HOW TO START YOUR OWN BUSINESS

Starting your own business can be very challenging, rewarding and profitable.  You can open up new avenues of self development and achievement for yourself and a rewarding and secure life for your family.

But it also requires a Tittle bit  of luck, a  lot  of cburage, stamina and discipline, because financial ability, technical know hoe intelligence, and a good product are not enough.

Many personality traits are required to make a success of a business.

Your social background, professional status and experience in life have a good deal to do with efficiency and success in your business venture. If you have worked in a large organisation, you will know that you can fall back on a self-functioning organisational structure like peons, typists and an accounts and billing department.  But when you start your own business, you may not have the resources to et up an organisation on a large scale.  You will find it will have to be your responsibility to make executive decisions, attend to or supervise even the clerical work like maintaining your daily accounts of purchases, petty expenditure, postage, refreshments, and at a pinch may have to self-supervise packing, despatching, making bills and even go through the hassle of collecting money.

All these will be simultaneous functions.   Unfortunately, several people may tend to overlook small but vi~al details, or even find that many of these jobs are beneath their dignity.  The fact is that they have to be attended to. Today, you may have a high status in your present job, being used to meeting clients at a senior level.  Yet, when you start out on your own, you will have to deal with many organizations at the semi-managerial or even clerical level, like purchase officers  for  orders,  accounts clerks  for  your  payments,  small suppliers of raw materials and fabricators. Also, working on your own requires a great deal of personal discipline.    To start work at office time, without any official compulsion, is not easy.

ln the beginning you may find you have no orders.  It means beginning from  scratch—developing and selling your product, ‘ making your contacts and creating a market or consumer need for ‘your product.  Initially, it may take time, perhaps a long time, before you make a break-through.  All your contacts may just turn your product down.

Again, often you will find that your business will require long and tiresome hours of work.  In. the early stages, apart from working at a tremendous mental, financial and physical strain, your life is not your own.  You may have to cut down on a lot of your family demands and social engagements, and your priorities become work, work and more work, perhaps allowing time off only for exigencies involving family health and education. You may be used to the convenience of a pay packet at the end of each month and have learnt to arrange your household expenses accordingly.  But when you start your own  business remember, you yourself have to generate enough business to pay yourself.  At first you may not be able to draw out as much as you need or are ‘used to.  Also, you may need to plough back extra finances into the business to execute more orders.  This implies a certain financial discipline and restraint on you and your family.

If you can withstand all these pressures for a while, then get started on vour own.  You may never look back.