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.
By January 2011, I knew I was going to get married on August 13th of that year and so I needed to get an apartment befitting a newly married couple. My search for a house began in February but by early June I had gotten nowhere. I had gone through all kinds of houses ranging from those looking and smelling like a pig sty to edifices way beyond my pocket’s reach. I had search through various neighbourhoods in town and contracted several estate agents (sorry, they rather we called them estate managers) to do same for me. After wasting so much man-hours on the process and burning gasoline driving my car round town, emitting my fair-share of greenhouse gases, I finally got what was just right for us. Funnily enough, the estate agent who was handling the house was several miles away from it; contrary to what mostly obtains, where houses under agents’ purview are located around their offices.
That got me thinking and wondering, ‘Can we not have an online house-for-rent directory? Could I not find some way to get all the housing info I need from the comfort of my air-conditioned living room as I sip on a glass of cold Coke? Is the horror I faced for months, the only way to get an apartment in this town?’ From my painful experience, a business idea was born. Now, don’t think I invented that idea. In fact, it is a taken-for-granted, always-there online service in developed countries and well-organized neighbourhoods; it is however not found in my state (I am not sure about country either, except for very expensive neighbourhoods). That is a way to come up with that enterprise you will do well at.
A family relocating to southern Nigeria from the tumultuous north had drawn up their first five crucial agenda on the to-do list. The first was getting a shelter, which was as rigorous for them as it was for me but even more so as schools were on vacation and there was no place to keep their three pre-teens while checking out houses. Eventually, the parents ran into an old friend who told them that her home was open to the kids whenever they went house-hunting. The wife was so relieved by the friend’s offer that tears were streaming down her cheeks. But, it did not end there, the experience was so impressionable on her that after some months she began to organize camps for kids, where she minds them with a staff of four to their parents’ relief every school vacation, and she rakes in good money doing so.
Business is for profit, but profit comes only when you render service. And the more useful the service is to others (like taking their housing headaches away or child-minding chores away) the more profit you can command. In short, don’t think money, think service then money will follow. When you think service don’t go theoretical, just remember a good impressionable service that someone gave you or better still, think of a service from your experiences, that you wished someone gave you.
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