BY JALUUM HERBERTS LUWIZZA
Starting a business! “Where do I start from?” This is the most asked question I have come across in my business consulting career. There are many people out there that would love to start a business but don’t know where to begin from. If you are one of those people then this article is for you. Let me take you through the things you need to focus on as you ponder on which business to start.
Idea
Every business starts with an idea that is later on built into a functional venture. How one comes up with a good idea is another thing all together. Some people pick on existing ideas and try to improve them to come up with a better idea. Others get ideas from experiences around their lives.
In an interview, Livingstone Mukasa, the founder of Mazima Retirement Plan, the first private pension savings scheme in Uganda, said his idea came to organically being a business trainer. Having come from a fairly poor background, he was scared of becoming poor again, especially in his old age when he couldn’t work anymore. That’s how he got the idea of starting Mazima Retirement Scheme that has over a thousand members and over seven hundred million in savings to enable him and many like him save for their retirement.
Capital
I know you have been told you don’t need capital to start a business but truth be told you can’t start a business without capital and with capital I mean financial capital, human capital and social capital. Raising capital is one of the trickiest corners of the start-up road to circumnavigate. As a business owner you are the first source of capital so you will need to put up some equity of your own before you even begin looking outwards, so make sure so save some money to invest into your idea as can.
Then you can also raise capital through the various grants around by government, global social organization and the private sector. Projects like the Competitiveness and Enterprise Development Project (CEDP) by the Private Sector Foundation Uganda, Youth Livelihood project by the government through the Ministry of Gender,Labor& Social Development, Tony Elumelu Foundation grants for African entrepreneurs, among others.
You can also raise money through crowd funding and loans from financial institutions and private lenders who will give you money at a cost. It’s therefore advisable to shop around for the loans with the best payments terms.
Marketing
What is business without marketing? Like Daniel Choudry, author of Uganda’s best-selling marketing book, “Become A Sales Superstar & Dominate Your Market,” and founder of the Daniel Choudry Sales Institute put it in our interview, “Business is 80% marketing and 20% everything else” (Choudry, 2016). He points out that, “With a good marketing team and strategy any business can sell anything. You can even package and sell ash. Sales are the lifeline of any business.”
“Sales are the food on which businesses feed and marketing is the process of finding this food.”
There are quite a few ways of marketing your business from going door to door telling people about what you do or your products to using the internet mainly social media to connect with clients, explain your business and generate awareness for your products which can later on become leads that get to be turned into sales. Email and SMS marketing are other cost effective ways to get the word out there sending emails and SMS messages to probable clients.
Management
Business is about managing resources and these resources are capital, stock, raw materials, employees and clients. A business that fails to manage those resources is doomed to fail sooner than later. It’s good to be able to handle the monies in the business well so this calls for proper book keeping, separation of personal finances from company finances by the owners and having high financial discipline to respect the business’ money. You also need to put up a good team. This is very critical because this group of people working together is responsible for bringing the dreams of the owner to life.
These are the four most important things to take into account as you plan on starting your business. I hope you found this useful. If you did please like and share this with your friends. You can also leave comment.
