Pearls Of Wisdom From My 'Aunt'

A few friends of mine and I were involved in an informal business during the later part of last year before an opportunity which was too good to let pass presented itself.Of course we could have been complete idiots if we had let this go.

Pearls Of Wisdom From My 'Aunt'

The better part of the month of December was spent at the Deeds Office in Harare pursuant to registering a company.The first person we approached promised to speedily bring the idea to fruition for a small fee,he claimed to know the inner workings of the office ,having worked there before being led to pasture.I digress this is a tale for another post.We submitted the names we preferred as the company name,gave the required amount for the name search and got the good news that the desired name was available.The amount to secure the name was duly paid and the company memos typed and printed.Soon after our 'consultant' became very reluctant to do anything else without any payment.Being no push-overs,we refused to release any payment until the whole process was finalised.After the fall-out,we decided to take the matter into our own hands and went to the Director of the department who was more than willing to help ua after first admonishing us for having used an unregistered consultant.To cut a long story short, we finally completed the registration exercise a full month later although the documents showed that the company had been registered a good two weeks after first submission.

Our second order of business was the task of knocking on doors to try and get into partnerships with various stakeholders who met the profile of the high-traffic destinations for our business.During one of these cold canvas visits at a very big multinational organisation we met Ms Maroodza,a receptionist.Her words of wisdom ring in our ears to this day.'When you start operating and things start turning rosy,do not forget those you started out with.If you promise someone a hundred dollars as payment for services rendered,be sure to pay that person.Guard against the tendency to buy flashy cars or suits that are very expensive instead of reinvesting in the business, this was said in between answering calls .We waited and listened carefully because we could see that it came from the heart and she meant well.

Very often ventures started with very good intentions fail to come to fruition because of lack of focus or selfishness on the part of leaders of these organisations.