WalletWise

The Return of the
__Shhh! Don't be an amateur!

Many years ago I was on a flight, and sitting there I listened to two guys in front of me speaking in hushed tones. As I listened carefully, I realized they were from a competitor company discussing a very interesting opportunity that I had not heard about! Wow!

As soon as I got off the plane I did two things: First of all, I moved in quickly and took over that deal from right under their nose. To this day, they don't know what happened! No regrets on my part, those were fools!

Second, I told my people, never, ever, open your mouth about what we are doing in public. Don't discuss business issues whilst on the phone in public, and don't sit next to each other on the plane or bus!

It never ceases to surprise me how careless people are about what they are doing. Some just do it to boast, and those ones I won't talk about here! (We don't have the boastful type on this platform.)

When I was a graduate student at university, one of my engineering professors asked me to help him on a criminal court case where he was an "expert witness." We had to set up an experiment to demonstrate that a person who claimed to have overheard a confession could not possibly have heard it from where they were. It was a very technical sound engineering experiment at the time. Through that work I learnt not to say too much in public...!

Actually a good entrepreneur does not talk about what they are "planning to do" before the business reaches the customer. If you must, talk about what you have "already done." Otherwise keep quiet.

This is a principle I try to use all the time. When you get into serious business, your competitors are constantly studying what you are saying or doing. It's not just a question of being accidentally eavesdropped by the guy sitting behind or in front of you on a plane...

And don't make the mistake of assuming certain people are harmless by observing the way they're dressed, or even their age, or gender. You can make a deadly mistake through thinking someone is not important!

There are also detractors who, whilst not being an actual competitor, are consumed by what can best be described as a "spirit of jealousy" and will go out of their way to destroy or impede the work of others, even though there's no gain for them. It's part of life, so don't give them the ammunition they need.

Some time ago, I wrote a series about how you protect your plans, and Intellectual Property (IP), including ideas and inventions. Go back to it, and study it carefully.

Even on this platform, please avoid giving details about what you are "planning" or "thinking" about, without taking adequate measures to protect it in the professional manner. Don't send or publish business plans to people.

It is like leaving your wallet on a counter in a bar!

End.

Strive Masiyiwa
Be prepared to change your career (Part 2)
__Experience alone is not enough.
In a few weeks, I will be 56 years (young). I have been
working for more than 33 years (old). By all measures,
you might say I'm experienced. But what does this
mean in the age of constant change, in which I must
change my career (the way I do my job) every five
years? Either I change the way I do my job, or my job
changes, or it might disappear altogether!
# Experience is important but it is not enough.
In fact, when you get to my age or older and all you
can talk about is your experience, it’s nothing more
than vanity!
What’s one definition of experience? “The process of
getting knowledge or skill from doing, seeing or feeling
things.”
"I don't read any books," the veteran began proudly.
"Really, I could write most of those books myself
because I know it all. I have been doing this job for 30
years."
__This guy needs to retire quickly because he will
destroy the organization!
You can be old and young at the same time... You
cannot afford to think old!
# Experience is important, but it is not enough.
You must complement it with a constant desire and
hunger to learn new things and change your career,
again and again and again.
Have you ever noticed how hard it is for a team to win
back to back World Cup soccer titles?
# When you have a winning team, you don't want to
make changes, but that’s when change must be
uppermost in your mind.
Much of our older executive corps in Africa really
battle with change, and wear their experience as a
right of entitlement. This needs to change.
Management and leadership roles are not immune to
change.
# Experience is important but it is not enough.
Probably the best engineer I ever worked with was a
South African guy called Les Cullen. He was already in
his 60s when I first hired him, and he worked for me
well into his 70s. In every way, Les was like a 26-year
old!
His curiosity was insatiable. It always seemed that
every day he was trying out a new idea or reading
about a new idea.
So this is not an age thing. It's about a mindset. I have
known 30-year old who, only 10 years out of college,
cannot absorb a new idea! I have known 80-year olds
who embrace new ideas and change their careers with
extraordinary energy and gusto.
Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus (70+) wrote
something interesting. (He’s a social entrepreneur that
pioneered the ideas of microcredit and microfinance).
He said his greatest challenge has been to change the
mindset of people.
“Mindsets play strange tricks on us,” he wrote. “We see
things the way our minds have instructed our eyes to
see…”
Now don’t let the idea of change panic you. Get your
mindset around the idea that in this rapidly changing
world, we’ll ALL need to be prepared to change our
career, again and again and again.
I saw a quote recently that made me smile: “A year
from now you will wish you had started today!”
To be continued. . .

The hardest thing to do in business: building an efficient organization (Part 3)
__Always pay your workers first.
You can’t call yourself an entrepreneur if you have the habit of not paying your workers on time, erratically, or not at all. Real business leaders always pay their employees first. Let's call it the first law of entrepreneurship.
Let's talk.
I began my business career as a construction contractor more than 30 years ago. My business entailed getting construction contracts, some which took several years to complete. I would sometimes have thousands of people working on my projects. 90% of my people were paid on a weekly basis. It was almost a ritual, whereby we’d go to the bank on Friday morning to collect the "payroll."
Each worker was paid in cash, and we would sit and pack the money into little brown envelopes, after deducting taxes. We'd then travel to the sites and pay them their money.
I never ever missed a payroll… except once, and it probably saved my life. I was abducted from my office at gun point on one of my payroll days. The person who raised the alarm that I was missing said this: "We know something has happened to him because he didn’t come to supervise the release of this week's payroll."
# If you owe your workers money, you’re not yet an entrepreneur.
The second law of successful entrepreneurship is this: If, for any reason, you’re going to miss your payroll, you must always make sure the lowest paid workers are the first to get paid -- not the managers and others you deem most skilled.
# Always pay the lowest paid workers first. They’re the most vulnerable.
If we didn’t have enough money to meet our payroll, I spoke to my senior people and asked them to make the sacrifice. It also meant I myself would go home with nothing. But workers like cleaners, laborers (we had a lot of these in the construction business), drivers etc., were always paid first. This always included the youngest people in our business.
If you want to go far as an entrepreneur, treat workers’ salaries and wages as sacrosanct. If you see a big man who has lots of cars, a big house, goes on holiday overseas but is in arrears on salaries and wages, he’s really not an entrepreneur.
Don't be fooled, he’s not a big man at all! True entrepreneurs pay their people on time, all the time. And they take care of the most vulnerable members of their organizations first. I’d rather someone called me a successful entrepreneur on the basis that I never missed my payroll, than on the basis that I made a billion dollars.
Now to help avoid such a crisis, there’s one thing you must learn to do straight away in your business, and that’s manage your cash flow… your “accounts receivable” (sales) and your “accounts payable” (expenses). If you don’t keep track of your cash flow, I guarantee at the end of some months, you’ll have a shortfall.
If you haven’t already done so, put together a cash flow budget, with a few different scenarios (best case, worst case, different assumptions). You can’t predict everything, of course, and surprises happen, but do your best with what you know now. Cash in? Cash out? Timing? Enough cash to meet payroll? (This is a complicated subject but we’re just talking about payroll here.)
A few years ago there was an article in Forbes’ magazine called “Success will come and go, but integrity is forever.” Never forget that. Most all businesses have legal and contractual obligations which you must respect. But there are also moral obligations to consider... Do you know the difference?