Choosing The CEO

Who is your CEO?

In lay man terms, the CEO is the big front end of the organisation, while the receptionist is usually the smaller front end. Many small businesses fail due to the inabilities of the CEO to manage the business properly and Leadership is key to the success of any business.

Most startup entrepreneurs are always eager to have their name on the top hierarchy of the startup as Mr CEO. In their defense, its their idea, they started it, its their sweat and all. They are right, except that they fail to realize that its only an existing business that needs a CEO. If they do not have what it takes to manage the startup properly, the CEO position becomes a neglect.

As an aspiring CEO, there’s much work to be done, many plans to be made, many things to learn, unlearn and relearn, many books to be read, many seminars to attend, many practicals to be done and most importantly, many mistakes to be made.

I run a clothing line WITTEEwears. I can’t afford to hire a CEO or a manager right now even though I know I still have much to learn, so I decided to go into partnership with the best partner that ever existed. My business partner doesn’t sleep, he’s always marketing, he’s constantly bringing in new clients, he handles the management better than I do and I can ever do, he only takes 10% of profit and allows me keep 90%, even though he’s the CEO.
My CEO is God.

I realized my in capabilities on time and chose my CEO wisely. You don’t have to use the same CEO as I do, but you definitely need a great front end management for your business. If you know you’re not so great at managing your business, don’t deceive yourself, think other than yourself, who else can come on board to assist you, it could probably be in form of employment or partnership; put the business first. The person might be the manager if you really love the CEO name, but most importantly, if your business is failing due to your inabilities as the CEO, look for someone who can CEO better than you. The most important asset in a business is the organisation itself, not the products or the marketing and definitely not the CEO.

If you’re scared of someone stealing your idea, you can keep starving your business of success, till there finally isn’t a business.
When choosing your CEO or your partner, make sure you employ legal agreements that define each person’s rights, percentages and roles. An MOU will also be good too.

Don’t be scared of taking risks, be scared of remaining stagnant.

Mr CEO, who ever you are, be realistic, be strategic, understand the company’s mission and vision and work according to it. Set long and short term goals. Stay true to the mission- the mission comes first, then the team and yourself should come last.

When it starts to get easy, EXPAND

Think WITTEE! Think Intelligence

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LAZINESS BUILDS BRANDS

The Brand Is Worth More Than The Business

A while back, I was chatting with a friend who just started an NGO with a beautiful motive and wonderful ideas, but she needed to raise money through sponsors and donations. I told her to create a system to make it very easy for people to make donations online which would be much easier and faster. During our session, while doing the SWOT analysis for her organisation, I mentioned to her, 'LAZINESS BUILDS BRANDS!!! she flared up insisting she's not lazy, Laziness can never describe her and so much more in her defense. I thank God we were chatting that day, If it was a face to face meeting, I can almost bet she might have beaten me up that day. I later explained the concept and she understood.

Laziness builds the best multi-national brands till date. Laziness in brand building doesn't mean you as the brand should go weak with business implementation and activities. It rather means, the brand should do all the work for the customers and the only thing customers have to do is to fully rely on the brand to meet their needs without them going through any stress. Does that make sense?

Why do you prefer shopping on JUMIA?

Why do you prefer doing your searches on Google?

Why do you prefer buying/repairing your phones with SLOT?

or 

How did you become a fan of coca-cola?

Why do you like to eat Indomie noodles?

What makes noodles different from spaghetti?

The answers to these questions, are born out of laziness.

JUMIA - E-commerce site where you buy the best products from the comfort of even your toilet and only pay when they are delivered to your sitting room.

GOOGLE- Information database that has or links you to almost everything in the world, both past, future and present and is accessible from any internet enabled device.

SLOT- Trusted gadget merchant with excellent services and so many branches all over Nigeria with a good return policy and efficient warranty.

COCA-COLA- World re-known soda brand available everywhere in the world. Sold by every kiosk, bar, hawker etc. Even unconsciously, some people mention the name coke even when they intend buying another soda brand.

INDOMIE- Most popular noodles brand in Nigeria. Available in all stores, easy to prepare and comes in various sizes and flavors. 

Spaghetti has more nutrients than noodles, it's more filling and less expensive but because spaghetti would cook for nothing less than 30 minutes and it requires some cooking skills, Noodles is preferred by most.

All these brands understand the needs of their customers and work so hard to meet them while improving their services everyday to make their customers lazier and loyal.

Laziness builds brand Loyalty

In our own way, we are all lazy. What motivates me might not motivate you. We all have mood swings. For any brand to be successful, the brand needs to take it as a responsibility to ensure that even in times when the customer is psychologically unstable, your brand still comes first when they need your service. Such is achieved when customers can easily access your brands' products/services very fast without any stress. That way, even when competing brands arise, your customer remains loyal since its easier to purchase from you than your competition.

Put your customer's interest first.

In business, the interest hierarchy should go like this -CUSTOMER - SUPPLIER - EMPLOYEES - ENTREPRENEUR.

Your customers interest should always come first , hence the saying 'customers are always right'.

Your suppliers interest should come second, or else, you wont be able to meet up with customer demands and then customers start becoming unhappy.

Employees are next because they are the skeleton of your business, unhappy employees are less productive and less productive employees would reduce customer satisfaction.

If your customers, suppliers and employees are happy, business would be great.

The entrepreneur is happy.

Customers are lazy people who want all the work done for them. Entrepreneurs are hard working people who get paid to build a system that does all the work for them and satisfies a need.

If the entrepreneur becomes lazy, the customers have to become hard working, but since customers have the choice of patronizing competing brands, they won't get hard working, they would rather switch brands and subsequently, loyalty.

Don't strive to meet your customers half way - that only works for love stories.

Meet your customers 98% of the way, make 1% the neutral ground that holds the decision preference of the client and make the client only participate in 1% which is payment.

Laziness would make you a brand leader.

I wish you success in business.

Think WITTEE! Think Intelligence

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MAKE IT COUNT

It's been a while I last posted an article, I'm very sorry, I've been a quite busy trying to set up a couple new businesses which I will introduce later on this year.

However, I learnt a couple new things also and concluded on some very minute but very important and tangible tips to achieving business success.

This write-up will focus on the subject line usually referred to as 'USP' - Unique Selling Point.

This is usually what differentiates you from the competition, what stands you out from others or why you are special/unique. Either ways, every business needs that 'USP' factor to be different right?

The amazing thing is you don't need to look too far away to discover or determine your USP. Your USP doesn't necessarily have to be something totally different that you offer which your competition doesn't, it doesn't have to be something free to attract your customers, and neither does it have to be something that will be tangible. The secret to a perfect USP is that it first has to be aligned with your vision and mission statement and even the minutest detail has to be executed to perfection.

Every aspect of your business can be your USP if you let it count. Make every aspect of the business service count, from service to service, from department to department, from when the customer comes in contact with your business, up till the moment when a commitment is made, MAKE IT COUNT. 
It’s the little things that make the big things matter so much, just like the saying little drops of water make an ocean - what happens if the drops of water weren't falling in the right places?
In the bible, the parable of the Talents explains it more as the parable even ended with the saying - To him who has, let more be given. Does that sound fair enough? I think it does, if he who has handles what he has well, why shouldn’t he be given more?



Make the tiniest details count for your client's satisfaction. Focus more on satisfying the client rather than making the sale. According to Chuck Bauer, in his book 'Sales Mastery', it has been discovered that what makes the sale is more a determinant of the confidence of the sales man but not the product to be sold - This is why in many cases, we buy things we don’t actually need.
Likewise, people don't invest in businesses, people invest in people. This is because almost all businesses can make billions if executed perfectly with the right strategy - Who does the execution is what matters the most, same reason you are called for a presentation after submitting a proposal - the investor needs to meet the brain behind the proposal to determine if the person has what it takes to follow through with the execution, including the passion, tenacity and discipline.

One other thing many business, most especially start-ups and small scale business fail to do is to reward customers. Let customers who buy more and who buy regularly feel they are special to you and your business. Occasionally make offers to them and let them understand that they have earned it and they deserve it. You don't necessarily have to make this offer to all your customers, make it especially for your best customers and make them know how special it is so it would count. You could also offer something similar to first time customers.

The backbone of any successful business isn't the product or service offered but the people involved in delivering the product or offering the service. Make everything count to satisfy your customers, this could be as minute as sending your customers birthday messages and even cards, sending them inspirational messages from time to time etc. Make every customer feel like he/she is your No 1. Client, this can only be done when you make it count. If you make it count, they'll keep coming back for more.

Remember, make everything count, the people are more important than the business. Build the relationships before you build the business. Most importantly, God should come first, don't sin against God to satisfy your client. There are so many clients out there dying to do business with you.

I wish to see you succeed. Make it count, you have more than it takes to be successful.

Think WITTEE! Think Intelligence

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TOPTAL'S CONTRIBUTION TO BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

Using data to answer interesting questions is what researchers are busy doing in today’s data driven world. Given huge volumes of data, the challenge of processing and analyzing it is a big one; particularly for statisticians or data analysts who do not have the time to invest in learning business intelligence platforms or technologies provided by Hadoop eco-system, Spark, or NoSQL databases that would help them to analyze terabytes of data in minutes.

The norm today is for researchers or statisticians to build their models on subsets of data in analytics packages like R, MATLAB, or Octave, and then give the formulas and data processing steps to IT teams who then build production analytics solutions.

One problem with this approach is that if the researcher realizes something new after running his model on all of the data in production, the process has to be repeated all over again.

What if the researcher could work with a MongoDB developer and run his analysis on all of the production data and use it as his exploratory dataset, without having to learn any new technology or complex programming languages, or even SQL?

to read the full article, click this link Toptal

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