How To Start Your Business With Little Or None Of Your Own Money – Pst (Dr) Emmanuel Ojeagbase

LET me warn you before you go too far: my article this month is designed to peddle my seminar with the above title, which I will be offering at the 3rd Business Opportunity Expo. (For more info on the EXPO, see pages 41-53).

 

If you don’t want to start a business or if you want to start a business but have all the money in the world to launch it, skip this page and move on to other pages.

 

But if you are that man or woman that the above topic will meet a need in their life, this may be the best news you have received since the beginning of this millennium. This is because I’m about to present, within a three-hour period, proven, easy-to-duplicate strategies that will take anyone from flat broke to financial freedom, running their own business.

 

In my more than 15 years of running my own business and about five years of relating closely with people who want to achieve financial freedom, by taking the

entrepreneurship route, there is one problem that is proving to be a stumbling block to many who have this ambition. And the problem, which is universal, is: How to raise start-up capital.

 

On average, six out of 10 letters I receive dwell on this subject in one form or another. It is such a daunting mountain that many are finding it difficult to climb. Many aspiring entrepreneurs have been turned back by this problem. They accept defeat in the face of the fact that they could not raise the money they need to bring their dreams alive.

 

Coming from the same background myself, having started my business with N6,500, part of which was borrowed from one of my mentors, I understand what it is like to have an idea and lack the money to launch it.

 

In 1984, after three months of seriously looking for money to get my publishing business off the ground and getting nowhere, I nearly got sucked in by this problem. But, thank God, another problem led me to confront the problem head-long. And here I am today.

 

In this 3-hour seminar. I have put together SEVEN critical steps anyone might take to start a business with little or none of their own money. These were steps that I  have taken (and which others that I know have also taken), to create financial sufficiency.

 

The good thing about these strategies is that it is not rocket science. Anyone who is honest (and I want to emphasize HONESTly), can apply these proven strategies to start their own business without any of their money (or just a little of it). By little, I  mean it as in LITTLE.

 

I was first told that I could start a business without a kobo of mine in 1986 but I didn’t believe it was possible. Unfortunately, the man who promised to tell me how to do it died before I had the chance of learning the secret from him.

 

Back in 1986, I was spending an average of seventy percent of the working hours in a week in the bank. Don’t get the wrong idea that I was a staff of the banks where I  had accounts. I wasn‘t. I was only one of their customers. But because my business was always short of money (I didn’t have enough of it to start with), I was spending that much time in the bank trying to cajole the manager to extend one favour or the other to me.

 

It wasn’t until 1992, the eighth year after I went into business for myself, that I was free from this bondage.

 

So, you can appreciate my eagerness to learn the secret of how one could start a business without putting in a kobo from the man who had the secret. I traveled several kilometers to get this information. But it didn‘t fall on my laps like manna from heaven. I got the secret the hard way: by trial and error.

 

But years and years of using and perfecting these strategies have made them to become invaluable. A rare gem. Something that will be worth millions of naira to you. In three short hours, I will cut away all the fats and remove all the bones so that what you have left is pure beef: the essential things you must do to lay your hands on the start-up capital.

 

First published in April, 2000.