What business can I do? III

This week’s topic brings us, at least for now, to the last method of selecting a business that we shall examine. We shall call this method Your Skill.

Skill sets and aptitudes hold the key to unlocking your business potential if you evaluate them properly. What are you skilled at? And what aptitudes do people know you for?

Can you organize events and parties very well?

Or is salesmanship your thing?

Are you good at fixing broken appliances, no matter how complex they look?

Or is combining clothes, colours and fabrics your area of expertise?

Answer these kinds of questions and you would have answered, ‘What business can I do?’

What business can I do? II

Hi Readers, thank you for all the inputs, I treasure them a lot; however feel free to drop them as comments so others can learn from them as well. Also, you can now follow the blog via email.

I appreciate you all.

Now, to continue with our discussion on ‘What business can I do?’ we will be talking about how to answer that question from our experiences. We are so accustomed to our thoughts, feelings and experiences and take them for granted that we fail to glean the most from them. To examine this, I won’t tabulate like last week, rather we will go anecdotal.

What business can I do?

I said last week that we would continue with how you can become an entrepreneur. Some people might expect me to first of all lay the background of business principles needed for successful entrepreneurship; but because some of the principles are as varied as the businesses each one of us might be interested in, we will visit them later.

From my interactions with entrepreneurs as well as hours of interviewing some successful ones, I wish to state from the onset that you should perish the thought that money is the first or most important thing needed to set up a business. I once asked a friend what  business he would float if I gave him N200,000.00 he replied that he didn’t know. I upped the money to N500,000.00 and he still wasn’t sure. He only gave me a ‘maybe’ answer after I increased it to N1,000,000.00. This simply shows the indecisiveness of the capital-seeking would-be entrepreneur. We need to first settle on the business we want to do before we start to gather the resources (money is only one of them) needed to set it up.

The egg and the crowd

Last week we finished the post on why you should be an entrepreneur and I promised a little philosophical discourse before we examine how you can become one. Here it is, enjoy!

Ade’s prayer from his final year days was that he lands a plum job right after NYSC, so it came as no small relief when he got an SMS to attend a job interview for a trainee position in one of the new generation banks, two weeks after completing his service. Quickly, he went to the bookstore and purchased the GMAT text which he studied night and day in preparation for the exam; in fact his mother had to compel him to go to bed in the little hours of the morning or he would have forgotten to sleep. On the exam day, he got up early to beat the Lagos traffic, dressed up in his borrowed suit, packed his certificates, calculator and pen and raced to the bus stop.