Archibald Macharia the co-founder and CEO of Infolaunch Africa – a project management consultancy company shared with Bizna Kenya the dos and don’ts of running a business that he has learned from his experience as an entrepreneur.
The Do’s
Be a champion for organic growth: The businesses that build resilience in disruptive and recessive seasons are those that have grown organically. Organic growth exposes a business to a wide range of threats, opportunities, and experiences that entrench useful lessons in a business’s memory. On the contrary injecting capital to inexperienced businesses on a prima facie perspective of high earnings exposes investors to risks.
Identify and play within your niche: Businesses have lost due to non-meditated diversification. Evaluate your business holistically on its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and strengths, to ensure that you only venture in areas that align with your comparative advantages.
Leverage on your past experiences, however mundane: We exist in a world where numerous people compete in the same space. Excellence is now a factor of relationships and trust, since everyone else has excelled in quality. Your past customer interactions matter!
Explore low cost funding: That loans are the convenient source of capital funding is a misconception. Identify like-minded partners that bring unique experience, benefits and capital to collaborate with. Organic growth of a business is slow but ensures that a business takes on financial risks whose impact it can absorb.
Collaborate: Collaboration has numerous benefits; augmentation of capital, additional technical expertise, new business channels, and risk sharing. When choosing strategic business partners use the latter benefits as criteria of evaluation.
The Don’ts
Giving up: It takes time for the market to know you for what you do. Building a formidable brand is a process rather than an event. It may be costly and painful. Endure.
Oversell: Not selling yourself short does not mean overselling oneself. It means assessing your business’s capacity and determining how much you can deliver without lowering your quality standards. Identify partners who are willing to consort with you when huge capacity is required.
I lived hand to mouth after quitting well-paying job to start my business
Tax avoidance and non-compliance: part of organic growth is gradually building business processes that assure full compliance and minimization of legal risks in future. When compliance starts early, all new partners, employees, customers, and stakeholders will follow suit. Avoid non-compliance early.
It’s not too little business: Large business is justified by small business. In my line of work, I have won corporate clients because I delivered to their employee on a retail scale, who then put in a good word for me.
Complacency: Do not get comfortable. Seek to excel in quality and earnings. The experience of growth is incredibly rewarding, even just for its own sake.
