My experience as an entrepreneur has thought me that there are two options to make it big, which I refer to big ticket and big volume. Big ticket means high ticket business. Offering premium products with significant margins that allow you to be relatively successful just by selling a few of them. If you build […more]
It seems natural to ascertain the size or success of a company by the number of staff they have. I for one have also believed in this fallacy for a long time. Years of business, reading and self-development have thought me that this can be very far from the truth. Would you rather have more people […more]
80 percent. That is the percentage of Chinese imports from Africa that are oil and mineral products. The same percentage applies to exports from Africa to the US that is made of the same natural resources. For all the talk of growing trade between Africa and China (or Africa and the US), at the end […more]
Competition is usually considered good (and unavoidable) for business, as it forces firms in the market to improve their products and services, while consumers can benefit from lower prices as multiple companies compete for their dollars. My opinion is that, as a small business owner, one should strive as much as possible to prevent competition […more]
As entrepreneurs, we often make the mistake on thinking only about what we can get by starting our companies. In most cases, the (expected) financial rewards are the main objective. While we focus on ourselves, we shouldn’t forget that the marketplace, customers, or society in general does not care about what we want, but rather […more]
A few days ago I was reading an article (or was it a Youtube video instead?) about a new invention in my country, which basically could help transform/process some agricultural product grown locally. Functionally, this looked like a great invention, which was filling a real need. Design-wise however, on a scale of 1 to 10, […more]
In most African countries there is a growing number of people starting their own businesses. One fact that remains true across the continent, however, is that most businesses remain at the microscopic level. My experience in China, at least for the last few years, is that scale is considered very early at the stage of […more]