By Jaluum Herbert Luwizza
A successful entrepreneur is one who gets ideas working, even when there are unforeseen hurdles or even when it doesn’t seem a great idea in the beginning.
Its important to know that this doesn’t happen at your first attempt. Even the most successful of entrepreneurs are extremely risk adverse. They never take big gambles.
So if you want to follow in their foot steps, take small wise steps.Thus, you would:
1. Find your passion. You would start with trying to find out what it is you like and want. You don’t need an ocean of passion but just a little to get you rolling and going say you want to start a restaurant but don’t know where to start.
2. Take fast but wise baby steps as quick as you can towards your goal. What’s a wise or smart move?Its simply acting as fast as you can with the available means; taping into your knowledge, circle of friends, family, network and any thing else at your disposal. Say you know some good chef around, you would then ask your family and friends to support you, you may then have adequate money to open shop. Just make sure your move is not too much in terms of cost should your idea hit a hard wall and collapse. The amount at stake would be acceptable to lose. Involve many other people to be able to garner resources and spread risk and also confirm the quality of your idea .
3. Make It a point to build on what you learn along the way. This is necessary because as you start implementation you will realize that the reality my actually be far away from the initial plan on paper. The steps you take may get you closer to your goal, say will you be able to afford something just outside downtown. Sometimes your wants will change. Like you may have to decide to change your menu from fast foods to local dishes if the people around where put up the restaurant are traditional. Try to be attentive and you will learn things here and there and act accordingly. Ask your self; do you need more resources to even pull a bigger clientele? Do you have to find another chef because the one you had got initially can’t cook local dishes? Do you want to push a head with the plan as it was initially? Does it fulfill your objective?
4. Repeat.
Act. Learn. Build. Repeat. This is what defeats uncertainty… proving that you actually start and try to make your idea a reality.
All this sounds logical, But you will ask your self what about planning.
Planning is fine, but…
Lets get this clear first, am not anti-planning. Let me ask you one question. Can you predict the future with a high level of accuracy .If you can then;
1.Forecast the future.
2.Start coming up with various plans for achieving your mission.
3.Put up the required resources.
4.Set out to put you plan into work.
Know that how well this works totally depends on how accurately you can predict future events. How sure you are about today’s conditions being the same tomorrow,next week or month. That is very huge a risk putting in mind that the likely hood of predictable situations we all face is diminishing.
In the face of the unknown, the Act-Learn-Build-Repeat model works best.