In
BusinessTalk,
PepTalkWithDedun
Pep Talk With Dedun: Raising Capital and Advertising Your Business
Yay It's Friday The 13th and it's my birthday. It's been a blast so far. To the blog post, I promised to elaborate on the last point in the previous post, Don’t be afraid to start small. As a student, I don’t expect you to drop all your savings to a business you are not sure will pick up well. Generally though, every business is a risk and you have to be brave enough to take the risk. I also mentioned you should have saved towards the business. Let me explain how I started mine. Will use my cake and hair styling businesses for comparison.
Hair styling: I started this officially in 2009 and it was quite unplanned. Someone just asked me if I could braid and I said yes. Six years later, it’s a big money making business of mine. I didn’t need any capital whatsoever, just my time. Along the way though, I had to expand to weaves. For that I needed needles and thread (basic and cheap tools) and gradually I built my tool collection for hair styling. All I did was invest the money I made to expand my collection.
Baking: Honestly this was also spontaneous. I’ve shared the story many times. I initially started learning just for fun. All I needed was one pan and a hand mixer for tools and for ingredients, they were not pricey at all. When I decided to turn it into a business, I started small with tools, got more pans etc. I didn't have to put all my money into it. When I finally made a good amount of money, I then invested that money into the business and in return, yielded significant profit than when I first started.
Comparing both business, I invested less in hair styling business than I did with the cake business but I can tell you that I’ve made more profit with hair styling than baking. So it really doesn’t matter how much the capital is, if your business can thrive on little to no capital (in terms of money not time), then that will be the best option to start with before you go for the big business ideas.
