Wait a minute, if over 75% of Ugandans are known to be entrepreneurial, then why do we have fewer businesses formed, and even fewer new businesses living to celebrate the first birthday? Our children are coming home for over 2 months. Could we utilize one month for an entrepreneurship challenge, which will entail training plus practice of the chosen business idea. This should certainly depend on the children’s passion and talents.
As the young people hone the business ideas, better to create a business plan at the onset. Good intentions might sound nice, but it’s the positive actions that matter. Let us sprinkle with a little bit of passion on a good idea, as we do the business plan, the future will be assured. We all certainly would wish to curtail the high mortality rate for the business startups.
The business structure is key. Launching or even crafting a business idea is the easiest part of the journey, but not the business structure. This entails planning for the future, considering the past. The structure involves people, of whom authority and responsibilities must be balanced. For the structure to deliver, a robust performance management and evaluation system should be deployed
The business concept should be determined, which will define what the business will do, and the value addition to the prospective business stakeholders. A brief about the business concept will explore the market need, the devised solution, together with the unique value propositions, that should outmatch-the competition.
The budding entrepreneur should consider researching about the competition and the market. This involves researching major competitors to gain insight into their products, sales, and marketing tactics. Implementing stronger business strategies, warding off competitors, and capturing market share are just a few benefits of conducting a competitive market analysis.
As a matter of regularizing and certainly achieving the convenience in operations, advisable to consider registering and formalizing the business. This entailing searching and reserving the business name, plus the registration of the business. This will not only enable the business to achieve the much sought for recognition, but also be able to contract and receive financing.
The lifeblood of any business is the funds invested in it. The first and most pivotal use of funds is to get the business off ground. Funding can help an employee become an entrepreneur by giving them the necessary monetary support to at least run a hypothesis on the idea and convert it into a concept. From the concept, the real jump to actualization is about getting the ideation to see the light of the day.
Get strategic partnerships and allies, also known as strategic alliances, which are long-term, multi-faceted commitments with clearly defined goals for the partnership. The partners bring that value that the startup would have not attained single handedly. Strategic partnerships could be in the form of suppliers, bulk off takers, consumers et al. They will certainly hand hold the business at the nascent stage.
Plan and execute the marketing and promotion of your products and services
In short, marketing focuses on increasing the awareness of a product and getting it in front of potential customers. Promotions are the final step of marketing ; they provide the needed incentive to turn visitors into buyers. All in all, marketing vs promotion is about awareness vs conversion.
Mentorship is a game changer. There are many ways of avoiding the repetition of the avoidable mistakes, but the best would be the mentor-mentee interactions that will offer the hindsight and guidance regarding how to go about the business. Better to avoid avoidable mistakes, rather than going in to learn from the mistakes that may cost leakages in the working capital.
In a nutshell, with the escalating levels of unemployment, precipitated by very few jobs targeted by the very high number of graduates, we are left with no option, apart from the promotion of entrepreneurship, which is to lead to the creation of job opportunities not only for the graduates but also the casual laborers. It starts with unravelling that passion. We cannot bury our heads in sand!
The writer is the General Manager Commercial Banking at Centenary Bank
