a small business journey - the Musings of Moko Bi.

Hi. You may call me Mokobi. These are my musings.

Why does the average person turn to small business ownership? or more broadly, entrepreneurship?

There are probably a myriad of answers, and my own reasons are not atypical.

I fancied entrepreneurship as a ticket to influence my ambitions of self determination and my penchant for problem solving.

Self determination - well, the idea of independence although idealistic, is innately powerful and attractive. Who wouldn't like the ability to influence greatly their own whats, wheres, whens and hows?

Problem solving - because, someone always needs help getting from where they stand today to where there want to be tomorrow.

So, with these interests I took the plunge with no prior toe dipping. I was relatively confident that I had built a decent enough platform to jump from.

It's been a mixed bag of early success, managing stakeholders, and outright failures - with doses of highs from wins and lows from the mundane and drudge.

So, why keep going? What keeps it going? Success - undoubtedly gives me a burst of confidence that is personally affirming and provides an embrace of vindication from taking an initial risk. Needless to say it's vital that the momentum from wins is leveraged for future sustainability. Simply put, winning begets winning. Stakeholders - a significant determinant of easy success or failure - require a careful calibration of expectations of business and personal affiliates. It's one thing for me to be clear eyed about my own vision, whilst another to consistently explain, sell, convince and elicit continued support from business contacts to take a chance on me, all the while bringing along family and friends. You either have witnesses and champions who advocate on your behalf or you are choosing to commit to what can be a lonely road. Failures - arguably inevitable - some may see failure as a measure of... well, failure! I like to think of failure as one of two possible outcomes of doing... not good and not bad, but just an undesirable outcome of doing. Failure is probably indicative of the iterative nature of entrepreneurship and also an output of entrepreneurial experimentation. Having 'good' ideas is one thing, but it's only through the doing that we actually test our thoughts for viability.

Often times we focus on the ugliness of a future failure and end up never trying in the first place or we dwell on the current pain of an actual failure while we neglect to take note of the learning from 'picking up the pieces' as a means to move forward. Perhaps entrepreneurship should be perceived as a journey with starts, stops and crossroads... very much like... well, life!

So, now what? To start or not to start? Toe dip or head dive? Is it worth the hustle? What problems need solving? Entrepreneurship during a pandemic? Am I in a Rat Race? … now that's a whole other muse! 🤓