Angela Kamanzi My Journey in Entrepreneurship
If you are like the kawaida (common) entrepreneur, when starting your business your main focus was to sell your products or services and get money. There’s nothing wrong with that as long as you don’t forget what you are working at: creating a strong business that will outlive you. If your intention is to build an empire (which I hope it is), this vision should be constantly on your mind, least you get stuck in a start-up mode and caught up in the daily nitty-gritty for too long.
Therefore what should you take into consideration in order to build a strong foundation for your empire? Here are the five pillars on which strong businesses are built:
- Human Resources
A few years ago in my network marketing years, I heard testimonies on how frustrating it is to work for a family member. In the early stages of our businesses, we tend to employ family members because they represent ‘free and reliable’ labour. Sadly the time you employ a family member without treating them as employees may be the time your business struggles the most.
Your staffs are your biggest asset. Happy employees – whether relatives or not – buy your vision and make it their own; and this is what you need to strive for, for your business to work. When they feel valued, your employees become your best ambassadors to current and prospective customers.
Have a Human Resources policy that recognizes staff members based on their strengths and allocate them duties accordingly. Remember that “People quit managers, they don’t quit jobs.”
- Services and Marketing
People buy feelings, not products of services. What experience do your clients get in your business? Do you know what makes people gravitate towards your business or run away from it? Clients bring money to your business, and money is the fuel that powers your enterprise. Have a clear marketing strategy and a system of checks and balances, to give those who bring money in your business an experience they will want to repeat again and again.
Complaint Management is central to this system. How are complaints – both from clients and staff – handled in your organization? This can make or break the company. A good complain management system ensures retention of clients AND staff.
- Finances
How is money handled once it gets into your business? I’ve met quite a few entrepreneurs who confess that they know their business makes money but they can’t tell where it goes! This is a shame, especially nowadays when so many modern tools are available to us to record our daily financial activities.
How do you handle OPM (Other People’s Money)? Do you know how to use the various loan facilities available to your advantage? But before you rush to apply for a loan at your bank, do you need one in the first place? A bank auditor recently shared how, after assessing a business that had applied for a loan, they realised that all the owners needed to do was to seal the loopholes through which the money was leaking.
- Operations and Risk & Governance
Do you have processes in place for every activity? Every item requires a process that is well documented. Every operation has its own risks which should be thoroughly thought through.
Communication should flow in your company, for all the departments to operate harmoniously.
Those processes need to be put down on paper, in a document that is available for all the staff members to consult.
- CSR
What drives you as a person to give back to society? How much do you give in tithe? Some people give 10% faithfully, and big corporates give around 2-3% of their billions. Robert Kiyosaki says that he tithes even more than usual whenever he’s broke!
People who faithfully give away 10% of their earnings to charity or to the church swear that they get returns in a way that can be qualified as magic. I recently got a deeper understanding of this phenomenon when a pranic healer (Pranic healing is a system of natural healing techniques that use energy to treat illness), through an experiment with my wallet, proved to me that whenever I had the intention to tithe, the energy of my wallet increased almost 5 folds; and whenever I changed my mind, that energy reduced significantly.
Clearly tithing consistently and genuinely does something positive the finances. Why not give it a try?
Those are the five pillars on which you need to build a strong business. On which ones do you need to work? Please share with us in the comments below.
Angela
