By Dr Wilfred Isak April
COMMUNICATION skills are one of the most important skills you need to acquire as an entrepreneur. It will enable you to get your business ideas across and explain your thoughts to a potential investor or even a customer. Even more important is communication in terms of making money. Believe you me, you can have a great business idea or an excellent business plan but if you are unable to effectively convey that message to the next person, then no one is going to follow you.
Today I challeng each one of you to imagine that there are nine broke people around you. Just take a rough guess and tell me who will be the tenth one? I am certain that all of you will be able to get that one right.
Therefore I have to remind you that you need to communicate effectively to attract resources and business relationships. As a person who wants to generate income you are automatically a leader, but you need people, you need money and I believe that the only way you can get those things to show up is to communicate effectively. This implies that sometimes in business you can’t tell long personal stories. Sometimes potential investors are certainly not interested about your long boring stories, they would like to know are you able to meet the need, can you deliver, can you perform and if you can do those things, your business deal will be sealed.
By now some of you may think that we all are different and respond differently to various situations. There might be some sensitive readers right now who are shy to ask for money, ask for the business deal, who doubt whether they will sound intelligent and convincing enough. How should you go about communicating effectively? Great thought my dear readers. Keep thinking, keep dreaming big and you will certainly get there.
I want to remind you that there seems to be more male entrepreneurs than female entrepreneurs in Namibia. So you have to communicate effectively. Within a more male dominated business environment such as Namibia, with men and the way men hear, you have to talk in bullet points. This means when you walk into the room first of all make it clear from the onset what is the subject and then the bottom line. If the meeting has to continue, there must be three clear-cut bullet points.
When you talk in that specific manner the potential investor will hear you loud and clear. When you are looking for funding, and sometimes even for a promotion, some people are not really interested in your own personal struggles and challenges at home. It does not mean that they are monsters, but we are strictly talking about business and you are asking for funding or about a potential business deal, so talk in specific bullet points that would support your type of enterprise. It is strongly advisable that if you wish to be an effective entrepreneurial communicator then keep the storytelling short.
Finally, I would like to leave you with a few pointers as to how communication can really increase your bottom line. Well, when you are talking to an investor, banker or someone in your family who is interested in making money. These people really want to know if they invest N$1000 when are they going to get it back. The response will be the bullet points: When I receive your money Dr April, I am going to use it for four months and you are going to get it back in the sixth month and here is how we’re going to do it. That is all some investors are interested in. This leads us to a very interesting topic for next week: ‘Find the coaching in criticism,’ you don’t want to miss that discussion. Please do join us again.
• Dr Wilfred Isak April is a Unam graduate and holds a PhD- Entrepreneurship (New Zealand). He lectures in Leadership, Organizational Behaviour and Entrepreneurship at the University of Namibia.