SEVEN OF US STARTED A COMPANY. IT BEGAN AS A WEDDING GROUP.

Today Sieben turns five years old.

Before I tell you what it has become, let me tell you how it actually started.

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Mweru House, 2003

In grade 10 at David Kaunda National Technical School, four of the seven ended up in Mweru house.

Gabriel, Caesar, Mukolo and I arrived in 2003. Not the same class. Just the same hostel, the same house master, the same Saturday morning inspections.

Our house master was Mr Katete, a physics teacher who was already something of a legend at the school. He had produced a pamphlet called Katetelization, and the story went that if you studied it properly, a distinction in physics was almost guaranteed.

He also had what we called the R-L syndrome. Whenever he addressed us, Mweru House became Mwelu House. It never stopped being funny.

One of the things that came with those Saturday inspections was a trip to a place we called Siberia.

It was a sanctioned school outing for the Grade 10s and 11s. We would be taken out as a house to an area in Libala South, near the Lusaka Water and Sewerage Company pump station, where we would collect limestone in sacks and plastic bags. Back at the hostel, the limestone was mixed with water, and we would dip pan bricks into the mixture and line them along the edges of the hostel floors and lawns in preparation for the inspectors.

By the time we came back from Siberia, we were usually white from the dust.

It was essentially a chore. But it felt like a day out.

You got to know people doing things like that. Not in conversation. In the work.

In 2007, all four of us went to UNZA. There we met Bornwell, Frank and Mwaba, and the group became seven.

All engineers, though we did not know that yet.

At UNZA, those of us hoping to study engineering, medicine, mining or agriculture sciences started in the School of Natural Sciences (NS) and waited to see where we would be allocated at the end of the year. Students called it the School of Natural Sufferers. The name had been earned.

We were in the Kwacha hostels at the Ruins, a cluster of old hostels near Monk Square that did not need much imagination to acquire its name. Room Kwacha 1-24 was where we gathered. Group study sessions before exams. Late nights. Going out when the work was done. Nobody thought about whose room it was or whose food it was.

We graduated in 2012 and went into the industry in separate directions.

By 2021, seven engineers spread across different companies and different towns were still in each other’s lives, approaching a decade of professional experience each.

That is what Sieben is built on before anything else.

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The Group That Started At A Wedding

In 2014, Caesar was getting married.

We were his groomsmen. A WhatsApp group was made to coordinate the logistics. Quickly. Practically. With full intention of dissolving it once the occasion passed.

It did not dissolve.

After the wedding, the group was renamed Friends. The wedding coordination was done. The group was not. Football. Weekend plans. Things someone found online that could not wait until morning. As more of us got married the name evolved again. By the time six of the seven had wives, someone renamed it Married Men plus 1. Directed entirely at the one bachelor among us. He endured it with dignity. The group gave him no alternative.

That group, the one that started for a wedding in 2014, is the same group in which Sieben was born.

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Ideas? Let’s Do Something Workable This Year Gents

The conversations about doing something together started on the same Married Men plus 1 chat that had been used for years to discuss football and weekends.

One message changed the direction of the group.

We had been out of university for almost a decade. Between the seven of us, approaching ten years of experience across civil, mechanical, geomatic engineering and supply chain management. Gabriel suggested we list ten ideas and do a SWOT analysis on a Zoom call. And thats how Sunday evening weekly zoom meetings began.

Monthly contributions began. Capital started building. We were an investments company after all, and the early thinking was around finding the right vehicle to grow what we were pooling together. The ideas came in. Village banking. Computers. Selling goats to the DRC. A microfinance lending operation was proposed. A name was needed for it. Three options went to a vote on the chat. Golden Goose won at 57.1%.

Golden Goose Financial Services was created. Logo and everything.

It did not go well. The losses were real. We learned quickly that enthusiasm and capital are not the same as expertise.

The question that eventually surfaced was the obvious one.

Why are we trying to do things we are not good at?

Seven engineers with approaching ten years of engineering experience. The answer was sitting right there.

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The Name Was Almost Decided Before We Voted

January 2021. Whatever this was becoming, it needed a name.

We had gone back and forth on names for a while. Ideas came and went, including attempts to combine our names. Eventually Caesar narrowed it down to three options and put them to a vote in the WhatsApp group.

The vote had barely started when Frank typed: “We are The SIEBENS.”

Mukolo immediately responded: “There is no integrity in this vote.”

Bornwell added: “I wish I proposed a more traditional name.”

The joke was that the vote was still running, but Sieben already felt like the winner.

Frank then explained why. Sieben is 7 in German. Seven because there were seven of us. And Germany because German engineering had always carried a certain reputation for quality.

It landed.

We were seven engineers. At university, German engineering was something we had heard spoken about with a certain respect. We had seen that reputation ourselves over the years. And more than a few of us had admired the precision of German engineering sitting in our driveways.

The affiliation felt genuine. We were comfortable carrying a name that said we took this seriously.

My response was: “Interesting name with interesting meaning.”

Mwaba’s response was simple: “I like this.”

Sieben Investments Limited was formally registered on 31st August 2021.

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The Themes Changed Because We Changed

On 9th January 2022, all seven of us met at Legacy Resort in Lusaka.

It was still early. We were trying to work out what Sieben was going to become.

We looked at where we had come from, where we were, and then spent the day thinking about the company we wanted to build.

The theme for that first conference was Define Our Future. It became the first of what has happened every year since. One phrase that names what the company needs to do in that season.

The words we chose for the conferences changed as the company changed.

Sieben Version 2.0 came next in 2023.

The first version had been the idea itself. Now we were trying to work out what needed to be built around it: systems, processes and people. This was a call to stop running on goodwill and enthusiasm and build proper systems.

Then came Turn Pro in 2024.
The question was no longer whether we could make something happen.
It was whether we were ready to operate like a professional company. It was time to move from being amateurs to being professionals.

Then December 2024. Mwaba was taken from us.

He was our founding Chief Operating Officer. The one who drove the company in its initial stages, who brought his precision and his commitment to doing things properly into everything Sieben did from the very beginning. He was the one who said “I like this” when the name was explained in the chat.

The loss was immense. We were gutted. The kind of loss that makes you stop and ask what you are doing and why and whether you have the will to keep going.

In January 2025, we met again.

The theme was Building Resilience.

It was our first conference without Mwaba. The theme carried something of what that moment required of us, but also something of what we wanted Sieben to become.

A year later, in January 2026, the theme was Level Up.

By then, the company had gone through another year of change. New people had joined. The leadership structure had changed. We had moved offices. There were new ideas and new ambitions.

The language had changed too.

Define Our Future.

Sieben Version 2.0.

Turn Pro.

Building Resilience.

Level Up.

Five themes across five years.

Looking at them now, they read almost like chapter headings.

Not because we knew where each chapter was going when we chose the words.

We didn’t.

We were simply trying to describe where we were and what we needed from ourselves at the time.

And then we would go back to work.

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The Next Five Years

Five years.

Honestly, when we were on that chat in January 2021 running a poll for the Golden Goose name and debating whether Sieben or Blue Corp was the better option, I did not know with certainty we would still be here five years later. You start something and you stay with it through the seasons it brings. Some were good. Some were hard. One took someone we could not afford to lose.

Along the way, people joined who became part of what this is. Staff who showed up and gave their work to something they did not start. Contractors, bricklayers, carpenters, architects, facilitators and suppliers who brought their skills to projects that carried the Sieben name. Clients who placed their trust in seven engineers who were still figuring it out. And the wives who watched the founders sacrifice evenings and weekends and the easy version of things, and held everything else steady while the company was being built.

None of them are footnotes. They are part of the story.

Looking back at five years, I can see things I could not see while we were living them. Why certain decisions mattered. Why the difficult seasons were necessary. Why losing Mwaba did not end us but became the reason to go further.

The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote: “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

Five years understood backwards. A wedding group. A chat with no integrity in the vote. A man saying I like this. Losses that stung. Lessons that stayed. A company that now carries a name that means all of us.

The next five years must be lived forwards.

We do not know exactly what they hold. We know what we are building toward. Ten years as a company. Ten years of the seven who chose to stay connected from a hostel in 2003.

Six of us will carry it forward.

For all of us. Including the one no longer here to see it.