From $ 50 to $ 50,000 In Revenue (I)
It all started when I wanted to make a difference in my life and change my financial standing as an entrepreneur. I compared the salaries earned by my colleagues who had gone straight to work with Multinationals with what I was earning as a hardcore tech entrepreneur and co-founder.
Even though comparing these two things didn’t make sense, I still went ahead to compare them. It was like comparing Coconuts and Pineapples by doing a drop test, of course the Pineapple will get dented and eventually disintegrate. To be frank, it was a silly thing to do, however, I had to compare them because the common denominator was money. For staff of multinationals and startup employees the common expectation was money. Both groups of people received financial renumeration for their effort at the end of each month called salary.
The difference in the salary was wide and scary. Our entire monthly revenue was the monthly salary of a colleague working with an oil company. A single person was earning more than our entire company with ten (10+) plus employees. This got me thinking, asking questions and wondering whether something wrong with me or with the entire team that was building this startup. Were we dump or just not good enough to make money?
Could it be that our business model didn’t make sense or we just could not take advantage of a large market opportunity? Why was our revenues not large enough to afford us the kind of salaries equivalent to those working in multinational companies? Was the question a valid one in the first place or it was totally out of place to do such comparison? Whatever the case ,this was a real blow to our ambition of building our own company and growing it to become very successful and in the process making us wealthy entrepreneurs.
The irony of the matter was, most of our colleagues in corporate always talked about how they admired the tenacity and drive we had in building our own company. They were amazed by our desire to take on such risk. Risk of not knowing where your next salary will come from. Risk of not knowing whether our biggest customer was still going to be using our services the following month. Risk of not knowing whether the cheque promised the previous month was actually going to be paid.
This kind of risk taking earned us praises but never paid the bills, it boosted our morales but didn’t turn into cash directly. Like we say in our local Twi dialect “ Na morale na y3 be di ” literally translated, “Will we eat morale for food”. With so much morale pills in the air from our well paid corporate colleagues, I decided to find out if I could change my financial standing while building a startup.
