The Heart of An Entrepreneur (1)
ONE lady summarized what it takes to be an entrepreneur in Nigeria very well. She said the person must have the heart of a lion. That is a basic requirement for survival. A stout, sturdy mental state must be there or how else can one be so many things at the same time without going round the bend?  The dear woman was answering questions in a newspaper interview.
Not that entrepreneurs are alone in this, I think anyone who ever tried to set up a business in these parts must be lion-hearted to face the challenge for even one month. What with the situation where you are totally alone and where you provide all that is needed including a good stretch of road networks if you run trucks.
Now what is all this talk about a special kind of heart for the small business owner? Is his lot much different from those of others? Aren’t everyday survival skills for the rest of mankind enough to navigate the waters of entrepreneurship in Nigeria? The answer is that you need more than mere everyday survival skills; you need a different mental setting to make any headway.
If you already have this type of heart, you are sure to make good speed but if you came in with a faint heart you must in one way or the other evolve fast to the desired stage or run away in fright when the storms start gathering. The truth is that you cannot escape the early storms and how you weather them will determine if you are closing shop or braving it till you hit good weather.
The very first test of your heart’s sturdiness is the recurring problem of running your business aground and watching your start up capital finish before your frightened eyes. It happens to almost everybody. You simply keep fumbling and making mistakes due to inexperience until you get up one morning to see that you don’t have a kobo left with which to run the business.
You are also faced with a situation where an individual is required to generate power, provide water, assist or wholly undertake the construction of roads, face up to highly demanding neighbours, grapple regularly with government officials and closely monitor a very volatile set of demi-gods otherwise known as customers.
I’d advise anyone venturing in to read up certain verses in the first chapter of Joshua in the Bible especially the repeated ‘Be strong and of a good courage”. You certainly aren’t leading millions of people to a new land but you will encounter giants and other fearful situations that you must face up to or forget it. I guess it was the shame of running back to look for a job after assuring everyone that I was going to make it that kept me from abandoning ship two months after resigning to run my own business. The heat was unbearable or so I thought.
Having to repeatedly fend off intimidating people and circumstances isn’t too easy. Also having to stand up and defend your empire against marauders of all sorts must require guts. Forging on when you realize you are totally on your own in a storm takes a strong heart. No one is there for you except, perhaps family members. You are totally convinced at critical periods that the main goal of the government is to wipe your business off the map. You look round in a frightening situation and the only logical thing to do is break into prayers to whichever of the invisible forces you subscribe to. It takes an uncommonly strong heart to look looming danger in the face and keep on moving.
It is this courage that makes you not to get paralyzed with fear while facing a strange new situation. That is what made me not to back out when I realized part of my duties will be seeing to the road worthiness of trucks when I knew absolutely nothing about motorized contraptions of any kind. How do you supervise staff carrying out tasks you are witnessing for the first time just the day you arrived? How do you carry on as manager of a business you have never done before. That is how a whole lot of us got into small businesses. It really takes a strong heart, a lion’s heart not to just sit and watch everything go to ruin. Every move you make is the product of courage mixed with faith.
Not only is the heart supposed to be strong, this poor heart also need to go cold. For me, it all started with personnel matters. For many who left posh, well structured places with polished and highly educated staff, the initial problem will always be how to live with the new set of colleagues. On a lighter note, my kids proclaimed my spoken English dead after six months; they were wondering how I could ever handle the Queen’s English after listening to my newly acquired dexterity in pidgin and other badly mutilated forms of the English language. I hope they are not right. Part of the reason I started keeping a column is to ensure I don’t also lose the ability to write the language. A friend who refused to adapt always has to repeat himself since he isn’t communicating most of the time. I simply told him that he might as well be bleating if no one understands him.
The change in language is the least of the worries though. To me, the worst thing that happened to my heart is this aforementioned cooling of the heart.  It is the hardening that also came with the cold that bothers me. We are enjoined to have a ‘heart of flesh’ but mine solidified to stone though that took time and series of assaults from my new colleagues. It didn’t take long for me to realize why every true capitalist turns cold, calculating, suspicious and detached over time. It is a basic survival mode. It is the required mode if you must safeguard your money, get some honest labour out of the people you are paying and keep yourself from being continually defrauded.
I arrived at the new place determined to find goodness in the hearts of men. I believed in the brotherhood of man. I also bought into the new thinking about punishment not always going with crime. I had a very tender forgiving heart. I often dismissed crimes with ‘I forgive you for you know not what you have done’. I believed forgiveness will stir up godly sorrow in the offender. Alas, how wrong I was.