Business and Money

When you speak with most unemployed youths in our country, they will tell you that the only obstacle preventing them from fulfilling their dreams is money, or capital, as the majority of them call it.

I won’t blame them so much, because at a point in my life I had such a mindset.

However, I have a better understanding now due to life experiences.

I have learned that there are three ways in which a person learns the ropes of running a business.

The first is through apprenticeship, which is the cheapest of all. It is a very effective way of learning the rudiments of business, where the trainee works for his trainer for several years just to learn how businesses are successfully run. He does this without any salary, although the master may decide to give him some financial support at the end of the apprenticeship program.

This process is what the Igbo apprenticeship system is hinged on. It is believed that this system has produced a lot of successful entrepreneurs both inside and outside of Nigeria. It has also helped the Igbo people’s economic well-being.

Most importantly, it has helped people learn skills that they can use for the rest of their lives, like running and caring for businesses and building value chains.

The next method is the mentorship program, where a person approaches someone who is already running a successful business to coach and guide him on how to start and successfully run a business.

This is also a good way to learn, but it does take a long time, like in the apprenticeship system.

The problem with this method is that the mentee doesn’t have to do everything the mentor tells them to do, like in the apprenticeship system, where the trainee is like a servant and does what his master tells him to do.

Most of the time, the mentorship program does not end well if the ideologies of the mentor and his mentee differ.

The last method is learning through experience. It is very costly and is the reason behind the failure of most start-ups.

Here, people start businesses without any knowledge of the market they have delved into.

Most of the time, they fail and lose their investments.

The dogged ones start all over again, while the rest leave and never make any further attempts.

Sincerely, the third method was what I ignorantly used while starting my first business.

I was working for a multinational company, with a very good salary and the opportunity to assess loans from several cooperative societies.

So, I felt money was all I needed to start and run my business.

With this mindset, I borrowed a huge amount of money and invested in a business without any customer base or good knowledge of the sector.

I paid dearly for my ignorance because I lost all the money.

I bought my inventories, but I couldn’t sell them because I didn’t know how to.

However, there were young men that went through the apprenticeship system who didn’t have as much money as I did, but their small businesses were flourishing, while mine, with all the investment, was going down.

Nevertheless, I did not quit, even though I had a lot of financial problems. My story is much better now.

Therefore, the most important factor in running a successful business is the competence of the business owner or manager.

If this is absent, the business will surely fail, no matter the amount of money injected into it.