Before You Open Shop(again).

If you’ve ever inquired about how to start a business as a new or prospective entrepreneur, here’s an answer you might have come across: find an opportunity or a need and fill it; find a sizeable problem and solve it. This is the expert saying that rules the block.

And then you start crawling all over the internet, breaking your fingers and busting your head because you want to find a need; an opportunity to exploit. Then you take into cognizance your surroundings and your environment and you try to figure out what is going awfully wrong so that you can create a “fix” that could potentially solve the problem and hopefully send your bank balance running over and out of control with staggering wads of cash. 

Suddenly it seems to appear. You stumble upon a potential something and you quickly swoosh into market research. The opportunity looks sizeable so you begin seeking investment from family, friends and business angels, or you nervously pour out your entire life savings to capitalize on it.

5 years later, you have a growing business that’s producing healthy profit margins, accompanied by a growing tsunami of issues — personal issues.

Your mind is never at ease; your heartbeat is irregular; you can’t sleep at night and the breaking of dawn sends you straight into a panic attack. You are about to repeat the same grueling routine of unhappiness as the day before.

You look like you’ve shrunken, and you appear very frail.

Your business is booming but so are you in a negative way. You’re booming out of life. 

Your calendar is full of appointments with medical specialists ranging from open-heart surgeons to the most exclusive psychiatrists.

Your financial burdens are forever settled but your health far from that.

Finally, you can’t handle this vicious cycle of living anymore and you put the business up for sale. You get an offer that is somewhat close to your original asking price and you immediately sign over the business to its new owner. You are relieved!

Now, you’re back to where you were 5 years before. No employment, no business, exhausted and hauling baggage full of misery. The only [good] news seems to be breaking on the set of your bank balance.

What happened?

Let’s rewind.

When you began inquiring about starting a new business and wearing the entrepreneurial hat, you took the advice of the “experts”. You WENT OUT looking for opportunities. You went out looking for problems to solve.

 Aha! That was the genesis of the issue. 

You should never have gone out. You should have GONE IN. You should have looked carefully into yourself to find out what you really are made for.

Jim Collins, management research specialist and best-selling author calls this “finding out what you were GENETICALLY ENCODED for”.

Even when you begin looking inward to discover your peculiar calling, it is so easy to fall into the trap of simply weighing in on your current skill set, past working or personal experiences and/or educational background; then attempting to construct a start-up from this bedrock.

While this might turn out in your favour and enable you to build a great business with better sleep at night, you’ll still be missing out on the best.

One astonishing thing about discovering your “genetic encoding” — your calling, is that a lot of times it has nothing to do with where you are coming from or what material advantages you currently possess. 

It is simply your UNIQUE PURPOSE neatly tucked inside of you with unquantifiable armouries of energy, creativity, and abilities waiting to be harnessed and deployed. 

The most successful business leaders understand that for a company to consistently score high in the marketplace and bring unbeatable returns to its shareholders, it must be solidly founded on a real, compelling vision and mission that intensely seeks to add tremendous value to the world, and that’s bigger than any one single individual in the organization including the CEO. 

This deep sense of purpose always has what seems to be a magical effect on its management and team members, and it works to create an atmosphere of camaraderie that unifies everyone to more or less be willing to die for the success of the company.

Indeed, it takes a man or woman on a mission — coupled with a deep sense of purpose to build a strong, lasting business that changes the world. One of the most legendary business leaders who had such a mindset was the late Steve Jobs, whose vision for Apple way back in 1980 was “to make a contribution to the world by making tools for the mind that advance humankind.” It is hard to argue that this isn’t the case today.

So, dear friend here’s a kindred suggestion for you: SEARCH DEEP WITHIN FIRST. Do all you can to discover your unique purpose, your genetic encoding, your calling — whatever you choose to call it. Then begin the process of building a great, principle-centred business that’s wrapped around your core internal wirings and that has roots in a solid vision and mission which seeks to add increased value to the world.

In another 5 years you’ll probably have another growing business with healthy profit margins, only this time, your sleep will be a lot sweeter and you’ll look forward to waking up the next morning to bring more joy to the world and to yourself.

C.C Achukwu is a visionary, speaker, writer and the CEO of Uppist, a company he founded to bring a suite of first-class services to African companies, beginning with Leadership and Management education and consulting, in order that they might become the leading global powerhouses of the near-future, thus enabling the continent to reach its fullest economic potentials. 

Enquire about his availability to speak to your leadership and management team on [email protected], or call +27 81 713 0321. Visit www.uppist.com to gain an overview of how Uppist can add value to your organization.