Go, get set, ready!
We all know the all too familiar adage that showing up is half the work done. Still, you wouldn’t want a half-done job. Like the proverbial donkey at the drinking well, that too is showing up and being ignorant. So it is with doing business in an age where everything is and can be connected.
So much so that that every start-up business falls in love with the idea that every business should be a technology driven business, even if it makes up 1% of the total ingredients.
Case in point, social media, dedicated applications and other seemingly seamless tidbits of technology mostly driven by the electricity of the new industrial revolution;the internet.
What I am trying to get at is that the gritty grindstone journey of entrepreneurship much like riding a bicycle is one of balance and timing.
The contradiction is that there is no such thing as balance and coming out the starting blocks late costs customers and that winning cheer of the cash registry that is vital for small business to survive.
As an entrepreneur, boot-strapping and all, I have given it serious thought to start an online store. However many abandoned virtual shopping carts I get reveals that much more about the customer.
Its either finding the time to incorporate the digital with the rudimentary work that counts and prepping for the industrial revolution poised by many as the quickest way Namibia can defeat the poverty monster lurking under our beds.
Think about it, being connected equates to not having to waste time for tasks like waiting in line. This pairs well with the mobile money wave and doing away with cash. By merely being connected to a network and logging in our daily activity affords us as the data to do business that much more easier
and rid most of the friction from the current system.
Getting the swing of the entrepreneurial life by necessity and adaption means streamlining life.
I like to think of it as the Lean-Start-Up Life, trying to fit two lifetimes in one existence. That’s a noose I am prepared to wear.
Finding the time to incorporate everything into your daily life, because what is life but a collection of memories and not the days and weeks of our lives. Those all too become forgotten when life becomes one monotonous existence inter spaced by those truly good memories. The remembered mistakes of entrepreneurship often become like whiteout-out on a piece of writing, there for all to see but the revelations in the mistake is an education they will have to pay for.
Isn’t that what business school is for. Jokes aside. Predicting the pivots comes with a little more insight once your turn the business model on its head however many times until a glimpse of success shines through. Taking the famed Business Model Canvas as Swiss knife with multiple functions
as a tool to turn the vision of an idea into a viable business equates to focusing on the value proposition to the customer. How does the customer benefit and you get their money or attention to leveraging getting money from some other source willing to pay for the customers attention?
The business model is never written in ink, archaic means of doing things stifle, workflows change, employees glean insights at their own process and that came be used to ready, set and pilot your 21st century business.
Unleashing the creativity lurking inside your workforce becomes all that more important in drinking from the common knowledge pool. There is more perspective to the bottom line at the front-lines, the higher altruism ideal of People, Planet and Profit is often trumped by the harsh reality on the ground.
Being out there in the world where your customers are is likely to reveal more insight than your co-working space. But thanks to social media, having your customers on the same platforms and being savvy on how to listen to them becomes like shooting fish in a barrel. The catch is often that the fish are not in the social media barrel. It takes a collective start-up ecosystem to pool customers to join the online conversation.
That is half the battle won, mistakes are often passed on as an education. Surely, we cannot keep learning the same mistakes, is that not what innovators innovating is for.
Those who have failed often with tact and not blind enthusiasm reveal new insights thanks to the act of passing the baton of lessons learnt as a right of passage from each learning curve to the next.
