MSME Digest with Kola Owolabi
This is the second in the series of why no entrepreneur, particularly someone who has the nose for smelling good opportunities can ever be jobless.
Let me first of all define who an entrepreneur is. An entrepreneur is a person who has a knack for spotting opportunities where others see problems. Someone may pass a big dump site with refuse scattered all over the place. Most people will cover their noses and complain bitterly about how people who live in the area are so dirty. Someone will lambast the government, maybe the local government that is in charge of the area. Another person will say I will never pass this place again, that is why I had always wanted to travel out of this dirty country. But what will the entrepreneur, I mean someone with the entrepreneurial instinct say? He will quietly bring out his pen and paper (no true entrepreneur goes around without writing materials). He will write down the name of the street. He will scan the environment and try and estimate the profile of the people who live there. Are they low class or middle class or top class ( a lot of high brow areas are also very dirty). In addition he will look at the type of refuse people dump there. Are they recyclable? Or are they refuse that would be discarded wholesale or burnt with fire. He will quietly ask if there is any landlord association he can talk to right away so that he can document his interest in helping them solve the refuse problem.
By the time he is leaving the area, he has already two or three business opportunities to work on and develop which become other streams of income to him.
I was at a seminar back in the United States held for business people. They were debating many issues about business and how things can sometimes be very bad for entrepreneurs. I had to raise my hand to talk. I first of all told them that an entrepreneur is someone with a lion-like nature, always hungry for a prey. I told them that the entrepreneurial instinct makes one ready to pounce at the nearest opportunity that is close to one. This is why true entrepreneurs are never dry of ideas.
You have some who have a whopping ten ideas in a single day and the same person wants to pursue all. There then comes another problem, which one should one focus on out of the ten competing ideas. That is the entrepreneur’s ideas saturation dilemma that is a big problem for everyone who professes to be an entrepreneur.
I think we should take a break here and discuss in the next post how to resolve the ideas’ saturation dilemma. That is, faced with so many competing ideas at the same time, which one do you go for?
Kola Owolabi a Fellow of the Nigerian Institute of Management Consultants (FIMC.CMC), is CEO, David Solomon Consulting Limited. The company can be reached via phone or WhatsApp at 08023203198.
