[dropcap]M[/dropcap]any people get into business to make money and possibly get richer. Others get in because they can’t secure employment. But for Jinal Savla, entrepreneurship is inspired by something different: delivering value.
“Money should be secondary,” he says. “Business should be about the value you will create for family, friends, society, country and even the world at large.”
That means providing a solution to a problem or satisfying a need. Simply put, a business idea should have an impact. And when you focus on value, it becomes even easier to execute the idea without fear or emotional worries since even if you don’t make money from it, you will impact the world in a positive way.
“If you create value, money will automatically come in but if you create money without value, you will struggle to sustain its flow,” said Jinal, who runs three thriving companies. “I know a guy who started selling mandazi at the roadside and now he owns a mandazi bakery supplying 400,000 mandazi per day. That’s is value he created and kept improving on it.”
But then how do you come up with a business idea that will create value and, of course, bring in the cash? Jinal says the source of virtually all businesses ideas is usually a problem. Either your own problem or someone else’s. “The trick is to have a mind that looks at a problem as an opportunity then you package it in a business model,” he says.
That’s how Jinal started off with Mo Moviez, a movie rental business and expanded into digital signage firm, Ideas Unlimited, before setting up Solutech, a software and app development company.
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All these three companies create different values by solving various problems, Jinal says. Mo Movie, for instance, brought original movies to a growing middle class population, Ideas Unlimited introduced adverts inside supermarkets (this has been replicated by other firms), while Solutech is helping companies automate operations.
Even then, still over 90% of businesses fail by their third birthday. That tells you just an idea isn’t enough. For Jinal, business is like a body, with a heart, hands, legs and so on.
In a business setting you simply need people without whom you will certainly struggle. “Remember the heart doesn’t create a body. It forms the vision. That’s where the company’s vision comes in. It’s the heart of that business,” says Jinal.
As a business, you must provide capacity building for these people who work for you. You must spend resources to empower them and not just blame them when they make mistakes or things go wrong. This way you create a strong team that will deliver the business vision.
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