KIMAROSE ZAMBIA

 Quick question: What do Walt Disney, Sam Walton, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Dave Thomas, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell and Bill Gates have in common, apart from the fact that all of them are in the entrepreneurial hall of fame? The answer: none of them had a formal education. Not one of them graduated from college when they should have (it’s another thing that some of them have been awarded degrees later). In most cases of successful entrepreneurship, it looks like success in entrepreneurship has no correlation to education. The real answer to whether or not education makes a difference is tricky. Surely, though, the right kind of entrepreneurial education puts entrepreneurs through a better conceptual framework, introduces concepts that are necessary for entrepreneurship, and introduces you to the world of business. So, education has its place but is certainly not necessary for success in entrepreneurship. According to Saras Sarasvathy who conducted research by sampling about 30 ...

 Capital raising is by far, the most important skill that any entrepreneur needs to master. We all know that the lifeblood of any business is … the money. If your business is just an idea, that has the potential to take off and become a runaway success, then you’ll need money to get to market and make sure that everyone knows about your business. If your business has just started, and you are doing something right, you’ll need more money than you have on hand, in order to grow. Either way, you’ll need to master fundraising, an incredibly important part of building and growing, a successful business. Often people want to raise money because they think it’s cool or easier, to be a venture-backed startup. It’s not. You’re selling a portion of your company. You shouldn’t do it unless you absolutely need additional capital to bring your vision to a reality. It has never been less expensive to have an idea, build an MVP (minimum viable product), and test it to see if it has traction. How...

Launching a startup is not an easy feat in Africa, and many entrepreneurs who go it alone find they may not have the necessary experience when it comes to running other areas of the company, such as small business cash flow. 4 in 10 startups will fail within their first 3 to 5 years of operation, and one of the most significant contributors to the high failure rate is an inability to manage small business cash flow. It's exciting to get the ball rolling and see your ideas take shape, but it can be easy to lose focus on your financial stability during those first critical months. In this article, we will talk about what is cash flow management for startups and provide 6 cash flow management tips SME owners can apply to their business. If you are ready to learn more please sit down and make yourself a cup of green tea and enjoy what we are going to explain to you in this article. We have decided to share with about this, after visiting different countries like Tanzania, Botswana, Sou...

These five steps will help you toward a safe, secure, and fun retirement Retirement planning is a multistep process that evolves over time. To have a comfortable, secure—and fun—retirement, you need to build the financial cushion that will fund it all. The fun part is why it makes sense to pay attention to the serious and perhaps boring part: planning how you’ll get there. Planning for retirement starts with thinking about your retirement goals and how long you have to meet them. Then you need to look at the types of retirement accounts that can help you raise the money to fund your future. As you save that money, you have to invest it to enable it to grow. The surprise last part is taxes: If you’ve received tax deductions over the years for the money you’ve contributed to your retirement accounts, a significant tax bill awaits when you start withdrawing those savings. There are ways to minimize the retirement tax hit while you save for the future—and to continue the process when that ...

   Few weeks ago, thousands of bright-eyed, ambitious graduates  walked out of universities (CBU, UNZA, Cavendish Unilus, Royal and many more) halls of institutions of higher learning and into the larger world. Among these graduates will be the next generation of innovators, founders, entrepreneurs and small business owners not forgoting also those who will be looking for employment on a daily basis. These adventurers, some armed with well-defined business plans and others with nothing but dreams and moxie, are determined to follow the road less traveled and carve out their own unique career paths. But before turning down a steady job or packing away the interview suit, let me  evaluate if they truly have what it takes to start a business. I  asked business experts, economist and entrepreneurs, many of whom started their first business right out of universities, for entrepreneurial advice for this year's graduating classes. Here are some of the key lessons they ...

Thinking about going into business with someone? Be sure to weigh these pros and cons first. Perhaps because of the uncertain business climate, more people are deciding to pool their talents and go into business together. Their entrepreneurial impulse is to be applauded. The advantage of going into business with a partner is being able to make the most of shared resources and complementary talents of others in a new enterprise. But going into business together is more than just two people with complementary talents "teaming up" to work together and there may be legal implications. Over the course of my journey, I've been personally involved with a number of good partners, but I've also learned some valuable lessons from arrangements that didn't turn out so well. One of my initial partnerships went sour as a result of my partner obligating our company for services I knew nothing about. In the end, this was my first real experience in "business divorce," t...

Entrepreneurs create businesses, businesses create jobs and people with jobs make good customers There’s been a lot of talk lately about the future of work. Much of the time, these conversations are fueled by the anxiety many of us share as we try to understand the impact new technologies have on our industries. We tend to reduce these discussions to binary arguments -- how smart machines are doing extraordinary things to improve our lives, or how this or that innovation will make human labor obsolete, creating a jobless dystopia. Both conclusions strike me as somewhat specious. It’s not that these concerns aren’t valid, but they oversimplify a more complex phenomenon. Why do entrepreneurship and innovation fuel economic growth? On the surface, the answer seems intuitive: entrepreneurs create businesses and new businesses create jobs, strengthen market competition and increase productivity. In Africa entrepreneurism is part of our continent identity and self-image. It’s non-partisan, t...