The Growing Pains in Entrepreneurship!

Making mistakes is inevitable before one grows, either in running a business or in career growth. William George Jordan once said Mistakes are the growing pains of wisdom.” Nevertheless, we soldier on, wounded and bloody, but we keep going back to the drawing board to re-strategize.

Making a quotation for a service Offering can be a big task if one can't calculate all the expenses involved. If done wrong consistently, the business stands to shut down and many jobs will be lost. Sometimes going before a client with the lowest rate in the market can make you the best choice, but one needs to ask themselves, where else am l short-changing myself in this deal?

A story is told of one engineering firm. They were tasked to handle a big project out of town. Quotations were sent, and theirs came out tops as their price was the lowest. The project was estimated to run for a month, but it dragged on for 3+ months. The ones in charge of estimates weren't exactly lost, but the delay in procuring everything the client needed made the project drag. This meant every time the engineers and artisans went out on site, daily task completion wasn't possible. The site crew didn't stop requesting fuel, food, and airtime for the length of the project and its extension. The staff kept sending timesheets to HR though they spent the days in the shade, waiting for materials to arrive. They're paid per hour anyway, whether they're idle or working, it doesn't concern them. Unfortunately, nothing changed on the final invoice. 

The client paid what was quoted, though they mentioned that the project no longer made business sense to the service provider, they were not obliged to pay more to a service provider who failed to understand proper business accounting. 

There are lessons l want to share from this

a)    It's important to say NO if what's being offered will not bring value to your business. Rather be quiet, than being too busy operating under extreme losses. 

b)    It is important for the project manager to start a project once all the materials are available on-site to avoid time wasting. If you have ever worked with contractors, you will understand that, time is money

c)    Lack of support to make the business viable. For the business to grow, it takes one to even do projects bigger than them. This however requires external funding. In the case of study there, management failed to realize that, relying on internal funds only was their downfall. They put their investment into the project, only to come out deep in debt.

d)    There is something that wisdom coming from a round table does. It fosters the team to come up with a critical SWOT analysis. Such meetings are meant to facilitate creative thinking from every team member, enhancing productivity and a greater profit share.

e)    Picking the cheapest contractor is not a cost-cutting skill, most often the project takes time to end, making the client pay double through loss of income generation.