It starts from the first kiss..............

My best friend and I used to say that (the line above...) a lot in secondary school. It served as a reminder of what happens when you go down the road of romance. it was our code for avoiding dodgy guys!

Its the same principle as the saying "it starts from the first step". sometimes, until you take the first step, you will never get to where you need to be. Take me for instance, I am contemplating starting my own business and petrified I will fail. People who know me would probably laugh if they hear this, I am supposed to be the embodiment of confidence!!! But I just credit that to good acting!

The problem with fear is that it paralyses you. I am reading "Wake up and change your life" by Duncan Bannantyne. Now on my bedside cabinet i have a ton of books piled up, but this is one of the few that i have read recently, which has me hooked (another brilliant read is "you can if you think you can" by Norman Vincent Peale. The language is dated, but the concepts the same! you can get a copy on amazon). In his first chapter he lists the top five things people are afraid of in business and guess what made it on the list.... Failure.

I like his argument " .... if you don't give it a go you'll never fail, but if you don't accept the possibility of failure, you'll never get the chance to succeed". Now i have been pondering in my head why go down this route - starting a business. then i realised something, I have been down this route before - 3 times!!!

The first time was in second year in university. I was broke and a cousin decided the best way she could help out was to give me shirts to sell. These were simple cotton shirts, bright fantastic colours and at a reasonable price too............... that ran their colours and shrank after the first wash. From this experience i learned my first business lesson:

"Know what you know/ sell/ or offer (in this case the shirts).... and its after care..... and have advice for customers ready when things go pear shaped! Know it inside and out"

Needless to say that folded and I went back to being broke and stressed out on how to pay school bills. Now my church at school stumped up part of the money and some kind family friends, but everyday living expenses  I didn't have. Until i realised something, if i didn't do something quick, I would end up having to drop out of school before my finals! I came up with a business and in the process learned "my" second principle of business:

"Use what you have/ know to get what you want. It may not be much, but it will be enough"

I knew music  and i knew the kind of music that students liked. I didn't have a deck, i didn't have tapes or CD's but i knew people that had those things and they were willing to let me stay over at their rooms till 3/4am (at times) mixing tapes. I also knew where to get blank tapes at a discount and i knew (from painful 1st hand experience) what the best quality tapes were..................... and i had enough money to buy a dozen blank, 90 minute cassette tapes. So I started a mix tape business and for that 1-2 years, I not only was able to take care of myself, but also support some other students in the same boat as me!!! I was making (dependent what make of cassette tape I used) 50 - 100% profit per tape!

Now when I left school it took me a couple of months to get a job. in between I needed (again!) to pay bills, get myself to interviews and take care of myself. so i decided to start a cupcake business. this was in 2001 and the last time I baked was in 1989! I was under no illusions of my ability to bake (I am happy to say that NOW I can whip up a mean batch of cup cakes or any cake in fact - within reason for an amateur that is!). But, that didn't stop me, because in trying to get around this drawback i learned "my" 3rd rule of business:

"if you don't know it or don't have it - buy it!"


I found someone who was a genius at baking and we went into a 50/50 split. he baked I packed them up and sold them. we got boxes and split them into sizes - packs of 6, 9, 12 etc and offered ad hoc services at a fee e.g. add flowers or a hand made card or personal delivery or a message in icing etc. it sold like wildfire! at the time we were novel and different and our pricing was friendly. We eventually went our separate ways amicably when i started working as a management consultant the following year. But it before I had learned a valuable 4th lesson (that was further validated at the consultancy where I was hired):

"Don't be afraid to work with/ hire a genius; they may be intimidating, but they make the work a whole easier and if you are their manager/ team mate/ colleague, you'll look good too! "


So after ruminating i figure i have nothing to loose! i have done this before, i failed at one of them, but i learned from that and i have been working since. if i let fear paralyse, then i may look back at this time and think "what if" and i don't want to be that person. So i think i wll give that "first kiss" and start something. And if this is a "dodgy boy" and i do fail at it, well at least i have a lesson about that too, taught to me by the Practice manager of the consultancy firm. he always said to me:

"if you must fail, then fail fast; fail short; brush yourself off and move on!"

Come to work, leave brain at home.

If you are a small business owner or a previous sole proprietor taking on your first set of employees -  this may sound like more rhetoric to add to your already over worked plate. but what employee engagement is really about - is making sure that when your employees come to work, thy don't leave their brains at home!

I read an interesting article in March about the UK PM giving his support to a task force taking a look at employee engagement in the UK. I literally did a double take - not just because the of topic the committee was looking at (with all the threats of strikes and unions up in arms, i would think the PM would be more interested in looking into "surviving the next 2 years!!"); but also because of the fact that the state of the psychological contract in the public service is in tatters and given the decisions of the present government, one would assume that how employees are feeling in terms of engagement and commitment was a non issue with them!

David MaCleod continues his work on employee engagement from 2009 (along with Nita Clarke), whose finding were that engaged employees (Defined in the report as An engaged employee is aware of the business context, and works with colleagues to improve performance within the job for the benefit of the organization) is a must have to succeed in the business world.

The best employment pitch I ever heard was from the HR Director at PWC - Nigeria office. When asked what PWC was in the business off he answered "we sell heads". Basically, we sell what knowledge and wisdom our people have stored in their heads. The problem is that we tend to hire people for specific jobs and tasks and that is, employee engagement practices are simple a bunch of things YOU do to get your employees to think more about what and HOW they do their job so as to help the business make its goals or targets or bottom lines. It could be you make and sell cup cakes and you have grown so much that you are able to hire someone exclusively to build the package boxes and pack the cakes. An engaged employee will do more than that......... they will let you know that the boxes look a  bit bland and might offer suggestions to improve their look; they may have been trained in calligraphy (yes, yes i know a looooong shot - no-one is trained in calligraphy these days :-)!) and offer to write your cards for you; they might choose to call your customers and ask how they found the cakes and come back and tell you what they found out. Basically - an engaged employee would go beyond their job description and actually do more than earn their pay - THEY WILL HELP YOU!. And if you really think about it, isn't that exactly why you hired them in the first place?

P.S
Have been down with a virus and that has taken some getting over! I have been tardy about this and I need to forge ahead. I made it a goal to publish 2 blogs per week (yup, I do have a bit to say) for starters. Lets see how that goes with me Performance Managing myself ;-)! I bet I will be a great boss of me!!!