How we Re-positioned a Natural Food Supplement Product Produced in Our Community

Whether as a solopreneur or manager of a well-staffed team, running a business can often prove tedious and overwhelming. I’ve found myself at this junction countless times.
It often seems like the tasks are endless: Emails to reply, teams to organize, meetings to attend, clients who want your attention, queries to issues and it almost leaves no time for even lunch. At the end of the workday, exhaustion makes you hit the pillow only to rinse and repeat it all on the next day.
After a while, you would realize that there’s been neither room nor time for novel and creative thoughts. The implication here is that your business is run in the same way and therefore, achieves the same results no matter the set target.
In this post and the next 2, I will talk about these 3 things you can do to ensure that running your business becomes less stressful:
<ol>
<li>Think differently</li>
<li>Create a system around your business</li>
<li>Give your employees a level of autonomy</li>
</ol>
The famous words “Think different” by Steve Jobs might be just the game plan you need to turn the tide for your business.
Here are 2 ways you can begin to change your thought patterns:
<h2>Create a vision and stick to it!</h2>
A vision is a mental picture you have for your business about the level of growth you hope to achieve within a time period. A clear vision helps you set the right goals, make the right inputs, and most of all, know what you as the manager/owner of the business should not become immersed in. When you know the endpoint, it becomes easier to set priorities. Reduce the stress by setting the right picture and creating only what you see.
<h2>Be more flexible</h2>
In contrast to what popular opinion might be, not running your business by the book does not mean failure. If none of the rules of the book work for you, throw the book out the window. Don’t be afraid to innovate on existing methods to create ones that work for you. Your business location, your work hours, your strategy, your voice, etc. can be flipped and re-thought.
<blockquote>Your questions should be “Does my current strategy help me achieve my goals?” “Is my business achieving any measure of growth?”</blockquote>
Put your feet up some time today and dive into some honest thoughts.

How Entrepreneurs Can Reduce Stress.

When it comes to measuring the scale of your business, small is not actually small. I repeat SMALL IS NOT SMALL. Here are 3 costly assumptions you might be making as a ‘small’ business:
<ul>
<li style="text-align:justify;">We are too busy building, documentation and record-keeping can come when we become big.</li>
<li style="text-align:justify;">All businesses function alike especially if they are in the same industry</li>
<li style="text-align:justify;">Our initial strategy is perfect, we just need to stay loyal to it</li>
</ul>
Everything stems from your belief that “we are just 1 or 2 on our team”. This makes you quickly lose the consciousness of the fact that ‘business is business’ if you are in for the long term. Here is a 3-part series on the thought-patterns of potentially big businesses but we will focus on the first today and walk through others, subsequently.
Most small businesses do not take documentation seriously right from the start, and it is not just enough to have it all in your head. When our brand was about to launch in 2018, we almost committed this same blunder, mixing up records, and not making it clear enough. I mean we were so excited about carrying out market research and developing our product that keeping track of something as small as transportation cost, or writing reports (keeping records is not limited to cash flow alone) almost seemed insignificant. Phew! It was a roller coaster of activities, but the key importance of doing this is that you will be able to track spending, revenue, and profit as well as to measure the progress your product is making in the market.
As it is important in everyday life to do reviews, evaluations, and backtrack in order to be able to map out the best way to move forward, make improvements, correct mistakes and keep tabs on excesses, the same goes for a business, irrespective of the scale.
A small business is like that baby that you just have to nurture until it matures. You will pay close attention to the kind of food he eats, possible allergies, etc, and make necessary changes or keep a habit, depending on the baby’s response. And if you are not observant and diligent at keeping track enough, something really bad could happen to the baby.
Other forms of documentation that are imperative include; Vision, Goals, Objectives, Projections, Achieved results, Timelines, Customer feedback, etc.
You keep records to be able to know early on, what works for your own particular business and what doesn’t.
What kind of documentation do you consider important? Kindly comment below.&nbsp;

Business is Business — Keep Track

Eridan is an incubator and accelerator designed to build transcendent founders for transgenerational businesses. As an organization, Eridan believes strongly that sustainable impact businesses are made of great communities.
To achieve this, Eridan works toward building communities of exceptional founders and providing them with the right resources, which will help them transform their startups into sustainable and impactful growth businesses.
To reach the right audience as well as scale the organization, Eridan needed a brand narrative and a website that portrays all the value they present to the founders that will use their services.
A member of our directors happened to be on the Eridan team at the time we executed this project, and he gave us a breakdown of the goals and vision of the organization. This breakdown helped us understand the project as well as to come up with the best strategy for this project.
With the strategy, we were able to highlight three of our services that would help achieve their goals which are “to educate, equip, nurture, connect, invest in and project exceptional founders” to be;
<ul>
<li style="text-align:justify;">Branding</li>
<li style="text-align:justify;">Website development</li>
<li style="text-align:justify;">Content creation and management</li>
</ul>
Under our Branding service, we developed a brand visual identity which includes; logo design, brand colour, typography, favicon, and imagery to reflect Eridan’s core values of “Community, originality, versatility, and future-mindedness,” as well as to equip, nurture, and invest in exceptional founders.
We designed the Eridan logomark to hinge on the ‘womb’ that houses a fetus, nourishes it till it matures and is ready to start life on its own. We did this to reflect Eridan’s mission statement which is “to educate, equip, nurture, and invest in exceptional founders, just like a womb provides nourishment and life for a fetus till it is ready to start life on its own.”
The website was designed and developed using WordPress as the building block. This decision was made to make room for seamless functionality and easy accessibility of the platform without altering the quality and usability of the website. It was also considered for the CMS (Content Management System) to enable the Eridan team to publish and edit content seamlessly as soon as the project was handed over to them.
It is not enough to develop a website without quality and value-driven contents to accompany the aesthetics of the website. So, we created very engaging content to reflect the values and goals of Eridan as a brand that served them on their different social media platforms. Alongside these contents are social media templates designed to fit perfectly with each of the content created.
We managed the website and the social media platforms for a couple of months to ensure quality assurance and consistency across all platforms, after which a handing over to a webmaster from the Eridan team was done.
Working on this project was a beautiful one because it gave us the leverage we needed to understand brand identity better and like every other project before and after it, we learnt tangible lessons that we are still implementing in our processes.
Stefan Persson, a Swedish billionaire businessman said, “Loyalty is not won by being first. It is won by being best,” and just like you, we can only get better.&nbsp;

Versatility, Originality, and Community: Reflecting Eridan’s Core Values Digitally

Africa has the greatest potential for entrepreneurial success, not because of its status as a developing continent filled with third-world countries but Africa lays unique demands that are key to economic growth and commerce. It’s nothing but the uniqueness of Africa, and many expatriates and foreign industrialists have recognized this and therefore taken advantage of it to create diverse kinds of thriving markets in Africa.
As an African business owner with even more legitimate rights to do business within the continent and grow to exponential extents, you need to get acquainted with some very unique factors in the African market that albeit might be different from what obtains in some other economies of the world, are important determinants of successful businesses situated in Africa. Here are 4 ways you can do things differently;
<ul>
<li style="text-align:justify;">Isolate solution from product</li>
</ul>
A place with problems needs solutions and profit is made when a need is met. Africa might be known for diverse kinds of problems of varying degrees but this is fodder for creations and innovations. You should latch on to the opportunity to create solutions first, then place these solutions within products/services.
<ul>
<li style="text-align:justify;">Leverage the community mindset</li>
</ul>
Africa thrives on community and once there is a sense of community, Africans come alive. Promote your values and target the market that holds the same or similar set of values, you will find that this particular market will begin to own your product and will form a tribe around it. It is not a product that holds a community but a common belief system.
<ul>
<li style="text-align:justify;">Be true to your market</li>
</ul>
As much as any human can sense dishonesty a mile off, Africans have “sharp brains” meaning they can sense dishonesty two miles off. You can create a niche for your business by telling it as it is, make only promises that you will deliver on, and be open.
<ul>
<li style="text-align:justify;">Create pricing plans and packages</li>
</ul>
Break your product into as many tiers as possible to be able to meet either the quantity need or the economic capacity of different customer groups. This is not to say that you shouldn’t have a specific target but in Africa, even with your target, there are still diverse sub-groups with slightly differing preferences. Create as much diversity from your product as you can and have broken down payment tiers if you can manage it.
Africa is a unique place to be and if you can create strategies that fit the landscape, your business can flourish.&nbsp;

4 Business Secrets That Can Help Your Business Thrive in Africa