Match your business with your personality, by Ola Emmanuel

All farmers understand that there are certain seeds to be planted in particular fields. They know that you can’t be planning a cocoa plantation and you carry the seeds to sandy grassland for planting or you choose a guinea corn seed for planting in a rain forest or a tuber crop in a soggy wetland flowing with water. This is also the case when it comes to doing a business. It is not all businesses that you can do because some businesses may not thrive in certain hands. Therefore you need to consider a business that agrees with your personality. It is very important and necessary that the business you want to do should fit who you are.

It is not good to start a business just because a friend suggests one to you or you saw those already doing a particular business and you think you can also jump in. Your personality may not agree with such business line. If you love going out and enjoy talking to people, you may find it more fulfilment if your business is woven round this personality trait. Where you are the quiet, sedentary type perhaps a store with products whose prices are already-determined and labelled will best suit your personality. If you failed to observe this, it may be a little difficult to find fulfilment and joy after running the business for some months.

You may be lucky to have a good business idea suggested to you, but you still owe it a duty to critically analyse the business idea to find out if it can guarantee your desired business objective and if it will elicit passion, resilience and commitment from you. It is after the matching of business idea with who you are, through careful analysis, that you can be sure you have what it takes to make success of a business idea. It is better if you want to go into business and you don’t know what business to do. In this case you can be helped to generate basket of business ideas, analyse your personality and be taken through the process that will enable you choose one or two out of the many profit-generation ideas.

Also, there are quite a number of people today who had tried their hands on some businesses but are now looking for who will employ them. Therefore, to discover what business to do requires a process. The process includes self identification and self examination, the ideas generation, the analysis of the business environment, the business idea analysis, the prioritization, and the selection of the best idea. In this wise, if you already have a business in mind and in the process of launching out, you should rather ask yourself such question as, “can I do this business and become successful in it”. Answering the question is a lot of work that requires a lot of thinking and planning.

You might have come across some people who do say something like, “I tried the business but I just discovered that it is not my line and I can’t really pull it through”; “There is no money and no customers”; “I have left the business, I am now doing something else or trying to go back to paid employment”. Quite frankly, this class of people failed to do the right thing first: they failed to match their business ideas with their personalities. You should not toll the line of the above example; therefore do your home work well.

Ola Emmanuel is a business planning and cooperative consultant