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BAFTER THOUGHTS GUESVTIWLARNITEER

ACK to business… at least as the first step of trying to reform young people and the way that they think and see life. In any situation, perspective is important and this is fundamental for any human who wants to grow and do anything beyond just ‘living’. When establishing yourself in the business world, perspective is important.

In your business studies class you have probably learnt the steps of making a business plan and are confident in applying them which is great – until you come to the understanding that there is a bold line in textbook approach and the real world.

Resources

And while it would most certainly be great to follow textbook methodology to the ‘T’, the one thing it fails to account for are resources in the real world. This is why oftentimes we have many people with innovative ideas and yet they fail to implement them. Implementing ideas does not have a one-way rule to achieving, it requires diligence and utmost intelligence in understanding that different resources require different approaches.

In a perfect textbook world, a man who wants to start a business will go to the bank or go apply somewhere for loans worth millions, this will cover their marketing, branding and all other prospects of the business. In fact, with just the loan or the capital start-up that covers everything, then you are good to go, but in real life this formula only works in the capitalist system. The methods are also designed to make sense in the capitalist system and as such grow businesses for the majority. Small businesses owners must have a sense to evaluate and redesign these structures, without totally changing them to fit the scope of reality.

Capital

In a real world it is okay to start from zero and it is necessary to understand that getting capital for business ventures is not easy. While our government has tried to create incentives for businesses and young people who want to start businesses, it is without a doubt that these incentives are still inaccessible to the majority of the public because of greed and corruption. Another major factor in this is the fact that these very same incentives are hard to get because they are designed to be hard to get and as a result, they end up being received or given to those who can afford to start businesses on their own.

When incentives have too many terms and conditions, too much paperwork and requirements each line and every document required decreases the probability of many even qualifying to apply for these incentives because they have already been excluded.

This makes these incentives questionable; if they are truly meant to change economic living and create opportunities for employment then the incentives created would align with the capacity and measures of the poor as they are the majority of the unemployed. This suggests that

in order to start and maintain your business then it requires you to think differently and not be intimidated by textbook nuance and government structures. What does this mean? It means for any idea that you have doing adequate research is enough but too much research is most likely to be a reason why you did not start.

The most important research when you are a small business is the ‘what’ ‘why’ and the ‘how’ everything that follows that is continuous improvement. What, is crucial because it helps you identify what is missing in the market, it helps you locate the problem and your business idea must be to solve that problem, which brings you to the ‘why’ and the assurity that the ‘what’ you have chosen (problem) has a solution in the market.

Problem

After identifying the problem, why would people want to pay for your solution? Does your solution fit into the market and is it marketable? This guarantees that you already have a customer base that can be attained with just quality and delivery and minimum marketing. The how, is what answers your approach to starting, it is the mirror in front of you as to what you have and what you do not have, for example your ‘how’ will tell you that you cannot afford to rent a space in town where people will come in and out to buy, but it will tell you that you can start by delivering to different towns once a week and once you grow from that you move towards doing this two times a week and eventually making enough profit to rent a small space. This goes to show that after these three questions, everything else is improvement, it is improvement in packaging because now you can afford to as you grow your base, improvement in marketing, improvement in everything else.