Business Opportunities for You !!!

Type of Opportunity: Distributor / Agent / Reseller

Overview of Opportunity:

The demand for hair extensions in Africa is growing at a frantic pace. The hair and beauty industry is enormous; some estimates place its worth at $9 billion, and the distribution, supply, marketing and retail of its products is truly global in scope.

The growth of Africa’s hair and beauty market has grown tremendously over the years. Research has reported that the average woman spends approximately $50,000 on her hair over the course of her lifetime. Human hair extensions are in vogue in Africa, and with the influence of celebrity culture the desire for them amongst women in Africa has dramatically increased.

It is a growing market that can prove very lucrative with the right product, team and marketing support. Prestige Luxe Hair, the leading purveyor of 100% Virgin Hair, is seeking capable distributors across Africa.

Nigeria beyond 2015: Insights on Africa’s largest economy

Last year Nigeria became the largest economy on the continent, surpassing South Africa with a GDP valued at US$519bn. At a GDP growth rate of 7.3% and a population of over 160 million, Nigeria could be argued to present the best opportunity for many investors, including South Africans, looking at the African continent.
South African law firm Webber Wentzel and africapractice recently hosted a panel discussion to explore the investment potential presented by the Nigerian economy.
Three key themes emerged from the discussion. The first of these highlighted the relatively small impact that the elections would have on the country’s investment potential. The second theme focused on the financial sector, with a strong suggestion that Nigeria had to be at the core of any strategy devised by banking institutions serious about success on the continent. The final theme was South Africa’s need to better understand the jurisdictions in which it was looking to invest, starting with Nigeria.

Budding Nigerian entrepreneurs to watch

Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, is seeing the emergence of many young, promising entrepreneurs.The Anzisha Prize, a competition that recognizes and celebrates African entrepreneurs between the ages of 15 and 22 who are using business to solve problems in their communities, is currently making its way through 339 applications to find this year’s top 12. According to Chi Achebe, programme manager for The Anzisha Prize, the competition received applications from 32 countries across the continent, with the highest number of entries coming from Nigeria.

While reviewers are still evaluating entries, How we made it in Africa has been profiling some of these applicants, and this week focuses on some of the young Nigerian entrepreneurs who have applied for the award.

The entrepreneurs profiled below have been selected randomly and are not necessarily winners.

Digital marketing agency reeling in the big fish – Sunkanmi Ola (22)
After finishing university in 2012, Sunkanmi Ola founded a digital advertising agency when he saw a gap in the market. During the venture’s early days Ola kept close contact with a mentor who gave him leads on when companies where taking pitches from advertising agencies to market their brands.

Avoiding common business mistakes in 2015

A new year presents business owners with not only an opportunity to evaluate and set goals for the upcoming year, but also a chance to avoid some of the common business mistakes that are made during the year.This is according to Christo Botes, executive director of Business Partners, who says that as entrepreneurs are often required to be a jack-of-all-trades, focusing on too many aspects of the business which can result in costly mistakes occurring as it is impossible for one individual to oversee all the various roles within the business.

“Being successful in business is a delicate juggling act and while business owners cannot completely avoid making mistakes, they can ensure that mistakes already made are not repeated. When it comes to managing a business, recurring mistakes can threaten the long-term viability and success of the company. Many business owners also seem to repeat simple mistakes that could have been avoided by exercising diligence and proactive planning.”

Don`t Waste Your Money

You may have heard that some rich people are very stingy. Some of them are known to bring food from home to their office.
What they have learned is that it is important to make every penny to count. They ensure that every penny spent is accounted for. Remember, what you do with $1 is probably what you will do with a $1,000
Respect the resources that you have because what you don`t respect you may lose

An Entrepreneur who left Poland to start a business in Nigeria

Marek Zmyslowski, managing director of Jovago – a popular online hotel booking site in Africa – believes some of his biggest successes have been a result of taking chances. And leaving his home country Poland to move to Lagos to start an online company is no exception

It all started when he decided earlier in his career that he wanted to be an entrepreneur. Speaking at a recent TEDxIfe event in Nigeria, he admitted his first attempt was a complete flop. “Whenever an entrepreneur hopes to start an idea, he thinks about solving his own problems. That’s mainly how it works. So I built a dating website. And in six months I had failed tremendously, in a spectacular way.”

However, despite the failure, he realised he still wanted to be an entrepreneur in the online space. And although he was broke, he decided not to give up and started searching for investors for his next big idea.

9 Ways to Become a Better Investor

Treat your money like soap
Your money is like soap. The more you handle it, the less you have.” So true. Moving money entails transaction costs, sometimes tax consequences, and most often, you’re going to move it at the wrong time. How do I know this? Year after year research shows that average investors underperform the market, earning half of the returns they could have all because of their poor timing abilities. For better than average investing, when you move money, it needs to be part of well-designed investment plan, not a last-minute reaction.

Learn the term "dollar cost averaging"

Dollar cost averaging is a strategy used to reduce market risk by automatically investing a set amount at regular intervals. It forces you to buy more shares when the market is down, and buy less when the market is up. Smart savers automate their savings plans and let them run for years and years at a time. Be a smart saver, and if you don’t already, start dollar cost averaging.

10 Ways to Get Rich By Warren Buffett's

With an estimated fortune of $62 billion, Warren Buffett is the richest man in the entire world. In 1962, when he began buying stock in Berkshire Hathaway, a share cost $7.50. Today, Warren Buffett, 78, is Berkshire's chairman and CEO, and one share of the company's class A stock worth close to $119,000. He credits his astonishing success to several key strategies, which he has shared with writer Alice Schroeder. She spend hundreds of hours interviewing the Sage of Omaha for the new authorized biography The Snowball. Here are some of Warren Buffett's money-making secrets -- and how they could work for you.

1. Reinvest Your Profits:
When you first make money in the stock market, you may be tempted to spend it. Don't. Instead, reinvest the profits. Warren Buffett learned this early on. In high school, he and a pal bought a pinball machine to put in a barbershop. With the money they earned, they bought more machines until they had eight in different shops. When the friends sold the venture, Warren Buffett used the proceeds to buy stocks and to start another small business. By age 26, he'd amassed $174,000 -- or $1.4 million in today's money. Even a small sum can turn into great wealth.

2. Be Willing To Be Different:
Don't base your decisions upon what everyone is saying or doing. When Warren Buffett began managing money in 1956 with $100,000 cobbled together from a handful of investors, he was dubbed an oddball. He worked in Omaha, not Wall Street, and he refused to tell his parents where he was putting their money. People predicted that he'd fail, but when he closed his partnership 14 years later, it was worth more than $100 million. Instead of following the crowd, he looked for undervalued investments and ended up vastly beating the market average every single year. To Warren Buffett, the average is just that -- what everybody else is doing. to be above average, you need to measure yourself by what he calls the Inner Scorecard, judging yourself by your own standards and not the world's.

African Dream: Ghanaian banker turned shoemaker

Fred Deegbe is a former banker who decided to take on the world's leading shoe brands.

Back in 2011, he teamed up with a friend to start Heel The World - a high-end shoemaking company based in Accra, Ghana. He gave up his banking job one year later to dedicate himself fully in his new ambitious venture. The young entrepreneur wants to prove that quality shoes can be made in his country.
Heel The World, which currently has 13 full-time employees, has built a website to take orders and relies heavily on social media for marketing.

Top business tips for 2015

It is the time of year when forward planning comes to the forefront of people's minds. Here are the 10 Top business tips from various leaders as profiled in the BBC's business magazine.

James Watt, co-founder of Scottish beer firm Brewdog

Work like a demon, work stupid, stupid hours. So make sure you are enjoying yourself. Running your business shouldn't feel like work, it should feel like a hobby. This is what sustains you if things are ever difficult. And only employ amazing people. You need to get the most out of your staff, so don't employ anyone you aren't sure about.

Don't be scared to take risks [in growing your business], as the biggest risk to your company is when you stop. Yet at the same time, you need to be forensic with your finances. This is something that a lot of small firms don't pay enough attention to, and therefore risk failing. It isn't the fun or sexy part of running a company, but it is vital, and you need to be clued up about it.

Danae Ringelmann, crowdfunding website Indiegogo

As Gandhi once said, "be the change you want to see in the world". I whole-heartedly agree. As a leader, I believe actions speak far louder than words. People follow what they see, not hear. So whether it's greater workforce diversity, faster innovation, or more accountability, change starts with you.

12 Lessons Learned In 12 Years Of Marriage

We were married before I graduated college. Pregnant with our first child shortly after. I finished college. New baby. Two miscarriages. Four more children. When the youngest was born, we had five children under 8 years old. Owned four homes. Rented a house and an apartment somewhere in between. Five different jobs with four different companies. Lived in four cities. In many ways, life has been on fast-forward.

In the course of these 12 years, we've learned a great deal. About ourselves. About each other. About the importance of marriage. And why it's worth fighting for. We were young, in love and ready for marriage when we said yes in our early twenties. But that doesn't necessarily mean we were prepared. 12 years later, here are 12 things that have been clarified for us in our marriage:

Expectations Lead to Disappointment
For a season, we viewed marriage like it was a game. A competition. If I do this, you should do that. Meet me in the middle here, do a little more there. If you do 20 things, I'll do 20. That sort of game. But the true work is done when one of you can't get to the middle. When it's up to the other to go the extra mile. Maybe that ratio is 90/10 for a season if a spouse is sick, stressed, even depressed. Don't view marriage as a scorecard, someone always loses that way.

What does financial freedom looks like to you?

Have you ever seen people who have financial freedom and thought to yourself, “I want to be able to live like that, too”? For most of us, the mental picture of financial freedom looks like someone who spends what they want when they want to, without concern about whether they will be able to afford it.

Are you financially prepared for life’s major events?

Are you prepared for this year’s life events? Our lives are shaped by various events that come with financial consequences. Too many of us get swept up in such events without being prepared financially.Life events range from the significant milestones of starting a first job, to getting married and starting a family, educating your children, losing a job, relocating, buying a home, caring for ageing parents, losing a loved one, and planning for your retirement and your estate.

 

Are you planning to get married this year?

Money is an important aspect of marriage and one of the most difficult topics to deal with. Whilst the time leading up to the wedding is very busy, try to make time to discuss money matters with your fiancé before the register is signed; open communication will help you both to align your goals which ultimately makes for a more secure and successful marriage.

Please Keep Your Focus

The secret of success is concentration. The cause of failure is a broken focus. The only reason Men fails is as a result of a broken focus. Your enemies are afraid of your total concentration on your divine assignment, and that is why they would try to break your focus by bringing a distraction into your life.

How to Plan and Achieve your Personal and Business Goals

 

Learn how to set effective personal goals. Many people feel as if they're adrift in the world. They work hard, but they don't seem to get anywhere worthwhile. A key reason that they feel this way is that they haven't spent enough time thinking about what they want from life, and haven't set themselves formal goals and objectives. After all, would you set out on a major journey with no real idea of your destination? Probably not! 

Goal setting is a powerful process for thinking about your ideal future, and for motivating yourself to turn your vision of this future into reality. The process of setting goals helps you choose where you want to go in life. By knowing precisely what you want to achieve, you know where you have to concentrate your efforts. You'll also quickly spot the distractions that can, so easily, lead you astray.

Why do you need to set Goals?

Top-level athletes, successful business-people and achievers in all fields all set goals. Setting goals gives you long-term vision and short-term motivation. It focuses your acquisition of knowledge, and helps you to organize your time and your resources so that you can make the very most of your life.

Common mistakes of new Entrepreneurs

When it comes to starting out as an entrepreneur or launching a business there is no formula or fool proof plan - certainly no magic blueprint for success. However, there are several common mistakes that unnecessarily move many entrepreneurs off the road to success and onto the dreaded path of failure. Here are the most common mistakes made by entrepreneurs and advice on how you can combat them:

Not mastering the 'four point business triangle'
If you have an idea for a company you want to start, you will need to do many different jobs to make the idea work.
You must get organized. Sometimes you need to be a boss, sometimes you need to be a bookkeeper, sometimes you need to produce a service or product for your customers and sometimes you will need to do marketing and sales. No one person is good at all four parts. This is what I call the four point business triangle.

Incorrectly valuing your company
When you evaluate the company, you can use the value of the company as an asset, which is really like cash. Most new entrepreneurs think the value is equal to sales. Not true at all.

Important traits to Learn from Successful People

Most people wouldn’t complain if they suddenly became rich. In fact, millions of people play the lottery every week with just this hope even though, statistically, their chances of winning are next to nothing.

Obviously, very few of the wealthy people we’re jealous of have gotten rich this way. As we know, “get rich quick” schemes are usually a gimmick or a con, so it follows that most wealthy people have invested time and effort into getting where they are today.

Look for a Problem to Solve

Everything God has made is a solution to a problem. Your worth and significance are determined by the kind of problem you are solving for people in a community.

You are paid to Think, Not to do



‘To be an effective leader requires the confidence to do the so-called invisible work of thinking’

A leader has about 2,500 hours a year available to work, and a significant part of a leader’s role and what they are paid for is to think. It is therefore entirely okay for a leader to spend time sitting looking out of the window, thinking. Too often, thinking is seen as being idle or lazy. To be an effective leader requires
the confidence to do the so called ‘invisible work’ of thinking. Of course, while staring out of the window may involve considerable cognitive labour, it’s tough to explain to one’s colleagues. Dealing with minutiae gives the appearance of being busy, but being busy masks the fact that a leader can easily be busy on the wrong things.The importance of being seen to be working is not a new thing: presenteeism has existed since the dawn of the modern office.

For many leaders, having space and time to think is crucial to their success. And this goes beyond pure meditation. Mindfulness, the act of being completely present in the moment, not worrying about the past or the future, is currently in vogue.