Am I cut out for business?

Covid and other factors have brought about a lot of change. Not necessarily positive. Many people have lost their jobs. New jobs are hard to come by, yet we must still find a way to make a living.

What next for many people? Business. Looking for what you can buy, manufacture, produce, etc, to sell and make a profit. Many are nervous. Nervous about getting into business. There is a class on every digital platform on how to run a business. Each one is more complicated than the next. They use strange jargon and acronyms. They make doing business look and sound like some strange ritual.

People are calling themselves all sorts of experts and they want you to pay to learn how to make money, how to choose the right colours and fonts for your logos, how to dress, when you should make eye contact and when to bow. It is maddening.

They want you to write mission statements and prepare slides. They want you to be passionate about some words that you have put together because they sound good but do not really mean anything to you.

Oh, and then they add that this circle of entrepreneurs, businessmen or self-employed people is not just for anyone. You must be willing to sleep for only three hours a day, read 500 motivational books a year, listen to audiobooks 24 hours a day, arrive 30 minutes before meetings start and send 100 emails as you wait in the reception. They preach busy, not productive.

Listen, we can all agree that we are all very passionate about not sleeping hungry or being homeless. Really, that is it. We can achieve this by working or running our own businesses. There are no special people born to be one or the other. We are all driven by the need for a better life.

If you find yourself out of employment and now want to run your own outfit, please, keep it practical. Let us go back to the basics. The most important thing is sales. Forget all the frills.

A story is told of a man who leaves or loses his job. He is sent away with a couple of millions. Said young man decides to start his own ‘kiosk’. He has read all the good books on everything start-ups. I am not saying it is wrong. At some point, you should realise that even the author is in business.

Anyway, so he gets a prime location and you know that will cost a pretty penny. He will then look for a firm to write down his mission, come up with colours, paint the office in those colours. He will buy furniture that will show he plays in the big leagues, you know, fake it till you make it crew.

He then joins certain clubs to mingle with money, birds of a feather and what not. He will hire staff and buy followers on social media. Within three months, the money that they sent him away with is spent on a startup that has not started, up or anywhere.

I was privileged to work for an organisation a few years ago that taught me so much. A business that had millions in turnover but was happy to pay rent in a servants quarter. I remember going for the interview and wondering what I had got myself into.

Nobody cared for the big English words I had been trained to use in interviews. They gave me the product and we went to the field. We knew no one, we did not know what colours would appeal to the target market nor did we have a slide with the right fonts. We just made sales. No frills.

Starting a business at this time will not be a walk in the park, but you can do it. It is not rocket science if you keep it simple. Make sales. The webinars, books, etc, are good, great even but not if that is all you are doing and not making money.

It is going to be difficult for the middle class (new poor). We have a lot of information but know nothing. Sometimes the learning is in the unlearning.

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