Happily, or sadly, depending upon how you look at it, entrepreneurs just don’t give up! Why? Well there are two answers to this question one negative, one positive. I’ll give you the negative first. Always the bad news first, right? Right… Entrepreneurs play in a game of high stakes poker. Everything being relative, whatever the amount of money they have, they are usually putting it all on the line. We are extremists. The bad part of this is, just like blackjack, when we lose our chips, we just pick ourselves up, look for a new game, find new resources (chips) and try the slots… and God forbid we lose at the slots, we try Roulette or any other game that will make us the quick dollar. Now what I’m telling you is not a good thing. People lose their shirt playing these games, and to fix it, they re-finance their homes, collateralize the cars, scoop up a bunch more money and hit the tables again to start yet another business!

WARNING: IF THIS REMINDS YOU OF YOU, THEN STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING AND KEEP READING THIS ARTICLE UNTIL YOU FINISH IT.

Entrepreneurs, re-directed in the right direction, can and should start as many businesses as they want, but you need to know there is only one thing that puts them in the right direction, it’s called purpose. If the purpose of starting your business is to re-pay your parents and friends the money you lost, well, then, the purpose of your business will lead you to yet another failure and you will keep starting new businesses for all the wrong reasons. After that business fails, now, the next business you’ve started you’re not only doing it to pay back your friends and family, but also you are trying to PROVE to everyone that you can in fact make it, and you want to especially prove it to those people that never thought you could make it in the first place. Now this is where it gets dangerous. Your motives start becoming similar to that of a desperado. Now you’ve completely lost the purpose that entrepreneurship is supposed to give you. You’re in a dark place. You don’t care about WHAT your business is, only that it needs to serve the purpose of blanketing all of your mishaps.
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If you want to create wealth, it will help to understand what it is. Wealth is not the same thing as money. Wealth is as old as human history. Far older, in fact; ants have wealth. Money is a comparatively recent invention.

Wealth is the fundamental thing. Wealth is stuff we want: food, clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places, and so on. You can have wealth without having money. If you had a magic machine that could on command make you a car or cook you dinner or do your laundry, or do anything else you wanted, you wouldn’t need money. Whereas if you were in the middle of Antarctica, where there is nothing to buy, it wouldn’t matter how much money you had.

Wealth is what you want, not money. But if wealth is the important thing, why does everyone talk about making money? It is a kind of shorthand: money is a way of moving wealth, and in practice they are usually interchangeable. But they are not the same thing, and unless you plan to get rich by counterfeiting, talking about making money can make it harder to understand how to make money.

Money is a side effect of specialization. In a specialized society, most of the things you need, you can’t make for yourself. If you want a potato or a pencil or a place to live, you have to get it from someone else.

How do you get the person who grows the potatoes to give you some? By giving him something he wants in return. But you can’t get very far by trading things directly with the people who need them. If you make violins, and none of the local farmers wants one, how will you eat?

The solution societies find, as they get more specialized, is to make the trade into a two-step process. Instead of trading violins directly for potatoes, you trade violins for, say, silver, which you can then trade again for anything else you need. The intermediate stuff– the medium of exchange– can be anything that’s rare and portable. Historically metals have been the most common, but recently we’ve been using a medium of exchange, called the dollar, that doesn’t physically exist. It works as a medium of exchange, however, because its rarity is guaranteed by the U.S. Government.

The advantage of a medium of exchange is that it makes trade work. The disadvantage is that it tends to obscure what trade really means. People think that what a business does is make money. But money is just the intermediate stage– just a shorthand– for whatever people want. What most businesses really do is make wealth. They do something people want.

Build wealth, dont just make money!

Regards

Wilbert Chaniwa
Founder
Nexus Business Network

Unfortunately in life there are only two groups of people. Its either you are a leader or a follower. An entrepeneur or an employee. You either choose to sell or be sold to. Produce or consume.

This phenomenon is synonimous throughout society and we are inherently making these decisions daily as we make our paces through the journey that we call life. There is nothing wrong with being on either side of the fence but it pretty much determines where you are going to end up as far as financial freedom is concerned.

Being a leader,trendsetter, entrepeneur, producer or seller is the difficult side of things because it involves convincing or getting buy in from other people, it means most of the time you are thinking outside the box about what the rest of society does not normally think anout. You are constantly exercising your imagination to the “possibilites” of things that have not been thought of before, and usually you are faced with a lot of resistance to change, but as with every great risk, there is a greater reward; so its either you choose the easy way..or the hard way, but whichever way you go, the rewards are reciprocated. Its in all of us to choose mediocrity or exceptional.

Wilbert Chaniwa
Founder
Nexus Business Network

Business is essentially about creating cashflows. The fewer cashflows your business posseses, the more likely the business is to be affected by environmental factors, low and high demand periods, in terms of income streams. The most successful business in the Blue Chip company group on the New York Stock exchange have their hands stuck in a lot of pots. Property, Stock Options and investments and shares in businesses that have support services to their main line products and not to mention shares in competitor companies are only but a few ways to spread the risk of your business.

And so it would apply, as an individual, you need to also reduce the risk. Its not enough to depend on a salary of one job or run a business that only has one product or service,as your means of income. Increase the pots that you have as cashflows. Have 2 jobs, set up a small business that you manage on weekends or after hours, create an investment portfolio through various hedge funds available on the market, invest in other businesses that have different product and service lines other than your own. Think actively about how to create more than one cashflow to keep your risk low.

Until you have this in place, you are in a position of high risk and low returns. Increase your options.

Regards,
Wilbert Chaniwa
Founder
Nexus Business Network

It is no secret that we face an electricity crisis in South Africa. Eskom have just not been able to cope with the increase in demand of electricity due to the growing economy. The government and Eskom are trying to find a solution to the electricity crisis. There are suggestions that new power plants have to be built over the next couple of years and more coal will need to be secured inorder to power these plants. Funding for this expansion has not been easy as consumers seem to be the main contributors to the funding with electricity tariffs set to rise.

There have been calls by many to find alternative means of power to help increase the supply of electricity in South Africa. Many wonder why there has not been a major drive to start using more and more solar power. After all, we are in South Africa where we get a lot of sun shine through out the year. There are many countries in Europe using solar energy and they do not get as much sun shine as we do in South Africa. The cost of setting up the solar power infrastructure is relatively high but it would be a good long term investment. Read the rest of this entry »

According to a recent eMarketer forecast, mobile marketing will reach more than $19 billion globally by 2012. With that said, I think it is clear for all to see the effect mobile marketing is going to play over the next couple of years and it is time for South Africa to start to make a significant contribution into this lucrative and emerging market. Read the rest of this entry »

The major topic of discussion this past week has been about the elections in Zimbabwe. At the time of writing this, there is still no news on the results of the presidential elections that took place last week Saturday. The whole of Zimbabwe is still waiting for the results, so to the rest of the world together with investors waiting on the sidelines. The question on many investors minds right now is whether or not to go invest in Zimbabwe? Read the rest of this entry »