Your business should be as easy as playing, by Ola Emmanuel

There is nothing like working and the work seems as if you are amusing yourself. Actually your work should be a play. What you spend your time on in order to earn incomes should be what you enjoy doing, and that you cannot ever get tired of doing it. It is in this line of work that your fulfilment lies.

A business is like a newly born child, when you are just starting it, that needs constant attention. As an entrepreneur, you don’t have stipulated working hour. You can work on your business any hour of the day and at the oddest hour of the night, seven days a week. You have to give close attention and you can’t relent, you can’t take your foot off the pedal, until the business gets foothold and operate with fully-mobilised resources that will keep it running with lesser attention from you. Now if your line of business is that which you are not enthusiastic about or you get bored easily doing, you may not be able to make a success of it.

Therefore, not only should you choose a line of business that you will be happy with every day, the business will only be good and keep you happier if it focuses on the needs of customers and you offer it in such a way that it attracts the right customers who can pay premium for the value. What to sell, how it should be sold and what value the product will give to consumers (the problems that customers want solved) must be taken into account . As I once said, starting a business is not about “this is my product, please buy it”, the product’s availability should convey a very vital and important message to consumers. The message is: “this is what you are looking for” or “this is what you asked for”.

A bottle of cold water by the roadside may not sell above N100. The same bottle of water at a restaurant or a hotel may sell as high as N250. In a four star or five star hotel, the same bottle of water may sell for as high as N1,000. It is a function of value attached to the product where it is to be sold. A friend of mine told me about one of his friends who had just written a book. The budding author after printing some thousands of copies, found it difficult to sell the book. No one was willing to buy. Troubled and downcast, the author did everything he could to get people to buy the book, but it remained a bad product to sell. The author later met someone who advised him to repackage the book by changing its cover. The adjustment in presentation later turned a book that was once rejected by buyers to what people are rushing to buy. Before you roll out the business, you should find out what your customers want and how they want it.

So how do you know if you have a good business or a good product to sell? A good product or business takes into consideration the needs to be satisfied, who is looking for that needs’ satisfaction (the personality of the target customers), what products should be served to meet the needs and how best should the product be presented to effectively reach the target customers. This raises four fundamental questions that bother on which, who, what and how. The first is, “which needs of customers will your business satisfy?” Then, who are the customers that your business wants to satisfy or meet their needs?” “What product will satisfy the needs of the customers?” and “How will your business make the product available to the target customers?”. You must answer the four questions raised and it must be digested and assimilated in such a way that it becomes your singsong. When you are discussing your business with anyone, the which, who, what and how of your business should come out in just a sentence.

Once you get it right at the onset, your challenge as a business operator is more than half solved.

Ola Emmanuel is a business planning and cooperative consultant.