Thank you Fellow Abians and the good people of Nigeria for honouring this Ovim village boy as the 2021 Most Outstanding Abia Professional in the Diaspora and the 2021 Abia Ambassador. My love for Abia is my love for Nigeria and I continue to hope that one can do more. Thank you.
If the world is made up of numbers according to a Greek philosopher, it does mean that if you cannot measure anything, you are wasting your time on it. Your business is numbers, and you must measure it in order to make progress.
From the Great Library of Alexandria to the The House of Wisdom (Grand Library of Baghdad), the ancient world was ruled by those who could make sense of numbers. The Great Al-Khwarizmi, the Father of Algebra, and the man whose name is “algorithm”, preached the message of numbers. As the director of the House of Wisdom, he pioneered algebra and went to Mecca to shape commerce. He told men that unless you could make sense of numbers, you cannot be a good merchant! He solved puzzles on the streets of Mecca, but those puzzles were business numbers – cost, profit, etc.
In this 2022, invest to understand the numbers in your business and your career. Watch this keynote I gave on “Unlocking Business Agility with Learning & Numbers”.
I am wishing everyone Happy New Year. It would be a great one.
Quite an impressive number of disruptor startups are springing up by the day and in different countries. Like most other businesses, these startups will have to consider scaling up at some point to offer more services to a larger client base. Unfortunately, scaling up is a stage that is as dreaded as it is anticipated. Some founders will say that it is the point the business is no longer within your control, but I would like to think that scaling is the point where you equip your startup with the wings to fly higher than you can take it on your own.
At some point in the business, the business will outgrow itself and even outgrow you and it is something you should look forward to if you are hoping to have a business that will outlive you.
For digital or tech startups, scaling up will require things different from what a conventional business would require. It is not about building more infrastructure or physical branches, nor is it going to be about moving from 50 to 500 staff in one breath. It may surprise you that the companies behind some of the fantastic applications and software may not have such large staff strength.
So instead of dreading the day when you will have to scale your startup, maybe you should start considering putting some of these things in place.
Self-service features
As you work on perfecting and maybe even upgrading your digital services and products, you should enable self-service options so that users can signup, get the services, and even resolve issues on their own. This includes user-friendly interfaces, complaint resolution, maybe a chatbot, and a blog session with short articles detailing how users can get everything done on their own. If this is in place, you may not need more staff before you can grow your customer base. Let your processes gradually begin to involve less and less staff and more of the customers.
Automate processes
Before you get to the point of scaling, you should review your processes far ahead and begin to automate whatever can be automated especially the mundane or repetitive procedures. Customer onboarding, testing, regression runs, code deployment, or whatever else you think can be automated. There is no general rule here and it will differ from sector to sector. Increase your product reconfigurability
Position your systems and products in a way that will allow for modifying existing features or launching new products without going through lengthy release cycles. Where possible, you should be able to deploy changes in hours with as little help from the engineering or technical staff.
Use KPIs and Metrics to measure and manage results objectively
If there is any part of your startup that you cannot measure, then you cannot manage it effectively. Define the key metrics and implement them objectively. Everyone on your team will align themselves with these metrics and deliver results.
Optimize your products and systems to take up to 100 times their current load
Stabilize your products and systems so that they do not malfunction or become unreliable when they have to deal with 100 times their current load. If a little extra customer base already has your system delaying, then you are not properly optimized.
There are other helpful tips that could pertain to your industry. But generally, if you are in the tech space, applying these tips early will have you prepared for scaling up, long before you need to.
It is all beautiful – leaving the bounds of 2021 to touch the ecclesiastical blessings which 2022 has in stock for all. The sun rises on the horizon as the songs of the happy crickets fade, and the flowers blossom, awakened by the fresh energy from the eastern corridor . The happy birds are out, in ecstasy, and men and women, look with fresh imaginations in the horizons. A new day, bringing a new year, has broken. Happy New Year.
2022 will bring abundance to you, your friends and your families. Like the baobab tree, abundance unconstrained, on health, wealth and wisdom. The works of your hands would be blessed!
My name is Ndubuisi [ life is first]. And we’re here, breaking the curtains of 2022. Experience the best, 2022 brings. Welcome to 2022 – and Happy New Year.
The act of the Imo State government sending legal practitioners and government spokesmen to media stations to defend the gestapo style of arrest of Uche Nwosu is unbecoming. The arrest has no legality in it in totality, the process of the arrest is unconstitutional and fundamentally wrong.
You can not just abduct a citizen in a public place while shooting several shots with the risk shooting worshipers, causing panic and pandemonium and making people go run helter-skelter running over each other so as not to get shot.
There are rules of engagement even in international armed conflict; some of the rules of engagement as regulated by the international humanitarian law is that you are not permitted to attacked a person in a midst of civilians, if a suspect is extremely dangerous and armed, the rule of engagement is to disengage him first and make sure that civilians are cleared off the areas to avoid huge impact of collateral damage. This is international armed conflict between two warring nations or countries.
When you want to arrest a citizen, the law enforcement agents involved in the operation should bear in mind that their foremost function as an agency of the state as provided in the police act is protection of lives and properties. Protection and safeguard of lives should be their watchword.
Opening fire in church premises on Sunday afternoon while effecting the arrest of unarmed civilians is totally unprofessional and the officers involved in that operation should be made to face the music of the law.
Before we ask ourselves what is the reason for the arrest, what was Mr. Uche Nwosu accused of, it is pertinent to condemn in totality the process involved in the arrest, if we don’t condemn this and call for redress then who knows who next the police can arrest maybe in the mosque or church premises or other public places while releasing several shots in the air to the risk of worshipers or innocent citizens around.
Nobody, absolutely nobody should support this process of arrest even if you are affiliated to the Nigerian police or the IMO state government or you are a long standing enemy of Mr. Uche Nwosu, everyone should objectively condemn what’s wrong and that’s why we are rational human beings.