MSME Digest with Kola Owolabi
The only set of people that can never be jobless are entrepreneurs. Many people will say entrepreneurs can also go without something to do. I will tell you no, a big no!!!. Someone else may say the market may disappear or shrink in size for whatever reason and demand will dry up and there will be nobody to sell to again. Another person may say that a new technology may come along and render your own product or service useless because everyone will flock to patronize the new product or service that has just being introduced.
Yes. These scenarios are possible and can’t be denied. Others things may happen and you may say you won’t have a business again. But that is not the lot of a true entrepreneur. A true entrepreneur will always have a way out of any eventuality and keep on being relevant no matter what happens in the market place.
Let me back up my position with the case of a blind person that came to me wanting to start a business. Can you imagine? He had no eyes to see but wanted to go into production. Where did he see the product and how did he come about the peculiar attributes of what he wanted to do? The thing is that an entrepreneur does not look with the external eyes that we all use to see. He has inner vision with which he uses to discover opportunities that people with physical eyes cannot see. We all know the story of two agents of a shoes making organization that were sent to a former colony of Britain, now present day India. The first one got there and saw a mass of humanity, in their millions, all without shoes. He shook his head. “What a terrible picture of poverty. These people cannot afford shoes; there is no market here”. He took his leave immediately. You can just guess the report he submitted back home. The second agent came along. He was confronted with the same picture of hordes of people without shoes on. He cried out “what a great opportunity to sell shoes” This is the market that we have been looking for. India today is one of the biggest market for shoes. Actually, in neighbouring Phillipines, another heavily populated country, the country’s former first lady, Imelda Marcos, was said to be the woman in the world that had the greatest collection of shoes.
Let me give you another example, now looking at the giants of the tech world globally. Microsoft Corporation, with its founder, Bill Gates pioneered much of the microcomputer wave that took the world by storm and made the man the richest man in the world for nearly 20 straight years. Microsoft had developed the Windows operating system that became the defacto standard software that ran personal computers and laptops. However, the smart phone revolution also came along. It came so fast and even Bill Gates and his company were caught off guard and lost the opportunity to Google, who rushed to develop Android that became the defacto operating system. One will think Microsoft was finished as today we have more mobile devices than micro computers and laptops. However, Microsoft is now riding the boom of the smart phone revolution with the AI masterpiece that the whole world is scrambling to hop in to. They helped OpenAI develop the framework for CHATGPT which is the defacto standard in that space.
So when the environment turns adverse in terms of market demand or something like a new technology comes which may want to take away the patronage he is used to, the true entrepreneur goes higher the opportunity-spectrum by identifying opportunities within the threat that has threatened his existence in the first place.
For example, the present AI boom is disrupting virtually every human activity. However, a huge opportunity is coming up now within the AI threat, the technology is not perfect and the tiny probability of error can be costly and can you imagine who can be trusted to police what AI may disappoint in? The experts that AI was meant to replace in the first place. It is only the totally ignorant that will depend on what AI throws up. Every discerning buyer will vet whatever AI produces just like nobody buys any product in the market without testing it. There is a huge opportunity coming up on the back of AI that will birth new jobs and new roles.
The market can never close up on any true entrepreneur because he is seeing with the eye that is beyond the glitz of things that are mesmerizing others who only see with physical eyes.
Kola Owolabi, CEO, David Solomon Consulting Limited is a Fellow of the Nigerian Institute of Management Consultants (FIMC.CMC). The company has been helping entrepreneurs, both the new and highly experienced ones, plan and execute market entry with speed and minimal resources. The company can be reached via phone or WhatsApp at 08023203198.
