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73 Business Idea in Nigeria And Africa
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How to Start a Business in Nigeria or Africa Without Money
7 Virtues to have in business adventures
1.Planning-You have already planned to fail when you don’t plan at all. Planning is what gives clarity of direction. There are many roads that leads to the market. And I’m not talking about the modern market which has few gates that leads to it but a traditional market where everywhere leads to it.If you don’t plan your entry point into it which could be based on how near what you want to buy is , you’ll end up wandering in the whole market. Even what you have to buy must have been planned before going there. It can be confusing not knowing what to buy and yet knowing that you went to the market to buy something. Planning gives order ,direction and measurement to what must be done. When your journey is planned you have already made half of the journey and the rest is a smooth right .Don’t only plan , do a good and thorough planning. Plan your time, your resources and your nife ( nife is life in a typical Nigerian warri woman’s tongue).
2. Discipline– I have an adage that I value much it reads ” the race is against yourself to be what you ought to be” . We must be saved from ourselves to really make significant impact .The sport stars you see today had to be very disciplined at a point in their lives to be where they are now.They have had to subject their bodies to strenuous exercises, obey rules and their coaches. Discipline comes with self denial to a large extent. You make profit in business and you start jumping around town spending it, the business will soon crash if there is no discipline in reinvesting your profit into it. Must be disciplined in paying your bills to avoid government interferences.Discipline is the backbone of any venture in life.Be serious about your moves. Be serious about your business so that your team,stakeholders and your customers will be serious in their dealings with you.
3. Sacrifice– A hen physically loses weight while sitting on her eggs resulting from decreased feeding. Success in business cost what it cost. You’ll pay for your business growth and progress .What is sacrifice? It is going beyond what is required of you. There are parties you’ll ignore. Clothes you’ll refuse to buy all because you want to reach your goals. A farmer who plants some corn seeds only sacrifice in order to reap a large harvest of corn. Sacrifice is one of the hardest but fastest way to reach your goals.
4. Taking Risk – You probably have read “it is a risk not to be risky ” .If you are not taking risk then you are very risky you should be avoided. Risk are decisions taken in which the outcome can be favorable or unfortunate. When a risk is successful it can be a major milestone. You are advised to take risk but it’s not every risk that is what taking .Take measurable risk. Don’t take risk that you can’t afford.If the battle is bigger than the spoil of battle you had better drop the battle.
5.Patience – If you are not patient you can’t make anything. There are people who can’t be patient to watch a business succeed in 4 years time but are willing to work a job for 44 years. Every good thing takes time. Taking short cuts to get a hit in business will only cut the business short . You need patience to reap your sacrifices. You need patience to persevere . A hen sits on her eggs for 21 days ,patiently waiting and even if they don’t hatch she will still lay eggs again.
6. Sensitivity and Discernment– Not all business offers are worth your consideration. Be smart enough to pick the real and drop the counterfeit. I can tell a dubious business or moves from afar. Sensitivity and discernment looks somewhat similar. Sensitivity is to detect and perceive while discernment is to recognize what is what after much deep thinking.
7. Purpose– Purpose is what determines how you plan and which direction to go. That one purpose is broken down into objectives or missions and goals, that’s why there are many department within an organization. All are gearing towards one purpose .Help your team to maintain focus at all time. Without purpose people aimlessly do things. They don’t know what to expect from their engagements .Define your business purpose and let your team understand it.It will help you as the team leader to pass down quality directions as needed. Purpose is what determines how you plan, the kind of risk you’ll take and the kind of directions to give.Purpose is what empowers you to be disciplined.
See how partnership is the secret of your business survivability
Partnership is the act of pairing up with another person or company who has some leverage or features to offer that you don’t have but need for profiting. Partnership as always been there , when you employed your team ,you employed them to partner with you. They came to offer you their skills and time which you can’t give your business . They partner with you for the amount of productivity you want and you in turn pay them .
Partnership looks like trade by barter kind of operation.You bring what you have to get what you need from somebody who has it.
How did Facebook reach it first $100 million mark in revenue? In 2006, Mark Zuckerberg and his team were more focused on coding Facebook than growing revenue. Mark hired Dan Rose from Jeff Bezo’s Amazon.com as VP of Business Development to help grow revenue.
Dan had learned from Jeff Bezos that one big partnership can make all the difference to revenues. He watched Myspace how the started doing big deals in a grand style of it’s new Deal Maker Owner, Rupert Murdoch.
The problem was, Facebook was growing but was not as big or as established as Myspace so its marketing partnerships were still small. Within a month of Dan joining Facebook, in August 2006 , everything changed. Myspace announced a $900 million deal with Google. Myspace had the traffic and Google had the ad network.
It was a perfect partnership where Google would manage Myspace’s ads and that deal single-handedly made Myspace profitable.
Dan Rose asked ” who has the most to lose from this deal” ? The answer was Bill Gates’ Microsoft MSN ad network, which had lost out to their arch rival Google. Dan jumped on the phone to call Microsoft and asked them if they wanted a similar deal with Facebook. Microsoft’s answer? ” Okey, we’all be down there tomorrow to iron it out.” That one deal , wrapped up 24 hours later, doubled Facebook’s revenues in 2006 from a forecast $22million to over $40million .
The year after, the Microsoft deal was worth over $100 million in revenue to Facebook. You see what partnership can do? Go out and get what you need to get your business growing .”if opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door” .
Importance of Business Partnership
1. Partnership engenders business survivability – Many platforms and businesses would have collapsed if not for the partnership deals that came along the way. The likes of Facebook , Google and Yahoo would have become history if not for partnering with the best of talents and skills. Your business survivability depends on partnership to a large extent .Some top companies partner with celebrities in order to turn their fans into their customers. They hire the best in the field to perfect their products or services. That’s partnership .This operation result in business survival and thriving .Don’t downplay partnership in your dealings because it’s the life wire of business .
2.Partnership is the gateway to business growth -Business growth is achieved by the combined effort of a team in a company. Team in terms of the whole body of people from the top to the bottom working together in a company .Every body from the CEO to the gateman , all are partnering with the company’s owner or shareholders to make the company what it should be and how it should grow. Business growth is not the result of the business itself, but the combined effort of the people behind it. An object remains in a state of rest until a force acts on it before it can gain motion.So is business.Business can’t operate itself and can’t grow itslef .Even automated businesses needs people to set it in motion. People bring concepts, systems, method and strategies to bring about growth. It is in partnering with such people and companies we experience business growth.
3.Partnership increases revenue– From the story of Facebook, we can see how their revenue doubled because of partnership. They have the social media ( traffic) while Microsoft owns the ads network.But both of them wouldn’t have experienced growth in revenue if they hadn’t combine forces. If you want your revenue to skyrocket , leverage on partnership .You can be a manufacturer but a company out there is good or expert in marketing products, when you join forces , the revenue only your company couldn’t have grown in 5 years can be reached in just a year. That’s the power of partnership.” If opportunity doesn’t knock, you had better build a door”.
Too old to start again? See how KFC was launched by a 65 years old man.
Welcome ABC friend,
Today we want to share an inspiring story of a 65 years old man with you, a man, who as at the time his mates were planning how to start living on government, he had a better plan.
Many people die living on pension.
It is tough for the old people who have no financial support of any kind. Some have been neglected by their children. Many can no longer be employed. Some don’t have any means of livelihood, not even pension.
I feel sorry seeing some old people around a premises trying to get their pension out.
It is a cold world.
Well, if you are old and it seems you are tired of trying again, let this story inspire you to be who you were meant to be again.
Colonel Sanders was the founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken ( KFC). His whole life before founding KFC made him look like an epitome of failure.
At age 5 his Father died of fever . Sanders’ mother obtained work in a tomato cannery ,and he was required to look after and cook for his siblings .
By age seven , he was skilled with bread and vegetables, and improving with meat. The children foraged for food while their mother was away for days at a time for work.
When he was 10 , he began to work as a farmhand for local farmers.
In 1902, Sanders’ mother remarried. Sanders had a bad relationship with his stepfather.
In 1903, he dropped out of school and went to live and work on a nearby farm. At age 13 , he left home by himself.
At age 17 he had already lost four jobs.
He got married at 18 to Josephine King and they had a son who died from infected tonsils and two daughters. He then found work as a fireman on the Illinois Central Railroad
He then moved with his family to Tennessee. Sanders lost his job at Illinois after brawling with a colleague.
Sanders moved again to work for the Rock Island Railroad while Josephine and the children went to live with her parents.
After a while, Sanders began to practice law in Little Rock, which he did for three years, earning enough in fees for his family to move in with him. His legal career ended after a courtroom showdown with his own client.
He joined the army and wasted out there.
A lot of failure, you will say, but Sanders would not give up yet.
He became an insurance sales man and failed again. He was fired for insubordination.
He moved to Louisville and got a sales job with Mutual Benefit Life of New Jersey.
In 1920,Sanders established a ferry boat on the Ohio River between Jeffersonville and Louisville. He canvassed for funding , becoming a minority shareholder himself, and was appointed secretary of the company . The ferry was an instant success.
Sanders cashed in his ferry boat company shares for $22,000 and used the money to establish a company manufacturing acetylene lamps. The business failed after Delco introduced an electric lamp that they sold on credit.
Sanders moved to Kentucky to work as a salesman for the Michelin Tire Company. He lost his job in 1924 when the company closed their manufacturing plant. In 1924, by chance, he met the general manager of Standard Oil of Kentucky who asked him to run a service station in Nicholasville. In 1930, the station closed as a result of the Great Depression .
He became a cook and dishwasher in a small cafe. He later ran cafeterias for the government at an ordinance works in Tennessee, followed by a job as assistant cafeteria manager in Oak Ridge , Tennessee.
At age 65 he retired.
On the 1st day of retirement he received a cheque from the government for $105. He felt that the government was saying he couldn’t provide for himself. He decided to commit suicide.
It wasn’t worth living anymore; he had failed so much.
He sat under a tree writing his will, but instead, he wrote what he would have accomplished with his life. He realized there was so much more that he hadn’t done. There was one thing he could do better than anyone he knew.
And that was how to cook.
So he borrowed $87 against his cheque and bought and fried up some chicken using his recipe, and went door to door to sell them to his neighbours in Kentucky.
At age 88 Colonel Sanders, founder of KFC empire was a billionaire .
KFC was one of the first fast food chains to expand internationally, opening outlets in Canada and later in England , Mexico and Jamaica.
By the time of Sanders death at 90 , there were an estimated 6,000 KFC outlets in 48 countries worldwide , with $2billion of sales annually.
Sanders remains the official face of KFC and appears on its logo.
Inspired by this story?
It is never too late to be what you ought to have become.
Get to work.
Dream tthat dream.
You’re not too old yet.
Start that business!
Caring for your team the easiest way to thriving
Today we have bosses and not leaders. We have people who set up businesses so as to lord it over people. Some people went into business for ego display.We even have people who love their customers that their team.
Team care is very essential to customer care. Treat your team as you want your team to treat your customers. Treat your team like a piece of trash they will in turn treat you,your business and your customers like a nobody. This is what happens when a boss in quote treats his/her team like they are nobody. The team gives I don’t care attitude to the boss and his/her business.
They think they are doing people favor when they work under them. They are there to offer you service and get paid for it. You can’t because you pay them salaries make them feel they owe you their lives or that you are the means of their survival. They are working with you to make your business progress and thrive.
Working for and working with means a leader working together with a team to achieve something. Working for you means you don’t have any input in a work you give somebody to do. The first one gives no room for anyone to be bossy while the second one has no right to even come near being bossy. But people confuse the two and make people’s live miserable. People bosses others off their self esteem. Nobody has the right to make anyone look inferior. It is a crime to attack somebody’s dignity and self esteem. Bossing as never been good but leading as always pave the way to organizational development and business growth.
A team can be defined as a group of people who work together to achieve a definite chief aim. Treating your team well is a gateway to exciting experiences in business.
Three Areas of Caring for your Team
1.Resources – Give your team the tools they need and get out of their way. Like a chef, a team wants all the ingredients needed to accomplish a task. When they are deprived of those tools be it money or machinery, they will not be productive . You will cripple their enthusiasm and creativity. Don’t make your team suffer before resources they need to carry out what you have assigned to them. It it is money , give them enough. You only kill their moral when they are accused of mismanagement when obviously it is not so. Instructions are resources too.Directions are resources too and guidance. Don’t deprive them of these things . Their happiness is your peace of mind and success. Care for them by providing for their needs per time to achieve the set goals. Don’t kill their energy and passion. Give them all they need for creativity and productivity.
2. Be Patient with them – Patience is the key to know your team more deeply. Patience allows you to be able to tolerate peoples weaknesses .Patience they say bears a richer virtue .Your team will come to respect you for your patience in handling them.Some people can be very difficult but patience will enable to handle them in a right way and still get the best of their input. When you are impatient in your dealings they may turn bad by Intentionally trying you out.They will get use to your anger and shouting then prepare to give you back in return someday or they’ll just make the whole of your being around them miserable from time to time. Don’t transfer aggression to them in any way. Your customers comes to blame you, don’t directly turn it to your team making it their fault. Customers are always right but what about your team? Their care should come first before the customer’s’ care. Take the blame for your team , don’t put it on them. If they have to get the blame you can as well do it in the midst of praising them. Let your criticism be sandwiched with praises.
3. Salary – please note that people don’t come to work because they have great skills they want to show, they come to work in order to to be paid. A lot of wickedness is happening today in the business world where they don’t even pay workers at all. How will they pay their bills. I watched a program on the TV where someone was lecturing top professional on business management. He was having a nice time until a group of people with a megaphone disrupted the program protesting and shouting ” pay us our salary of 2 or 3 month”. It was a live program and I wonder whats the teaching for when you can’t even pay your own worker. No matter how people love you or your business don’t mess with their payment and don’t delay it.The worker is always worthy of his/her wages. Pay them when it’s due.
5 sold out companies that will inspire you to sell your business
Selling your business is one of the best and most profitable business you can engage in. It’s highly lucrative. The most lucrative product you can sell in business is the business itself. Here are 5 sold out companies,get inspired.
1. LinkedIn
Microsoft bought LinkedIn for $26 billion last week. LinkedIn is a professional networking social site which has 433 million members in it .I’m one of those 433 million users. Don’t think I was sold too . The thing is when they buy such network ,they buy the team too for a while in order to keep it going for the main time but the painful part is, they buy the users too and you don’t get to share in the money.Sigh.Anyway ,Reid Hoffman began on this journey since 1993. He worked with Apple to build world which did not succeed. He went ahead to build his own social site called socialnet in 1997 which was a dating site .He failed again . Reid joined PayPal in 2000. His job was to look after external relationships for them.He left PayPal to launch LinkedIn after PayPal was sold to eBay. He worked for 2 years at PayPal. The goal of the site was to build World’s No.1 professional networking site. LinkedIn was sold to Microsoft after 13 years of its reign for $26 billion.
2.Instagram
Facebook bought instagram for $1billion .Instagram was launched in 2010 by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger.Kevin loved photography and had this idea of a photo sharing site even before Facebook launched. Instead of launching his passion, he chose to work with people in that field to learn more.First as an intern at Odeo with Evans Williams who launched Twitter. Worked at Google before launching his own photo sharing site.With just 9 team,Instagram was sold to Facebook for $1 billion.
3. WhatsApp
Facebook purchased whatsapp for $19 billion. Founded by a two jobless friends,Brian Action and Jan Koun.Brian met Jan while working at Ernst & Young as a security tester. Brian worked for Yahoo for 11 years. Jan is an immigrant from Ukraine. He is the inspiration behind WhatsApp. When he started working on it and was about quitting, Brian told him to not quit but try it out a few months more. Jan then persuaded Brian (38) jobless and still searching ,he had been rejected by Facebook and Twitter in his search.He persuaded Brian to work with him on that idea of creating a new messaging App ” WhatsApp”. In the first year, user growth boomed,revenue grew to $5,000 a month. They started charging $1 when users began growing too fast.Fours years later Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19billion .
4. Oculus
Palmer Luckey (21) sold his 18 month old company,Oculus VR to Facebook for $2 billion .What inspired Palmer wasn’t the love of making virtual reality. It was his love for gaming. He wanted VR badly so at 16 , he took on different kind of odd jobs in order to buy it. ” My goal actually wasn’t to make something .I assumed there must be something out there that was really good that I could use for gaming . I started to collect them and bought a lot of them from government auctions and industry equipment liquidation sites and all kind of fun places. I took them apart , looked at how they worked, tried to learn what they do right, what they do wrong . Over time it became clear that the only way to make something that was really good would be to throw out the design book that everyone else had used and start from scratch”. He posted a video and fundraising campaign for a prototype on Kickstarter in August 2012 to raise $250,000. By September, he had raised $2,437,429… It was time to get serious, quit journalism college, and start a company . Oculus VR, bought by Facebook for $2billion.
5.Summly
Yahoo bought 17 year old Nick D’aloisio’s iPhone app, Summly for $30 million . The app has delivered over 90 million news summaries in four short month of it startup on his birthday 17th of November. Nick said ” I was 15 years old and I was revising for some kind of history exam. The problem was I was trying to find information that was useful to me .” Searching Google on his phone didn’t give him enough detail to know what was or wasn’t a useful link. So he put his own iPhone app together sold to Yahoo for $30million.
Why Overloaded Businesses Fail
What is your business goal,what are the objectives of your business, what is the purpose of your business? .You can’t be doing jack and harry as business and expect to thrive. People don’t patronize confusion. Do you really understand what your business is all about or the niche you are serving ? .A jack of all trade is a servant of none. You are in business to serve a specific need of the people not all their needs.Overloaded people are not men/women of this one thing I do.They are so filled up with many ideas that they simply want to try out everything at the same time. They now wonder why everything they did turn out to be imperfect. All they come out with is half cooked egg. Overloaded people launches or operates overloaded businesses.
In business, it is important you focus on one major value that sets your business apart. If you are dealing in furniture, let whatever else or another product you would want to add be in line with the furniture sector. You are good in design and making furniture, don’t go and add shoe making to it as your product line they don’t match.
Another part of an overloaded business is a business having too many useless department in it operations.In some companies, you can’t really figure out what some department are contributing as value . Such situation leads to wasting of company’s resources and productivity of such company is undermined. If a part of our body system is not functioning properly ,the whole body feels the pain.Same with companies too.Why departments are created should always be remembered.Every part of a business must have the values they deliver to make the whole business a produce.A cleaner may not be bring in money, but he/she works to clean the business place.This in turn makes customers want to come again.
Creating a department or section that has nothing to do with your establishment will only create loopholes in your company’s finance and it will create disorder.
Three reasons why overloaded businesses fail
1.Unnecessary features– Starting out to create a business, people think that all their goodies will be useful to their customers at once. Customers would like to understand what they really need to buy so that they don’t get carried away by the noise of many features. Too much of everything isn’t good. When you give people a thing they need wrapped up in a bundle of what they have no need off, they will leave the whole thing to go to where they find what they need without confusion. Too much of features in a business confuse the whole purpose of what that business stands for. I like Google search. The home page is clean. It does not have multitude of other features. You go straight and type whatever you want to search with no side attraction. They give you focus. You go into that page with what you want to search still in your mind. Some website you just dabble into,it’s obvious by how much time you spend there due to confusion on the site . You go into some website or search engine forgetting why you came there because they messed it up with many unnecessary features. The current Yahoo CEO who first worked for Google made their search page what it is today cleaned and tidied up.She cleaned it up and allow people to maintain focus.One thing that gave Google acceptance and recognition is still their search engine. They done have a worthy rival in the search engine business and yes am aware they have multitude of other products .They didn’t try to fix all other products into that search page which is already successful. What can you learn from this? Keep your business simple that even a dummy will understand the value you are rendering .
2. Doing what you love and thinking people love it too – In business ,you don’t do what you love to do alone but what your customers would love to buy except you are your own customer.Love to meet demands of people in the mist of doing what you love.
3.Too many people on the team – No matter how much you love football,you must not choose a team that is more than eleven players or you mess the whole event up.Business should not be stuffed up with too many people who has same set of skills working on a product. You can’t allow that in a football pitch. You try to make all your team a striker with no keeper, no defender and attackers then you may not be allowed to play the second half of the match. You should be very selective ,choosing the best of different talents and skills to work on the many side of your products and services. Don’t for the love of employing people stuff your company up with set of same skills. They will mess your product up because they all want to show what they have on that product .They’ll end up messing it for your customers. If it’s to produce in mass it is understandable but be careful not too choose overloaded team.