Getting Prepared to Go Into Business: Insights for Young People

Business venturing is a great platform for the development of human capital. However, the tragedy of entrepreneurship development today is that there are many barely trained entrants. The challenges that face a young man going into business are innumerable.

Your business should be a calling. It is the place where there is certainty that you can do more good than in any other work. Ability can be wrecked when committed to a wrong occupation. We live in the days where the young presume that success is obtainable at the peak positions of life. Success is living out your purpose in spite of your position.

Here are a few considerations to note as you step into business:

1. Counsel is King. Look for appropriate guidance as you begin your business. No one can excel without wise counsel. If you must go ahead to lead in your business, learn to tap into experienced heads. In influencing the career choices of the young, note must be taken that times change, circumstances get modified and what was worst or best in previous days may just be the reverse today. In making a choice, the young should seek the views, counsels and motives behind every suggestion extended by family, friends or any other.
2. Find your Competence. Business success begins with a true self evaluation. Competence will always influence performance. Those who excel in business focus on their line of work. Discover your path before setting out. The greatest investment to be made by anyone setting out in business is self development. The most important capital for doing business is capital that is within your own power. Self Development is very vital to developing competences that confront emergencies in life. Those who excel in their ventures have never ceased to embrace a personal growth agenda.
3. Pick Up Lessons from Others. To excel in business, you should study and learn from the errors of predecessors and competitors. Those who never learn from their master end up in disaster. Choose a guide before taking a step. In every presentation you find yourself in, there’s what pertains to you and what concerns others. Sieve out yours.
4. Embrace Curiosity. When you become too familiar with a system there is a tendency not to be innovative and peculiar. Those who are disadvantaged from education in their youth should seek means to acquire knowledge. The information required to excel can be acquired in as low as one-hour per day reading schedule. There are habits if not formed early becomes an uphill task later; such is the habit of reading.
5. Develop Character. The best form of capital to invest in business is character. It gives value to competence. Maintaining the right standard of values is the surest security of the person entering business.
6. Focus on Serving Others. Business should not be solely concerned about money as they should be concerned about service. Your choice can be guided thus: a. Where do I see myself making my utmost contribution to humanity? b. What competence do I have and am willing to develop in order to add value to others?
7. Develop Resilience. Resilience can’t be formed in comfort. Men who now thrive in business, once struggled to survive. Those who must excel in business must possess strength equal to opposition and temptation. Companies that are steady in crisis have handlers that have built up their mental abilities. When the misfortunes of this life tamper with your finances, your built-up capacity will recreate new sources. We need to grow to the point where we can confront issues with our reserves and not be afraid.
8. Maximise Your Background. Great businesses have been built by those who have never really been groomed in great places. Those raised from lowly places of the society have developed ingenuity to invent things they couldn’t afford to buy. The lessons learnt by a country side child is often the disadvantage of the city child.
9. Learn from Nature. Business acumen is mostly developed from observing the working principles of nature. A man with superiority of knowledge in everyday things finds his path from insights of nature. A man’s fitness for emergency is built chiefly by studying nature’s responses to circumstances. No one who has grown in the midst of nature has deprived himself from the lessons of greatness. The narrowing environments of life have raised more great men than cities with a free lifestyle. Many of those who built great enterprises have conquered nature’s hazards in the rural life.
10. Start With What You Have. Many great businesses have been formed by men of lean stature in resources. Country-side grown lads look upon opportunity as scarce hence the craze to make the best of them. ”The high stations of life can be attained only by men of exceptional power or opportunity”- Orison Swett Marden
11. Develop a Strong Personality. Most failures in business lie in limited and untrained power with which to combat difficulty. Business Success is largely dependent on who you are. It depends more on your personality.
12. Stay Focused. Those in great cities of the world face challenges akin to a man driving a high-pressure engine. The calls of varied interests deprive the man stepping into business the power of solitude. Many leaders that live in fear do so because of the overwhelming consequence of their defects.
13. Develop Your Intellectual Powers. A young man starting a business should develop his intellectual capital before seeking finance. Many businesses can’t move to a higher level because their owners are handicapped by illiteracy. Many young people eager to make money in business don’t hedge their future with relevant insight. Many companies plateau on the limits of the mental capacity of their owners.
14. Be Intentional In Your Pursuits. Business Success is not attained by a tangle of situations and circumstances. It is deliberate. Be resolute in your quest for improvement. Those who get improved by learning never get removed. A life that is lived void of purposeful engagement becomes meaningless and without joy. The discovery of your purpose in life influences the course of events in the world.
15. Enlarge Your Perspective. If you must build a business bigger than what you run now; you need a wider perspective. Big Businesses always place a heavy demand on the mind. It stretches it for better results. In your quest for success, seek to know where you will get the largest return for your efforts.

HOW TO CHOOSE A BUSINESS TO START

Deep research is needed before deciding on a career. Assess your desires and competences. Never forget that your passion for career must be so strong that even in the face of hardships and obstacles, you remain resolute.

• Scope Of Operations. When stepping out into a business, choose one that has a wide-ranging scope in its operations. The surest way to be successful is to get into the right niche within an empowering environment. Always engage in occupations that are best fitted to your competence, physical, and mental make-up.
• Capacity to ensure Self Development. When stepping into business, choose one that has the capacity to ensure your self-development. Accept business engagements that have a promise of personal development and boost for promotion. Don’t do any business that will cramp your intellect, crush your aspiration or blunt your senses.
• Capacity to Improve Social Status. When stepping into business, choose one that has the capacity to improve your status in future. When choosing a business vocation, be careful to select one that will not reduce your humanity.
• Visionary. When seeking a path in life, choose the one that points most nearly in the desired direction. Choose an occupation which will enable you to look your own soul and every man in the face. Those who look within themselves may hear a guiding voice pointing them in the direction of their best fit occupation. This mandate when ignored cannot go without a scar of disaster and defeat.
• Maximises Your Competence. Choose an occupation which has the consent of all your noblest faculties and competences. Choose an occupation which will engage your mind, hand, brain, and heart.
• Divine Guidance. The path to deciding what career one should pursue in life must of necessity be linked to the still small guiding voice of the Almighty. The manufacturer is never wrong on his intention for a product.

25 REASONS FOR FAILED BUSINESSES

1. Lack of Structure
2. Slothfulness
3. Lack of attention to details
4. Complacency
5. No Strategy
6. Over sensitivity
7. Indecision
8. Pessimistic about tough times
9. Hopeless and Toxic Climate
10. Lack of a Plan
11. Lack of Persistence
12. Lack of Resilience
13. Lack of Vision
14. Indolence
15. Lack of Proper Perspective
16. Warped Character
17. Lack of Discernment
18. No Counsel
19. Selfishness
20. Undue Selflessness
21. Lack of Self Confidence
22. Lack of Caution
23. Prejudice
24. Stereotype
25. Lack of Analytical Engagement

CONCLUSION

• Making a choice for a business pursuit is no mean feat. Care must be taken to evaluate options, personal aptitude, desire and fitness before reaching this decision. No man falls into error after a sincere self-examination.
• If there’s no assurance of growth in the work you do. If your life is not expanding and becoming intensified with proofs of success then you may not be on the track meant for your pleasantness.
• The resource that sustains business success is human capital and certainly not financial capital. Your best opportunity becomes a successful endeavour if it meets with a self-developed person.
• Aspiration for greater things is easily stifled and killed when a man keeps striving to do something that he has no aptitude for. Orison Marden once said, “One’s natural inclination, developed by encouragement and education, and controlled by conscience and reason, is the surest guide to an employment most likely to be rewarded with success.”
• Finding a career is great; but has the career found a worthy person in you? Make yourself fit.
• No matter how brightly painted a career may be, it must never rob you of the natural roles of family preservation and soul tie with your loved ones. Opportunities are secured by a pleasing address and an air of self-reliance.
• When you have discovered the place where you will be making your utmost contribution to life, you will be unique, original, strong, contented, happy and resourceful.
• The person that attracts attention to his works is one that revolutionize processes; one who brings order out of chaos.

OAO