01/12/2017
SKILL ACQUISITION IS NOT ENTREPRENEURSHIP pt. 1
After learning the skill of any business, you need to learn the business of that skill. Those are two different bodies of knowledge but both very essential in building a business. Agreed, every business system must have a certain skill or skill sets as the subject matter of their existence. However, being skillful alone is not enough to build a business.
The best cooker (abi chef, or whatever they are called😁) who has not learnt how to throw a business model around her skill is simply a technician. People who understand business will make so much money out of her skill and leave her with peanuts. How many restaurant owners know how to make a great meal? Most don't even know how to boil water to save their lives. Yet they set up a business system that is making money from the best chefs around, who in turn get peanuts as their takehome at the end of every month.
This is why I am sad when organizations (claim to) organize entrepreneurship trainings and you visit them to find out that all they do is skill acquisition. Skill acquisition isn't the same as entrepreneurship. Every skill acquisition programme should be planned to include ONGOING Enterprise Development training and mentorship as well. Otherwise, we are creating an army of skilled people who will burn out in a few months trying to own their businesses and then come back full circle to looking for people who can hire them and pay them for their skills.
I remember those undergraduate days when I had to hustle to survive. I had friends with coding skills who had zero entrepreneurship skills. I had zero coding skills but a basic grasp of the entrepreneurial drive. So what did I do? I created a company and began to market my friends' skill as our service offering. We were basically a web design company. We got quite a number of jobs, but the catch was that I made the most money. How!?😱
My friend will give me the cost of building a site, I will mark up by as much as 50-80% of the price he gave me.And then I'd ask him for a further discount on the price he gave me considering the resources I invested in marketing the services. I will close the deal and pass on to him to execute. Of course, he passed off as a staff of the company. So he was invariably working for and earning off the company, and yet in his mind he was self-employed.😢
Today, that company has grown...our range of service offering in IT has expanded...I still do not know how to code!😁 But we have a team of dedicated techies that perform miracles with their fingers, creating bespoke IT solutions for SMEs.
Are you a technician or an entrepreneur?
PS- If you've learnt something from this article, kindly share so that others will learn. Don't forget to use the hash tag . Let's make change happen, together! And stay tuned on this page, for more.
