Running a business, any kind of business, is a herculean task. It requires insane time management skills, people skills, frugality skills, rapid fire thinking, tonnes of mental stamina and a won’t-take-no-for-an-answer attitude. And that’s on a good day.
Running a business in the middle of a recession, well you either have to be nuts, or part of the millions of (un)fortunate entrepreneurs hustling in the country called Nigeria in 2016.
There’s a silver lining though. While it may sound counterintuitive, in many cases, starting with a small amount of capital is preferable to launching with a large chunk of cash. That’s because it makes you always stop to ask the all-important question: Is this absolutely necessary? Do we absolutely need to do this?
Office real estate is one major blackhole for capital. Landlords aren’t smiling either so it’s not like office spaces are gonna get any cheaper.
Your first option is to go the coworking route. The average coworking space would cost you around N40,000 a month. That’s N480,000 a year. The average office space would cost somewhere between N600,000 and 1 million.
Do the math.
If the numbers make sense, and it should, we can help you get started with shared workspaces in Lagos. (See bottom of article).
Your next option is to work out of your home office. If your home doesn’t have an office, make one pronto. That way, you’ll be getting an office and a home for the price of one. Many of the tech behemoths today (Amazon, Google, Apple) started in someone’s apartment or garage). If a garage was good enough for Gates and Jobs, let it be good enough for you.
2. Leverage on Barter
This transaction method dates as far back as 1555. Yep, we’re digging that far down
the bag of tricks.
Listen, your transaction returns don’t have to be cash. You can get more value when people pay you in kind instead. For example, when one of the Buffrspace founders was looking for an office space in 2012, an office space in Yaba space was going for about N750,000/annum. That was too much for his budget. Fortunately, some guy in his church wanted a website. He usually charged N120,000 per website. But the church guy said he didn’t have that kind of budget so offered instead to pay N50,000 plus free workspace.
So for N50,000, our founder got a serviced office space for one year, for “free”. The highest expense he had was fueling the generator on weekends.
Post Credit: Buffr Space
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