24/08/2014
THE UNFOLDING SUCCESS OF THREE UNDERGRADUATES.
Its funny. You talk and talk and talk and finally you decide to do it. You get pass all your doubts and reasons-not-to and something pops up. All the time you spent preparing, the urgency of it, to beat the deadline, your deadline. You say to yourself, this is it. Now or never. You psyche yourself up, tell yourself over and over again why you doing this ( do you want to go back, live like this, always having the "what if" feeling - very disturbing, yet these are the very things that drive you).
We've been talking since 2nd year in school about making it in life, not just making it but setting a pace. Talked about entrepreneurship where ever we met. At those instances, it’s like day dreaming - living the future in the present. Sometimes i get so pumped up, i feel goose bumps all over me. Eric and Lorenzo were so inspired by these talks. We can sometimes just talk about these things for hours. You begin to feel as if you living it until we realize, oh, we still here (hahahahaha).
Over the time period, we got all this funny ideas. Some were good though. But one thing always seemed to stopped us from starting. I rememeber we got so pumped up about writing a book...meennn, we finally have an idea we can start working on. Hahahahahaha......i remember when we would sit down and make all these figures up about the sales we going to make from the book, funny right? We spent hours writing the book and we were finally done. Went to a printing press, designed the book cover and then again...ops!...no money to print out. Not that we didn’t try, but we just told ourselves some stories and let it go. Actually we even used part of our hostel money to fund the project but it didn’t work out.
Finally, another great idea, thank God! It was this saturday morning, we were short of money - Lorenzo and I. We decided to go to Eric’s place to see if he has something we can benefit from - money. Went ahead of Lorenzo to Eric’s place. I got the money though, but our chit chat turned to business. I said to Eric we've been talking too much. Lets do something that we can start and not be stopped by money. An idea that we can build on in the short run and benefit from it. He liked my suggestion, then we sat there each person bringing up ideas upon ideas until we settled on this one (Bingo!...we got it!). It a good idea we all thought. I thought the best we've had so far because of how feasible it seemed. We decided to go for it.
We did our research, planned on little piece of papers, figured out pretty much how to go about it. We hired a friend to help us on credit. That we are going to pay him if all goes well and he agreed to help us. I believed he agreed because God has seen our effort and had help us got that agreement with him.
We also continued with our part of the work - the paper work, planning and all that. Again, it took us hours and days and for some of us, sleepness nights. It was then a week to End of Semester exams. We tried our best, put in the effort and we where finally done with the most important things. Then, the semester ended and we planned to start immediately next semester on campus. We designed the business to suit our market - tertiary students.
The long awaited time is here. The wait is finally over. The plan is to introduce the business to the freshers first and grow with them as they were coming a week before the continuing students.
With this in mind, we came to campus a week before to prepare before they come. Meanwhile, there was an ongoing UTAG strike which we thought will allow us more time to concentrate on the business, yeah, means no lectures. I for instance couldn’t wait for my first presentation.
Then there was a bomb, well it seemed like so to me. The information seeped deep into my bones causing chills all over me, i had to put on a hoody and wrap myself in a cloth. Here is it written boldly on the school's website - "REOPENING DATE HAS BEEN POSTPONED INDEFINITELY DUE TO THE UTAG STRIKE AND THE DEADLY EBOLA OUTBREAK".
We've waited so long only to be told this?
I thought about how it’s going to push our plans back and minimize our profits for the semester as planned. But most troublesome to me was the fact that we can’t start as planned and we didnt know when we were coming back. Hmmmm...well I’m going home tomorrow. I pray they call us back soon. For all our sakes. But how ever long it takes, we will lunch the business and sustain it. Student Earnings will be a success. A success story for everyone - the upcoming youth entrepreneurs, the university graduates and undergraduates and to all those out there trying to make it.
This is just a Part 1 of a success story yet to unfold.
Written by :
Bruce - Acquaye Bright
CEO, Student Earnings
12/08/2014
