Credit to Pastor Seyi Ola Daniels
The First Law of The Entrepreneur
Principal Thought:
“Success is an equalizer. A successful carpenter and a successful scientist can share a platform with a successful politician and an accomplished author, and all
be happy to be in one another’s presence”.
Introduction:
It is not the nature of your business or career that determines the degree of respect and fulfillment you get, but rather the quality of results you produce.
It was Oprah who testified to have been greatly influenced by Dr. Martin Luther King’s statement that, excellence cannot be discriminated against. The influence of that statement has propelled Oprah to become undoubtedly the wealthiest woman in entertainment, and the only black female billionaire. And she did it with only one television show. Truly, excellence cannot be segregated. In Johns Hopkins University Hospital, where the great neurosurgeon, Ben Carson worked at the time, it was said that a white patient who needed surgery refused treatment from the young black doctor and requested for the best neurosurgeon in the hospital, only to be told that Dr. Ben Carson was the best.
In this discourse, I will be taking you on a journey of the fundamental principle that must under gird the entrepreneur if success is his goal and fulfilment is his target. The disrespect of this law has seen not a few casualties on the road to significance. So, to disrespect this principle is to disqualify oneself from meaningful achievement. It is not subject to age, background, race or gender. In fact, education, if not well managed, can be an obstacle to it.
The Law:
The principle states that the entrepreneur must be willing and ready to invest in himself.
In other words, invest in yourself. The best of your business can only be derived from the best of you. What you get from your business or career is directly proportional to what you put into it. It is simply a situation of supply and demand. You cannot demand from your business what you have not supplied into it. This principle operates like a bank account. You cannot withdraw from your account what you haven’t deposited into it. If you overdraw on your account, you will acquire a debtor status. With that, your freedom has been traded and control has been transferred, because indeed, the borrower is in slavery to the lender. The effect of the global recession has shown many multinationals to be in the credit slavery scheme. Job losses, factory close downs, international partnership withdrawals, and bail out pleas smear the entire landscape with casualties too numerous.
Capacity Investment
Why must you invest in yourself as an entrepreneur? It is your own commitment to your vision that makes it believable to others. Rev Wright preached a message that it was impossible for man to fly a metal in the air. Three years later, his sons, Orville and Wilbur Wright proved him wrong. Their commitment made it believable. Nelson Mandela was told that you can’t destroy apartheid without violence, but he committed to non-violent methods. 27 years after, his commitment made it believable.
To be able to have such commitment in your endeavours then you must be willing to invest in your capacity. Invest in your capacity to withstand pressure because you will face many. Invest in your capacity to delay gratification because many opportunities will seduce you. Invest in your capacity to transit to the next level because the cost of it will attempt to discourage you. You must invest in your capacity. No one can do it on your behalf.
Investors’ Preference
At almost all business related seminars, workshops, or conferences, the issue of capital never registers an absent on the discussion board. Somehow someone brings up the issue of finance. Some will talk about the lack of collateral or the banks’ difficult procedures or one thing or the other. Bottom line: funding is hard to find.
Over the years, in my research and experience, I have come to realise a way out of this capital crunch or funding hiccup. I happened on a principle which is corollary to the first law of the entrepreneur. It is that people invest in people. To take it deeper, quality people invest in quality-proven people.
To put it clearly, people don’t invest in ideas, people invest in people. People don’t invest in the brightness of a concept but on the brilliance of the people who will run the concept. Richard Branson, in his book, Business Stripped Bare, in talking about how ideas are developed into profitable enterprises at Virgin, said “…above all, we look at the key managers who will be running the business. This is the holy grail for us, because it’s the people that make a great business idea work”.
And talking about the brilliance, it is not in terms of head knowledge only, but folks with brilliance of spirit. Elsewhere in his book, Sir Richard rightly said, “Seek out people with the right spirit, bubbling just beneath the surface, and get working with them.” If you pick partners in business simply because of social reasons and/or wealth of knowledge but are contrary in spirit (values), their contrariness in spirit will defeat the investment of their wealth of knowledge and social status, and injure the business as a result; if not deal a fatal blow to it. So, in investing in yourself, develop your capacity to see beneath the surface. That can be done by learning lessons from your experiences. Many do not process the experiences they go through in order to uncover life principles. Invest in yourself.
The Question
The question now is how developed are you about your field? Is your business knowledge of your field strong enough to command the attraction of possible investors? When Sergey Brin and Larry Page, founders of Google, were looking for investors, they decided not to relinquish the control of the company no matter the conditions of the investors. They eventually got two top venture capitalist firms to commit $12.5 million dollars each as seed capital, and they maintained full control of the company. How? They had a grasp of the business that was so sound and strong that it was equity on its own. These guys are great for a lot of reasons including the fact that they would pioneer a concept and then go on to pioneer the technology that will drive that concept. If knowledge is power; how about uncommon knowledge? Think about it.
Fact is, you can’t bring a creative and dynamic solution if you don’t have a very broad, much deeper and quite practical understanding of the problem. You must clearly appreciate what is required to produce extraordinarily and invest yourself into it absolutely. No substitute.
So I ask, how savvy are you? Can you be considered as some form authority in your field? Are you growing at the rate of the field or at the rate of the future of the field? How knowledgeable are you about the history of the profession? How has it contributed to civilization and the way we live? Who are the major players? What are their pedigrees? What is the present situation of the industry as it pertains to your environment and the world at large?
Passion is the energy of knowledge. If you meet someone who embodies the spirit of knowledge, their understanding will inspire you. It will move you to thought and action. That is what I mean by being savvy. If they talk about cutting edge, you should be the cut in the edge. Be sharp.
Three Forms of Knowledge
There are three essential ways in which you can invest in yourself concerning any particular field of commerce or industry.
(a) Product knowledge: During the anti-trust saga that really rocked Microsoft and nearly toppled it, Bill Gates, so wisely repositioned himself in order to keep Microsoft at the top of the competition. The rivals were breathing down Microsoft’s neck. And the US government wasn’t helping matters at all. In a wise move, Gates stepped down as the chairman, and repositioned to being the chief software architect. He went back to the product. He knew that the product was what gave Microsoft its enviable status and what kept them in the market.
Alarmingly, these days you find folks in sales that have just a little more than twenty percent knowledge of the product they represent. When they encounter a quite intelligent and inquisitive individual, their folly is exposed. This can be quite annoying. You see folks selling cars who know next to nothing about cars. You find ladies selling cosmetics and they cannot tell one skin type different from another. Have you met an average insurance sales man or woman?
In developing your knowledge of the product you represent, avoid a mistake many make. Many focus on the features of the product. When they talk to you about the product all they talk about is what the stuff can do. But then, the question is not what the product can do, but what it can do for me. This means don’t just focus on the features of the product but the benefits in the product. Not just what it is capable of doing, but what it can do for people. So the benefit of the feature is as important as the feature. For instance, if a car can run at 300km/h, it has speed. Is speed the benefit? No. Speed will be the feature while time will be the benefit, because what is the point in having speed but not being sure of good time.
With the advent of globalisation, customer sophistication has been on the rise and ignorant salesmen/entrepreneurs will not be spared. Customers are becoming increasingly savvy and would place a heavy demand for value whenever they part with money. You must know more about your product than the most inquisitive customer.
Products must be need-based. They must be seen from the point of view of the customer and not that of the product. Too often bankers try to sell products that are irrelevant to their customers. Many have no knowledge of their customer’s line of business, hence they are ignorant of his business and personal needs, yet they are determined to sell him a product. Your customer is not going to buy your product just because it is a good product.
(b) Market Knowledge: You can’t survive in an environment you are ignorant of and
unfamiliar with. Knowing the product is one thing, but knowing where the product is going to compete is another thing. The Nokia Research centre, for example, develops various interesting technologies, but each innovation must pass through business development test to see how it interfaces with real life application to make consumer sense. If it passes that test, then it is good to go.
What other products exist? What are their market shares? Who is number one? Who is number two? Why is the leading product so? Is the leading product the first product in that market?
Do not be afraid to confront market realities. Entrepreneurs often get emotional/sentimental about a good invention/product and refuse to face the reality that the product’s value can never be appreciated in the society in which they are attempting to sell it. You must understand that change is legal and the only constant thing. This means that you must be up to speed with the external/market realities and adjust your product to reflect any changes you discover. Your comparative advantage may just be a superior understanding of the workings of the market you serve.
(c) System Knowledge: In order to effectively succeed at (a) and (b), you must
have a support structure that keeps (a) in tune with (b) in terms of supply, quality delivery, feedback, payment regimes and systems, branding/publicity, etc.
