Content and Media guru, Tofunmi Akinseye, who is the CEO of Savvy Media was live with us on Instagram last Thursday to discuss how to bootstrap ones startup from nothing. Overtime, many entrepreneurs have listed a lack of capital to be the stumbling block for them to go ahead with their business ideas; is that really an excuse to hold on to? Here are 5 simple tips from Tofunmi to help you find out.
- Develop the right Skillset: As an entrepreneur that is just picking up in business, you cannot possibly know it all nor have it all figured out; neither do you have the funds to enable you hire a few hands that can augment your skills. This leaves you with no choice than to focus on yourself and seek out the essential skills you need to run the business for the time being, you can use search engines like Google, enrol for online courses, watch YouTube videos or even do short-term internships all to ensure you gather knowledge and skills. While this spells a lot more stress, it will save you money and even help you learn more about the business until you have the capacity to hire.
- Character Capital: Being a startup, there’s literally no money but when there is no money, you have to have people. Human resource is the most essential resource any business could seek. As a person, what is your relationship with people like? How do you interact with people? Do you easily get along with people? Are you the patient type? Are you humble? These are the questions you need to answer and pay attention to as a young entrepreneur. You can’t do it alone, you will need people and the only other thing that can make people want to work with you asides money is your character. You don’t want to be a difficult person to work with or else people won’t do your bidding.
- Ability to Identify Strategic Partnerships: You need to identify who needs your product (or service). Once you figure that out then you need to start looking out for opportunities inside and outside your business space for possible business enablers. For example, if you are a cosmetics person, you need to find a model that can fit the use of your cosmetic products and a photographer that can take quality pictures that you can publish to market your product. This partnership can come at almost no cost as all three brands will be promoting each other one way or the other. However, it is important that you have something valuable to show potential partners in order to convince them to get on board. You can keep a diary of people and where they work and try to keep in touch in order to make the process easier.
- Pursue Excellence: Many believe that they cannot pursue excellence or deliver the very best because they don’t have the funds to fuel it. Tofunmi has said this is not true as there smart ways to pursue excellence without having to pay so much. One of the ways to do this is to have a number of brands within your business space that have gone ahead to do what you do better and try to model your work after them. You may not have the capacity to do what they do as well as they do it, but you can ask yourself if you can do something close to that standard based on your available resources. While pursuing excellence involves a lot of sacrifices, you should never be afraid to make these sacrifices as what’s beyond is usually highly rewarding for you and your business given that people love to associate themselves with something that looks good. This way, you can get support from sources you probably did not envisage.
- Leverage the Digital Media: As a startup, it is important for you to understand the workings of the digital media for your business especially the social media part of it. The reason is it is less complicated, cheaper than all other avenues and mostly very popular among your potential customers. Once you have identified who these customers are and in what social media they operate, all you will have to do is take your business to meet them there, observe what they like to feed on when they are there and feed them relevant contents about your business in ways that they like to consume content relatably and organically.
Now you see that lack of capital is no excuse to pursue that business dream of yours. Do your homework; get the things you can for your business and start! Don’t forget to come here for more useful contents that will guide you on how to run your business.
