While in the second year at Law School in the University of Nairobi, I recall watching the film Hidalgo. It helped me nurture my dream of creating a firm that encompassed law, the stock market and digital media.
Many
thought I was going crazy, that I should focus on just being a good
lawyer, but my view of law was simple. It was a foundation one could
leverage to push one’s dreams through. It opened up one's mind to being
able to understand business and how to navigate the hurdles of
contracting, and solving problems.
I
faced many challenges, and eight years on, I am still pursuing my dream.
Most of my friends from back then are now paying attention. Many still
think I am crazy.
Interestingly, the
challenges I have faced along the way were not fatal to my dream but
made me more creative, more versatile and more adaptive in thought and
execution. What has held me back, however, is my failure to harness
lessons from the mistakes that I have made along the way.
MOST TOXIC MISTAKE
The
most toxic mistake that entrepreneurs make — the moment they close a
big deal and the money is transferred into their account — is to reward
themselves instead of rewarding the business. We starve the very idea we
are meant to be nurturing.
By
failing to reinvest in the business, the entrepreneur is simply saying,
“I don't believe in myself and it's better to reward myself now by
buying a car, or taking a mortgage than pushing my business to the next
level.”
The second most toxic mistake that
entrepreneurs make is to treat employees like liabilities. These are the
people charged with ensuring the entrepreneur’s vision is adapted and
scaled to such levels that it becomes self-sustaining. Failure to
understand the daily goings-on in their lives, to reward them when they
succeed, is a daily wearing-off mechanism that leads to zombie
employees.
Zombie employees come to
work without fail to achieve one goal: get paid at the end of the month.
They have no motivation, and no desire to do more than the bare
minimum. Many entrepreneurs turn good potential employees into zombie
ones and their dream fizzles out within six months.
NEANDERTHAL REASONING
The third most toxic mistake we make — in the naive believe that we are doing ourselves a favour —
is to try and sabotage other entrepreneurs. The idiotic belief that
blowing out another entrepreneur's candle will make yours shine brighter
is something we need to correct.
An
idea should be good enough to sell itself. Killing another idea based on
malice to advance yours is the epitome of Neanderthal reasoning.
Entrepreneurship is about creating solutions and making the environment
we operate in better. It’s about changing lives, not creating problems
at the behest of greed.
The fourth
most toxic mistake we make is failing to repay debt. Any keen and
ambitious entrepreneur must appreciate the need to repay money borrowed.
Repayment creates the needed environment for an entrepreneur's idea to
be nurtured by other partners.
The
fifth most toxic mistake we make is to dismiss the essence of
partnerships. We cling to a small idea all the years, stuck in a rut as
multinationals take over the industry. In today's world, creating a new
wheel in terms of ideas is almost impossible. Leveraging partnership can
help scale ideas on already existing platforms, reduce the cost of
operations, bring in better technology and breathe sustainability into a
business.
No comments:
Post a Comment