If you are a business owner, one of the things you need to know, is called production capital and marketing
Production capital here, is how much money you need to produce the goods and services you sell.
For instance, if you are producing shoes, then your production capital will include cost of animal hides, cost of dyes, and cost of labour to get the shoe produced.
When you put that amount of money down, you are able to produce a good shoe.
But have you ever asked yourself what it is that the big and the international companies do differently from you?
You see, because of your background and training, you were not given enough knowledge on how much capital you actually needed.
That is because, according to your definition of business, business is the ability to produce a thing.
That is why an average Nigerian will learn cake baking, and she is happy that she now has a cake baking business.
Who are your customers? You don't know.
How can you have a business but not know your customers?
You see, the ability to produce does not give you a business, it only gives you a skill.
It is the ability to sell what has been produced that gives you a business.
For instance, if you can make hair, make shoes, bake cakes, sowing vest like me etc, then what you have is a skill.
But when you are able to start to consistently make hairs for people in exchange for money, and bake cakes in exchange for money etc, then you have a business.
So you cannot say you have a business until you start producing in exchange for money.
And to exchange your skills for money, you need to do something called, marketing.
Marketing is simply your ability to show people that you are good at something that can either benefit their lives or solve their problems.
This is done through a medium known as, advertising.
So when next you see these big companies running their adverts on TVs and radio stations, using very huge amount of money, know that they are not fools.
But how do you charge for your advertising?
It is simple.
You need to make advertising and marketing part of your business capital, just like production is part of your capital
A lot of us failed many times because we lack Marketing strategies.