Business is Discovery

Entrepreneurship is an adventure. The narrow path to success is filled with plenty of turns, stopovers, crossroads, fire ants & glory. These experiences expose an entrepreneur to points of learning like no other that polish the tools required to succeed in a very volatile activity.

On a personal level, an entrepreneur gets to discover their strengths & weaknesses, limits & possibilities, emotional barriers, limitations of the ego & working with people.

Shelving the Business Plan

In 2016, I started off with a business plan I wrote anticipating all expenditure, revenues, operating models & profit. This was geared to help me overcome the uncertainty & give me a sense of direction as I navigated a new complex terrain. I was mistaken!

The plan developed just gave me the most basic of foundations with all my assumptions proving irrelevant with each passing day.

With my initial product being office & school supplies, I quickly discovered the low profit margin, the seasonality in sales, differences in quality offered by suppliers, the price sensitivity of the market, difficulty in marketing the product, a saturated market & the essence of a proper business location. These and many more discoveries paved the way for a continuous iteration of my originally compiled business plan that has taken multiple overhauls over its lifetime.

Lessons Learnt

Overtime, this continuous process of discovery has given me an informal type of education of the business world & how it operates. With little to no commercial experience in my family line, I have quickly discovered the following key lessons;

Time is an entrepreneur’s best asset.

Time offers the perfect platform for an entrepreneur to discover & learn about their craft & trade. Its essential that every minute of the journey is fully utilised to continuously get better.

The biggest hurdle is yourself

School only teaches outside phenomena & barely ever teaches us about our personal selves. Over the journey of entrepreneurship, plenty of scenarios bring to light our strengths & most importantly our weaknesses. From a personal point of view, I discovered early the limitations of the ego & its ability to overrun a good business.

There is no fixed approach

Entrepreneurship does not involve a fixed approach or method of operation. An entrepreneur should continuously discover new ways to approach their craft.  Avoid the career or bureaucrat model where fixed tasks are required on a consistent basis for success to be achieved.

The ultimate goal is Efficiency

Efficiency should be prioritised even through the discovery process. An entrepreneur should seek to avoid waste with their monetary resources & time. An entrepreneur should seek to discover the most efficient approach to conducting their business, dealing with people, handling resources & managing their time.

Thank You for Reading.

The Kickback

To give or not to give?

Every once in a while, the business conducts a big transaction. Its usually followed with a situation that puts every single one of us to the test. To give or not to give (a kickback).

The greed instinct takes center stage in scenarios like these due to the load of the effort being done by the business. Another side pushes for offering small tokens of appreciation to the paying party to show appreciation & pay ‘tithe’ for the income generated for the business.

As a semi-experienced business practitioner, I secretly suggest you chose the latter option. A kickback represents a very important investment for the business as it gives incentive for more transactional activity & improves your relations with the procuring entity. They can take form in dine outs, cash, airtime or gifts.
We humans work best with incentive. Since business is done with people, providing the right incentives is important & represents an opportunity for the business to generate more revenue from procuring entities. A line should be drawn between corrupt activities & small kickbacks. A kickback should be a token of one’s appreciation but not a means to purchase a tender or contract.

Tips

  • Avoid blatantly offering kickback to procuring parties. This may come off as corrupt.
  • Focus on creating the best possible product or service first. The kickback comes as a small token of your appreciation.
  • Form strong relationships with your customers as a priority. A kickback should simply be a sweetener.
  • Get the right balance between hard cash & different forms of kickback. Be careful not to simply throw cash to procuring parties.
  • Make the kickback a soft gesture. Anything transactional comes off as corrupt activity.

Outcomes

  • Better business relationships
  • Improved revenue for the business

Thank You for Reading.

Creative Dress Code

Breaking the Norm

The decade after the millennium (the year 2000) witnessed the emergence of the Corporate class. The decade that followed (2010-2020), has brought with it the Creative sector with solutions geared towards the modern digital era. This has seen an influx of the ‘Creative’ that embodies a personality known for their casual outlook.

With traditional professional etiquette requiring a formal dress code in work related situations, the professional institutions are struggling to embrace the Creative’s approach.

To understand Creatives & their motivations, we reference some biology. A Creative is a right-brainer that uses the emotional over the rational side of their brain to understand phenomena. This helps with creative problem solving & trickles all the way down to their dress code. With the need to break commonly held assumptions to creatively formulate solutions for their market & clients, professional norms are broken as they seek to redefine themselves to match their creative dispositions.

Tips

  • Stereotypes of the professional environment are natural. Seek to overcome them when working with a Creative & focus on their outcomes
  • As a creative seeking to make a name for yourself, keep a well kempt, hygienic & smart outlook when presenting your ideas. Don’t seek to over bend the rules.
  • As a creative, have two sides of your wardrobe with a suit & tie for those once in a lifetime opportunities & your model casual look for your day to day activities.
  • Let’s harmonise & get the best out of each other.
  • Treasure your creative to get the best possible outcomes. Overcome the natural professional stereotypes & create harmonious working relationships.

Outcomes

  • Better working relationships & outcomes.

Thank You for Reading.

The Cost Factor

Cost & Business

The difference between entrepreneurial success & failure can narrow down to cost management. Costs include all business expenditure from fixed costs like rent & wages to operational ones like transport & internet.

My focus is on operational costs which are the ‘naughtiest’ consumers of revenue as they facilitate the service aspect of the business & daily operational activities. They take form in airtime, transport, internet, marketing, advertising & kickbacks (Important).
The first step of the journey is identifying the key cost areas of the business. This can be done through a spreadsheet software like Microsoft excel which gives you a framework to understand the cost areas of your business & identify potential leakages.

The second step involves the analysis of your day to day activities to evaluate the return on the costs incurred. Question that will arise include; Are trips to client premises being facilitated in pricing, is the investment in the internet good enough? can the excess expenditure on fuel be invested in a delivery motorbike personnel? These & many more observations will help reduce unnecessary leakages from the business operation.

A sample of the operating cost categories from a given period of the business

Tips

  • Success requires a proper book keeping culture
  • Track all expenses from the visit to the toilet to the income tax payment
  • Plan the business’s service & activity system on the basis of operating costs. Choose an activity system that returns the highest form of value.
  • Give an equal amount of time & effort studying your expenses as you would with your incomes
  • As the data set grows, input the data into a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel to get a deeper insight into the expenditures of the business operation
  • Seek to write a detailed report of key findings from your operations. This knowledge creation process educates you on your business & how best you can improve it.

Outcomes

  • A proper understanding of a business & where its money is spent
  • An understanding of average expenditure over specified periods like a day, month, quarter or year to help the planning process & the required revenue to match the costs
  • Applied checks & balances ensure the business generates a better profit margin which means more money in the bank.

Thank You for Reading.

A Reading Plea

Going through school, the constant thought of all that could go wrong with an academic exam never made reading a fond experience. The essence of reading was stolen from us & turned into a simple survival tool. The backlash that follows takes shape in a resentment of all things reading.

The gospel according to Ideation256 preaches a message of hope to all victims of the academic exam. We can overcome this resentment & use our reading not as a tool of survival but a companion in this climb up the entrepreneurial ladder. Like you take your vitamins to boost your immunity, read much more than you are comfortable doing. Newspapers, articles, a book, your shirt tag & much more. With this, you’ll have overcome the shadow the school system has placed in our sight of vision.

From teaching ourselves flashy new skills to providing that story to impress a colleague, reading will empower us, boost our confidence & take us to levels above & beyond this school induced mediocrity.

As you’re reading this, I point to the sky in praise for this day of awakening. A positive reading habit holds the key to our progress in entrepreneurship.

Thank you for reading.