Hello! Trust you had a great weekend!

This week we  will simply be sharing some lessons learnt within the three years of our existence, a wise person once said experience is the best teacher and a wiser person said other people’s experience is a less expensive way to learn, so we hope you learn from this.

Let’s use the 5 P’s, its not the regular 5P’s of marketing, but 5P’s of business management learnt by B&G thus far.

Partnerships: There are many partnership opportunities and enormous benefits in businesses synergizing. At B&G,  we are learning to work with other organisations who have similar visions as our organisation. Earlier we partnered with one towards an exhibition hence paid half the price of the exhibition space, talk about cost savings! Just recently we partnered with Bellafricana ( a market place for afrocentric products)  and now stock our products on their site. We encourage you to look for good opportunities in partnerships 

Power of Social Media: Advertisement has never been so cheap with the rise of various social media platforms; facebook, twitter, instagram, linked in,  BB messenger amongst many others. It is a medium to reach thousands without paying a single dime (or little if you want to reach more ) hence marketing cost can be close to zero. A start-up may not be able to afford a website but certainly has no reason not to be on social media platforms especially when the founders are there. B&G has connected with people across the globe using our social media platforms. So what are you waiting for, open yours now and grow it!

                                                               Our beautiful instagram page @belleandgraceafrica

Pleasure in listening to clients: YES, pleasure not pain in listening to clients, we must be ready to listen to the complaints and suggestions of our clients.  We remember a particular client that wanted the design in a certain way, yes we were stressed or should we say “stretched” but guess what? Her design became a most sought after design for us. Starts ups like mine and yours must take pleasure in learning from our clients.

Priority on local resources: Most times, we want to source all materials abroad, but pause and check your local environment. I remember when we needed to brand our products with B&G labels, we were researching on companies in China that we could get it from. Guess what? We got it from a printing press that was in my friend’s house in Ebute Metta, Lagos and our boxes too are made in Nigeria. Many times, we miss out on the local resources while focusing on the same quality exported ones.

Persistence: So honestly when I started this I wasn’t sure what the last P will be, but its PERSISTENCE. How important is Persistence for us? Extremely important!!! because growing a business is a long process which definitely requires patience and consistency. We can’t afford to give up on our business, YES we are allowed to fail but NEVER allowed to stay down! At B&G, we had a product that may be termed a failure but this is B&G with more products now. Don’t ever give up!

Thank you for reading, this is perhaps one of our longest blog posts, we hope you learnt from it!!

We want to hear from you so please drop a comment or send a mail to esther@belleandgrace.com

www.belleandgrace.com

 : @BelleandGraceAfrica

 :@belleandgraceaf

 : Belle & Grace