a rare kind of education. It is the difference between being taught how business works in theory and being given the space to test it, on something real, with something to lose and something to gain. Ricordi did not become a case study because it was perfect. It became one because school finally gave me a reason, and the tools, to prove why it works.

 Watch Nelly’s video recording here  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Qxz-hvSGJ4qpCTUdEhZlnzaYPmY7e4eV/view?usp=sharing.

Article written by Nelly Kinuthia.