Lack of capital to start a business!!

Many times people give lack of capital/money as the reason for failing to start a business. Truth is you need money to start a business, I won’t stand here and tell you that you don’t. Registering a business requires money, designing a logo requires money, designing marketing and branding material requires money so yes you need money to start a business. What I will say though is you don’t need alot of money to start. You don’t need 100M and most importantly the money doesn’t have to be yours.

Three months ago I asked my social media followers to raise money and we start a business and sure in about two months we’d raised 26M every one collecting minimum 100,000. The business (gokafoods) was started and it’s 3 weeks old. Same applies to Campus Doctor, raised about 25M from still social media friends.You see that all those times the money that started those businesses wasn’t personally my money. We are opening the second round of investing for Campus Doctor and the pledges are already good after people have seen the progress we’ve made in the past two years of operation. We have an understanding with an interested investor to give us all t medical equipment we need in exchange for equity in the venture.

When I started Young Treps about 5 years ago I had just about 10M which I raised selling molokoni part time as I worked a full time job. So as we worked all the money we got we invested into growth. We didn’t wait to have 70M to set up office and cater for operational costs. 5 years later the valuation of our business is fairly big. Now imagine if like most I’d said let me wait till I raise 30M or so. I’d never have quit my job or let alone started.

So capital is not about having lots of money to burn. It’s about being ingenious and seeing how to work with the little you have or work with other people’s money. All the big businesses in world from google,Uber,Airbnd et al were never started with the owner’s money. If you can’t find money find someone who has it and find a reason to interest them in your dream. This however comes with being genuine and trustworthy because one wrong move and you’ll end up in jail with no money a bad reputation and no one to ever entrust you with money.

So as you think about capital don’t only think money or lots of money. Think of social capital you can leverage on. Partnerships that can help get you started and going. Be ready to make sacrifices like selling off some of the personal assets that you have like a car, land I mean whatever you can get money from. If your not willing to make sacrifices for your dream then you don’t actually believe in it that much so why should others do. Yes it’s a tough call, if you want to build some thing big then you have to be ready to make some big sacrifices.

Otherwise always look for how to start from where you are and with what you have then build going foward.It will be easy for you to attract financing on the go when people can see exactly what you are up to. It’s hard for ideas to get funding so get them out of your head or off the paper and into execution phase. This will cut the hardship of attracting financing by half.