Nigerian Entrepreneur

2009 Business Year Is Not Over Yet!

The year 2009 is not over yet, even though it is natural to feel like given up the dreams you have for your business at the beginning of this year, I want to encourage you to stay in there and do the best you can. Your success as a business person is not determine by the fatness of your bank balances nor your turnover figure, rather is is the  inner satisfaction that you have put in your best as an entrepreneur to achieve the goals you set out to achieve during this year. Since there are still 30days more to go, don’t ever think of giving up. What you were not able to achieve in the past months can still be achieve in these remaining days if only you can belief and persist. Even if that is not feasible, you can at least improve on your present position. 😉

Coping With Adverse Economic Realities in Nigeria

For Nigerian businessmen, especially the small scale entrepreneurs, the year 2009 has been a tough one. There has been several challenges threatening to wipe out businesses. It all started with the global economic crisis which was carried over from last year. Unlike in other developing nations where entrepreneurs were being informed on the effect and likely impact the economic recession will have on their local businesses, Nigerian entrepreneurs were lied to!
Our so called financial experts predicted that the global economic crisis will have zero impact on local businesses. Of course I knew as at then that they were being economical with the truth. How can Nigeria which operates a consumer based economy be dreaming of staying stable while those countries she buys products from are badly affected?
Well, the truth is out now. Nigeria did not only suffer from the global economic crisis, she also was badly affected by home grown economic crisis. The financial institutions in the country gave everyone a bad jolt when it was discovered that their management have been playing with depositors and investors fund. Too bad.

Well all that is stale news now. The important thing is what you do with the situation at hand. While going over my goals for the year at first I was depressed to note that the overall performance has been really poor due to adverse operating environment. But then on a second thought, I realized that I’ve learnt a lot of lessons which I won’t have had the opportunity to learn if things have worked the way I wanted. What I really need to do is to find a way of making those lessons pay dividend as the nations economy recovers!

So while the year 2009 may be reflecting in your statements of accounts as a year of poor turnover, I want you to realize that the hard lessons learnt will eventually pay huge dividend in time to come. Instead of  complaining and getting depressed, look out for opportunities to make some additions to the income you’ve already generated so far.  That is the entrepreneurship spirit. Tell yourself, 2009 is not over yet!