First, I would like to point out that I have used the term CEO in a very loose form to represent the general perception of a CEO lifestyle, where one is boss to everyone and accountable to no one.

In the first year or couple of years of your business operation, there are a lot of things you will be doing as the founder, but none of them includes playing Boss. If anything, you will in fact take on any and every role to fill every vacuum. It is not uncommon to find the founder acting as a marketer, business developer, sales manager, accountant, secretary, and so on. Without taking on any of the titles, the founder will carry out all the functions in the beginning, and only let them go when he employs others with time.

Even after employing others, most successful entrepreneurs will tell you that in the first couple of years, they had to sit in the same room and work with the other employees. It is at this stage that you walk into an office and cannot differentiate the founder from the rest of the employees. And indeed, this is what it should be.

“I’m a boss, I get to do what I want to do and I can come in whenever I want and close whenever I want and I don’t have to answer to anyone. No one tells me what to do…”

As a founder and entrepreneur, this is the exact mindset you do not need. In fact, if you do your recruiting right, you should get some life-saving suggestions and insights from your employees but if you decide to act like a boss instead of an employee, you would be taking the quickest route to failure.

As the founder, you have the employees accountable to you. The next question is who are you accountable to? Who will make sure you attend your meetings, meet deadlines, and do all you have on your to-do list?

Some CEOs and founders will tell you that their Personal Assistants or Executive Assistants are like the bosses they have to answer to. They draw up the itinerary, schedule meetings, oversee operations, and make sure that the CEO shows up and does all he is supposed to. Although they are assistants, they are often critical parts of the business and keep the CEO on his toes.

The word ‘entrepreneur’ is not synonymous with ‘boss. As a founder, if you don’t hold yourself accountable and you don’t have someone who does, you will fail.

Be focused on selling your product and idea first. Know what is going on with sales, or else your business might hit the rocks. you should know how to connect with the customers instead of playing Boss. Don’t try to be too much of a business owner, but focus on trying to sell and make money based on your selling abilities

That dream life of a CEO will come anyway, but trying to live the dream too early can kill the dream. The dream life of an entrepreneur based on social media perception can be late mornings, dishing out the orders and taking no one’s suggestions but yours; but if you choose to toe this path in your business, you can well expect a crash soon.

Let’s meet at Abia State special day on Dec 30. Let’s renew the spirit of the Aba women of 1929 through entrepreneurial capitalism. Let’s scale the mercantile spirit of Arochukwu people. Let’s expand the trading sagacity of the Bende people. Let’s elevate the enyimba spirit of Ngwaland.

Let’s drum up the enterprising spirit of the Ukwa people. Let’s pursue new knowledge  like the Isuikwuatos and Umunneochis. Let’s build as the Umuahias. Let’s visit foreign lands and close deals like Ohafias.

From the east of Abia to the west, from the north of Abia to the south, boys and girls, men and women, the old and the young, are looking for a new rebirth and restoration of the state. We’re God’s Own State and indeed we need to make Abia this earthly paradise.

I will be speaking to deliver the message for our beautiful state. Join me on Dec 30 before the icons, merchants, titans, and leaders of our state. I want to see the innovators back. We built the old Aba – and we can rebuild Abia state.

Ndi Abia, let’s begin and get it done.

In this video, I explain how software is eating and saving the world  – and how one can monetize it. It was an old video which I just realized that I did not post in our account.

A recruiter shared on LinkedIn recently how he had difficulty recruiting good hands in a full-time on-site position. Most of the best hands in the advertised position were only interested in a remote work offer, or at least partly a remote offer where they only have to report to the office location on predetermined days.

“Throughout last year, my experience has been that people just want to stay home and fritter away time. A person is working remotely and you try calling to get him on a task, and he says his mother-in-law stopped by to say Hi. Some are actually brazen enough to tell you they are picking up a couple of groceries at the mall. During work hours??? I’d rather have staff on-site and know that it is now up to me to ensure they are working maximally than have them in remote locations where I hardly even know what they are up to” he posted.

Now to the facts. Remote working is not just ‘a thing’. It has become ‘the thing’. It has moved from being a secondary option an employer may extend to staff, to become primary offer employees want on the table. Another fact is that not every job role can be done remotely. Irrespective of skill or competence, there are job roles that will require you to be on-site every day of the week. One more fact that some employers are having to deal with is that productivity may be drastically affected if you don’t have a structure for remote work.

Given the way the coronavirus pandemic came upon us last year, it is understandable that a lot of employers did not have time to set up and finetune a structure for remote working before they were forced into it. Even when the lockdown was lifted in some places, some companies were not willing to expose their staff to all the risks of commuting to work daily, and still allowed people to work from home for as long as it was possible.

For many companies, remote working first came as a government order. Some however anticipated it and had started putting some structures in place ahead of the lockdown.

Back to the issue of transparency and productivity. How do you determine if your staff is still in bed by 11 am? How do you know that your employee is not seeing a movie on his Tv set at the time he is supposed to be working on your mission-critical project? How can you be sure your sales manager is not making that follow-up call to the client, in the bathroom and still in his bathrobe? How can you tell that your manager is not busy with some extra-work affairs at the expense of his defined roles?

As far as remote working is concerned, there will be a lot you don’t know and cannot confirm – probably much more than you know at any point in time. This explains why some employers are still uncomfortable with the idea.

One technology some employers used in checking their staff was a clocking innovation. I would not want to mention specific names here, but there is some technology that staffs use to clock in when they are about to resume work, clock out for a break, and at the close of work. With such technology, they could have a rough idea of how many hours staff was devoted to work. However, such technology has its shortcomings. While it tells you staff has clocked in for work, there is still no way to determine if the person clocked in and went back to sleep or actually resumed work.

Now, what you could do is combine this with any of the task manager technologies. While clocking in, staffs also have to enter projects they are working on, what stage they are on, how many hours it would take to get past that stage, etc. At the end of the day, they also use the task manager to check the items that have been completed, and the tasks which will spill over to the next day.

With this combination, the HR manager should be able to summarise a staff’s productivity for the week, the tasks that have dragged on for too long, the tasks that have been completed, etc. If a staff keeps entering the same task the entire week, even though the task should have been completed in 8 hours, the HR personnel can then call him for a chat and decipher what should be the next steps. This works excellently even for on-site working and helps avoid situations where staffs simply sit around all day doing the barest minimum needed to keep their job. Obviously, if a person has spent the entire day on a 2-hour task, he would have questions to answer.

The fact is that if you run a business, you will have to consider the remote working option sooner or later, especially for the high-skilled staff.