Business Development

Choosing the right business idea is a crucial step toward entrepreneurial success. The key is to align the business with your skills, passions, market demand, and long-term goals. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you choose the right business idea:

Effective marketing strategies for small businesses focus on leveraging limited resources efficiently to maximize reach and engagement. Here are some of the best strategies tailored for small businesses:

Promoting a startup on a limited budget requires creativity, resourcefulness, and strategic use of low-cost or free marketing methods. Here are some effective strategies to promote your startup without breaking the bank:

Developing the alternative entrepreneurship mind-set in fundraising is the principle and guidelines that will provide you with a better chance of effectively launching a new business from the scratch with little or no capital at the beginning. Some aspiring entrepreneurs don’t have the interest to start a business with borrowed money. They don’t search for loans or investors into their perceived business opportunity. They want to start all by themselves to maintain 100% shares of their businesses. At the beginning of starting a new business from scratch, all you have at this point is only your written proposal or business plan, indicating the amount that you basically need to start the business. The first step to take in this alternative method is thus:- Start with what you have. At the out-set of looking to start a new business venture after all other means and methods have proven abortive, you start by taking stock of what you have at your disposal by looking inward into yourself. 1.    Skill: What can you do practically? 2.    Experience: What have you done in the past very well? 3.    Knowledge: What do you know? 4.    Tangible Resources: What do you neither have nor own as a property, and you do have access to? It is recommended that you think very carefully about your answers to these questions. Go beyond what comes to mind immediately and think a little more deeply about what you have at your disposal. In this process, be sure to write down your responses to these questions. Your written responses will create a collection of artifacts that can be combined to create something interesting, novel and valuable in establishing a new business. Take into account what you have: What you have need to be combined with what you know, for it to have real power. Take stock of the relationships you have with others, map out your net-work of locations. Consider how your connections could enable you to use what you have more effectively. The alternative means of venture creation advocates, “stitching together partnerships to create new markets”. Relationship, particularly equity partnership, may drive the shape and trajectory of the new venture. Invest what you can afford to lose: There is a big difference in your mindset if you start with the perspective, either “I am investing this amount, or expect at least 30% return”, versus, I can afford to lose this much, therefore, I will put it into the business and see if I can make it work”. If you have only put in what you can afford to lose, you will maintain flexibility in the business and minimize stress in managing it. But if you are only willing to invest when you expect that you can get a specific return, there is a strong chance that you may never take the leap and launch the business you always dreamed of owning. =An example of this, is an entrepreneur who refuse to leave a well-paying job until he finds an opportunity that he predicts will pay more, versus one who decides to invest a small portion of her savings and two years of her life in a project that she believes is worth that amount of time and money-irrespective of whether it will pay than what she currently earn. She is trying out the alternative entrepreneurial mind-set. Experiment and Adapt: With this mind-set, flexibility and adaptability are a competitive advantage. You succeed not by becoming so fixated on a single goal or outcome but by being responsive to changes in the environment. Existing firms typically take longer to adapt than new firms, because they have more incentives for things to remain the same and they have established routines and practices that re-enforce the status-quo. New firms are not tied to the way things have always been done and thus entrepreneurs can benefit from shifts in consumer preferences, or shifts in technology or changing legislation by re-aligning their businesses to take advantage of such developments. In the traditional approach of business planning, there is an explicit effort to avoid unpleasant surprises. (The entrepreneurs with the alternative mind-set, in contrast has to stand ready to make do with what comes her way and learn to transform both positive and negative contingencies into useful components of a new opportunity).           However, still in the process of starting a new business, when all the needful have been done for the purpose of raising seed funds, and there is no capital yet to start your dreamed business; with this alternative mind-set and the adaptation to circumstances on ground, they are yet different kinds of work and business the entrepreneur can start that will not require any capital or may require a very small capital for logistics. This takes us into businesses one can start, with little or no capital. The alternative mind-set is to start something else or to do any other job for a period of time, just to raise the sum of money needed to set up the business of your dream. In starting an alternative business, you need to give yourself a time frame to do the available job, may be six month, or one year, or so. A time frame you think within yourself that you will be able to do the job and possibly raise the needed funds to start the business of your dream. A Case Study There was this French national I met in the Republic of Gabon, more than twenty years ago. He was an expatriate worker, working in one of the petroleum exploration company, Shell Petroleum Company, precisely. Despite the facts that his colleague of same nationality where highly placed in the very company, this French national was in the swamp forest working alone side with us. When we asked him why is he in the forest, while his colleagues are in the offices and at highly placed positions. His response: There was no vacancy for me in this company. So I demanded for any available position, because I was in

As mentioned earlier, the failure rate of start-ups in Nigeria and the world over are on the high side. Though, the rate varies in different regions and countries. Whichever way we look at it the failure rates are high. Many studies have stated that only one in five new businesses survive after about five years of operation or even less. That’s a 20% success rate. There are many reasons why new businesses fail, even though some are properly funded. In a recent online poll conducted by the popular blog; www.vc-4africa.biz, it found that the foremost reason why start-ups fail in Africa is “poor business execution” by the entrepreneurs. The second major cause is “lack of funds”. In that list also included unwillingness to adapt to changing market conditions, attributed to lack of experience and qualified staff. Also, is the excuse that the business is going too fast, the prepotency of single founders, no viable market and unfair competition among others are the common excuses. Typically, in Nigeria, the high cost of production could be caused by poor infrastructure. A number of these problems could be overcome if the founder of the start-ups had some form of guidance at the early stage. Someone or a group of people to provide advice, contacts, expertise and of course, finance, but who are these set of people? The Angels: Angel investors or business angels, whichever, refers to a group of individuals who have “free cash”, have been successful in their businesses and are looking for opportunities to make investments in start-ups or early stage companies.      They provide not just capital, but also their networking business mentoring and guidance to young management teams, hence the term “angles”. They play key roles in several developed economies of the world, because they serve as a bridge between when the business owner is starting, with little experience, capital or assets, to when he or she has perfected his/her business model and has started generating some cash flow. The angels get in early enough, and take a risk on the start-up company in return for a stake in the company when or if they become successful. However, because of the great amount of risk they are taking, they will be expecting above average market returns. The phenomenon of angel investment actually started in the 1900s in the USA as a number of Broadway plays were financed through this medium. In the late 1900s the concept of angel investment became organized with the brand of angels in Silicon Valley. Since then institutional angel investment is becoming prominent the world over. This form capital needs to be taken seriously because even when bank and private equity firms scaled back their support to companies during financial crises, angels still kept on investing, thus angel investors are less sensitive to market cycles. The small business association (SBA) of the USA estimates that about 250,000 angel groups fund about 30,000 companies in a year, investing $20-50 billion per annum. This amount is actually higher than the estimated funding that comes from the venture capital industry annually. At times angels do not usually know the individual companies they are investing in, but do see the prospect of a strong business, and want to help that the company get ahead. Nigeria and Angel investments: Whiles they are few formal angels net-work in Africa, some people have been supporting firms or companies on individual basis, example, the “Nollywood” movie industry in Nigeria. Though not formalized, movie producers approach wealthy individuals who provide them with money, distribution net-works and sometimes dictate the movie stars they want to see in the movie. This process worked for both the producers and the angels. The movie producer was able to get funding for his project which he couldn’t get from any other source, even the banks. And the investor gets above market returns for his investment. This practice exists in various industries and countries in various forms and guises. However, in order for Nigeria to get the best out of this frame work, there is the need to put some structure to angel investment. One possible reason for the lack of growth or openness about this form of investment in Nigeria could also be that the traditional angel investors have been private about their investments. Be that as it may, there is the possibility that this asset class offers numerous advantages for Nigeria and other African countries, investors and the overall entrepreneurial ecosystem. 90% of the USA investment resources are from the private sector. There are private investors ready at all time and willing to fund new projects. Unlike in Nigeria, we see on daily basis young Nigerians showcasing stereo-type inventions and brilliant ideas of new products that can command market customers in the news media, you see the broadcasters compelling investors to invest in the ideas, all to no avail. The media companies in their efforts also televise the programs often, compelling investors and even the government to buy into the young ideas. But unfortunately many young talented brains in Nigeria with their innovations have gone down the drain for many years, mainly for lack of start-up funds. Eventually, and of course, the invention will be silenced after no one offered to come forth to invest in their new ideas and products. Unlike in the USA, the government had already made provisions for funding start-up businesses of all sorts. CHALLENGE OF THE ANGELS IN NIGERIA: The challenge for policy makers is to device ways to spur this asset class for the benefit of investors and entrepreneurs in Nigeria. The angels do often worry about getting the right kind of deals or entrepreneur to back. If there are no budding start-up firms to support, then there is no need for angels. Some countries or region suffer from the lack of entrepreneurial culture. Another problem could be appropriate valuation from both the prospective investor and the entrepreneur’s point of view. Further, because the angel’s investing space are loosely organized and a bit secretive, entrepreneurs