My title suggests a class right? Yes! I am here to lecture us on Hustling. You might be thinking…. What the hell does this guy know about hustling, well I am thrilled to let you know that I know quite a lot…. I have hustled and I have conquered….. Here is the success story of my first Complete hustle!
Okay…. This unfortunate Asuu break (it’s much easier to call it a break than a strike … the term “strike” crushes my mind) has led me to do some things .. some I am proud of… others not so. What I think tops my proud list is an idea that a friend of mine dropped down one cold night during our whatsapp conversation. He is the personality the character “tycoon” on the series (ROOM 24 GH) is built on. From his character name… its quite evident that he has a flair for business. He said he wanted us to produce and sell Christmas greeting cards. Apparently he had presented the same idea to some other friends of his and they had not really been cooperative.
I told him I was in. kindly note here that at that point I was not sure this business plan would succeed, I definitely had no capital that I was ready to inject into the business, I also had absolutely no idea how it would work out but I said I was in. That means that BELIEF IS THE KEY. Once you believe in something and you believe it would work out, you are on the road to success. Learn how to approach situations without knowing how it would turn out. All you need to do is believe it would work out. I have to be right here, this is a success story, one of my many success stories, tested and tried! So you better believe!
We wanted to produce Christmas greeting cards right? but had no inkling of an idea on how or what to do. All we knew is that we wanted to do it. This takes me to my second highlight BELIEVE SO MUCH THAT EVERY OBSTACLE HAS NO CHOICE BUT TO BOW DOWN.
Greeting cards now flooded my every thought. When awake I saw greeting cards, when asleep I thought greeting cards and soon, when I talked I talked greeting cards, and soon a path opened! One of the people I mentioned it to was an IT student at my Uncles’ firm where I spent my time( courtesy of our Asuu Break). He told me of this place where they print all sorts of cards. We soon went to check it out. Alas the whole area was flooded with printing presses.
We approached a shop and met this young man. He asked us what we wanted and we told him we wanted to produce cards, he directed us to his “oga” who discussed with us and was very encouraging (he eventually became a fuck up nigga much later sha). He even gave us a book each on entrepreneurship skills which was very helpful. He also opened our eyes to different things we had not thought about before. He gave us an estimate of the cost implication. Neither of us knew it would be that costly but of course we did not show it. Also we were to print 4000 copies (and the lord knows I knew we could not sell even half of that…. Or so I thought)I Started harboring doubts in my mind about the success of this venture! But nevertheless we encouraged each other (my business partner and I). we had agreed we would split the cost into 2. We did not know where the money would come from but we were ready to risk experimenting. We decided not to worry about where the money for the venture would come from and instead concentrate on getting clients.
We decided to print out samples to show organizations and schools. Printing samples was expensive and we would get lesser qualities than the cards we would eventually print (quite stupid right?) but we needed samples to convince our clients also... so we kindda had to be stupid!
Worry had started to creep in already! Quitting seemed surer than ever! But then, we applied a worry technic I later read about in a book titled How to stop worrying and start living by Dale Carnegie. By the time we were using this technic I had not read about it then. The simple summary of this technic is to prepare and accept the worse possibility mentally. Once that is done, you should seek ways to improve on them. We decided that the worst possibility is that the business fails and by then we would have spent only about #5000 naira (rough estimate for printing samples and transport fare) which we both agreed was worth risking for the business. Also, even if we lose this money, just the fun and experience we would have gotten was worth it. After sorting this out within ourselves, we could think clearly and in due course we uncovered ways to make our #5000 naira count!
As you know I hate lengthy posts… so we would stop the class here today… tune in later for class 2
On my next release of hustle101 …. We would learn marketing strategies and how to deal with downgrading “washing” lol….. this is a really fun episode I promise. Subscribe by mail to receive alerts on upcoming episodes at the footer part of this page
I would post a continuation of this story soon….. I don’t want to promise but it would definitely be under a week (cos u know…..I am still gyrating in the Christmas mood). Below is a picture of some of our initial samples!! The Original productions were better than them of course!! Their pictures?….. also coming soon!
