Have you ever wondered why most Nigerian businesses fail within the first year of operation? In Nigeria, starting and running a business is no easy task. There are numerous obstacles to overcome, ranging from problems with infrastructure to obtaining the necessary financing aid to locating qualified employees.
To be successful, a company must be built on a solid foundation. You’ll want to be certain your product or service meets a market demand before going to market. To continue growing, you’ll need to hire qualified personnel, consult with professional business consultants and implement effective business planning and processes. You’ll have a better chance of long-term success in business if you plan and start working on it early.
10 Ways to Build a Successful Long-Term Business in Nigeria
- Identify Your Customers’ Needs
It is important you understand your consumers’ evolving needs. There are several methods you can communicate with your customers. Whether they are elite or averagely educated. You can easily enhance the quality of your goods, services, or other solutions by knowing the most recent problems customers encounter and the assistance they need. This increases consumer confidence, which leads to long-term relationships.
- Pay Attention to Market Dynamics
Keep an eye on industry dynamics if you want to establish a successful business. This necessitates keeping an eye on the competition, spotting industry trends as they emerge, and taking action quickly. It’s critical to have the flexibility and willingness to make continual changes to your business plan.
- Offer Quality Customer Service
Welcome to the era where customers no longer see themselves as kings, but rather semi-gods who should be served. The only way to develop a long-term business in today’s demanding and empowered market is to satisfy your customers with an exceptional customer experience. You can create more elegant value offerings and promote customer loyalty and long-term success by focusing on getting to know customers better, their journeys, habits, motivations, and unmet needs better.
- Take Your Time and Think Strategically
One common predominant problem with many Nigerian entrepreneurs is the desire to start making profits as soon as they start the business. This unknowingly cost them more than they can think of. To build a sustainable business in Nigeria, you must avoid trading short-term gains for long-term success. Verify your ideas and vision with a trusted associate or a professional business consultant who is not directly involved in the business. They have a lot of valuable information to impart that you wouldn’t have picked up on your own.
- Prioritize your employee
When it comes to building a sustainable business enterprise, prioritizing your employee and providing them with a clear purpose for their work is a winning formula. The costs of ensuring that employees feel valued and that their job has meaning are incredibly inexpensive in comparison to the advantages of doing so. With those underlying convictions, significant opportunities emerge that can assist your firm in reinventing itself, even when confronted with great adversities. It is one primary leadership skills for entrepreneurs.
- Foster Brand Loyalty
It is no new in the business world that customers only buy from people they know and trust. Brand loyalty is one of the key components that can help your firm survive an economic downturn. Loyal clients have faith in their brands and frequently rely on them to supply their preferred items or services on time. It is essential you, as an entrepreneur to capitalize on this by focusing on a constant quality and creating brand loyalty. It is one of the undeniable elements of building a sustainable company in Nigeria.
- Seek Financial Aids when Needed
Contrary to general opinion, it is almost impossible to build a sustainable business in Nigeria without seeking financial aid at one juncture of your business. Dangote, the most celebrated African Businessman once borrowed a loan of $650 million loans from Afreximbank (African Export-Import Bank). Likewise did Bill Gates loan, Steve Jobs, $150 million in 1997 as a form of investment in Apple when it was at the Brink of Bankruptcy. When Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy. The goal is to create a suitable company that can last for generations, taking loans shouldn’t be a big deal. You can check out this comprehensive article on how to get loans without collateral in Nigeria.
- Don’t try to do everything on your own
Just like a popular meme, that said you are no CEO if you don’t have officers working under you. While this article is not about being a CEO or no CEO, but rather how to build a sustainable business in Nigeria. However, as a rule of thumb, it is not advisable for you as an entrepreneur should shoulder all the responsibility of a business enterprise on your own. Not only is that the polar opposite of sustainability, but it’s also the perfect recipe for burnout and the collapse of your entire organization. As a result, I advise business owners to examine their procedures to see which ones can be automated, delegated, or eliminated.
- Be innovative – Start something new
A pen friend once mentioned to me that innovation is something that is missing in Nigerians’ blood. That Rather to start a new unique chain of business, they keep recycling the same types of businesses. I beg to disagree with this. In fact, this statement inspires me to pull my team together at insigh.ng, and come up with a list of the 50 most innovative Nigerian Youths in different business ventures. While this is enough to disprove my friend’s fallacy, I personally can’t deny that most Nigerians aren’t great at coming up with unique business ideas. Thank God for Experts.ng’ compressive article on that give insights on some unique untapped Businesses in Nigeria. You can venture into any of the businesses mentioned in the article.
- Minimize the Spending Gaps
Analyze each and every money that enters and leaves your company like a hawk. As entrepreneurs, we all know that to create money, you have to spend money, and this is especially true for new businesses, where cash outflows will always outweigh inflows. The most important thing is to keep an eye on your spending at all times, as it may quickly spiral out of control. Methodically and predictably close the spending difference to become profitable over time.
Conclusion
Longevity in business requires sustainability. Unsustainable firms typically waste resources and are shut down by their owners. You want to develop a business that lasts. Before you launch, make sure your product or service meets market demand. Then you need to hire the right people and implement the proper processes to keep growing.
Bio
Taiwo Sotikare is a business enthusiast who is passionate about helping small businesses grow through the power of effective content marketing. He is the founder of DigitalPud. Via SEO, Taiwo helps small businesses generate more monthly income. He creates content that hit Google front page, where thousands of targeted customers can access their products and services. You can contact him for content creation gigs via [email protected].