THE IMPORTANCE OF THE VISION THING

During the recent “Uganda Entrepreneurship Congress 2023” at Makerere University in an interaction with the students the question came up, “How do we ensure the durability of our businesses?”

The statistics have been parroted over and over again, that 90 percent of businesses do not get to their fifth birthdays. I suggested to the students that this is not as bad as it sounds, because the business people who run those failed businesses, did not lie down and die, but went out and started new businesses. And the lessons of their failure helped make their next business better, hopefully.

But yes the question, “How do we prevent from failure?” Business lady Sharon Tumusime, co-founder of carpentry shop Palit, advised first off the that budding business people should not fear failure because failure is part of success.

Easier said than done and I could have sworn I saw a few kids rolling their eyes. You cannot blame them. In school we are taught the lesson and then we seat for the exam, in the business world, you seat for the exam first and then you learn the lesson. A mental adjustment is important, for all of us who want to go into business.

“Rich Dad, Poor Dad’ author Robert Kiyosaki advises that you need to fail faster, so you can learn quicker. That failure will happen is a given.

In my mind I was thinking that one way to ensure these failures are not final is to cover your downside, factor in the risks. I learnt this the hard way in my forex trading days. However sure the trading set up is it minimized your losses by determining before hand how much you are willing to lose if the “sure deal” did not go as planned.

In the real world of business this may take the form of starting small. We now enjoy the hospitality of Café Javas multiple restaurants, but who remembers that it started out as a small, cramped operation on Bombo Road in 2005? That was probably the business owner testing his concept, checking whether it works or not and once he was convinced, he rolled out seven other outlets and four others in Nairobi.

Also you can minimize the cost of failure by spreading the risk, bringing in partners to shoulder the burden. That is the basis of the limited liability company. No matter how sure the deal is, it can fail and to prevent it from wiping you out entirely, making it difficult for you to heroically pick yourself up, dust yourself up and start all over again, spread the risk so if it fails you only hurt a little.

"We, who went to school, have the mistaken idea that money will solve all problems. So when we get a windfall and go into business big are wiped out and start complaining about the economy...

Though over the years reporting business and dabbling in this or that, I have become convinced that the founder’s vision is a critical ingredient to whether a business succeeds or not over the long haul. I saw a few more eyerolls in the room when I suggested this.

It is part of the human condition that we think you just tell us what to do, we do it and voila! Success will follow. I think it also comes from our classroom upbringing.

We don’t pay attention to the intangibles. To our detriment. Because before anything happens there is first a thought. If you want to make a chair, build a house or plant a tree, first a thought.

While its romantic to go out and start your business, a pause to think about your vision for whatever it is you want to build may make the difference between collapsing after year one or enduring for years.

The trick with the Vision is to own it. You should be able to see it with your mind’s eye and feel the emotion that will come with achieving it. This last part emotionalizing it, is important because it will provide the grit needed to hang in there through the debilitating lows and temporary highs that come with doing business....

Just as important is that with a vision you will be forced to be strategic, where strategy is the series of actions you will need to take to achieve the vision.

Many of us are not strategic, we are hardworkers, ready to roll up our sleeves, jump in and start making money. Inevitably when we are hit, we crumble like a pack of cards because our actions are not driven by a vision and guided by strategy.

"Strategy is important more for what it prevents you from doing than what it dictates you do...

Many years ago, when we founded the New Vision Staff SACCO, we closed the first year with sh33m in the bank. we were jumping around with glee, success had come quickly. The question then became how to utilize the surplus and also sorts of ideas saw the light of day – car washes, tent and chair hire.

But our vision was to be a financial institution that creates financial freedom for our members. Rather than divert from this and go into all sorts of general trade, we stayed true to the Vision and invested the money in treasury bills and bonds. The net effect of this was that 16 years later at the height of the Covid pandemic in 2020, we closed the year with sh900m in the bank. That figure would have never happened had we run around like headless chicken, spreading our energies all over the place.

Things like having a vision and mission statement that drive strategy sounds like text book stuff, “too much English” but when you appreciate that whatever is manifested in physical form is only as good as where it came from the intangibles, you will not be quick to dismiss the Vision thing.

And finally, your business or even you, as a human being can only grow as big as your vision. Small vision small company. Big vision, big company. There are no miracles.

In the 1980s Bill Gates dreamt of putting a PC on every table and became the richest man in the world in pursuit of this vision. But someone had a bigger dream, to put a computer in every hand and today Apple is a bigger company than Gates’ Microsoft.