Reasons You Should Consider Becoming an Entrepreneur - how to become an entrepreneur at 18

To some people, it is a sermon. There are however, a group of people reading this that are trying to decide if they should make the leap into entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship isn’t for everyone, but if you do have the bug to experience freedom and still generate income, entrepreneurship can lead to an amazing life. You get to set your own schedule, you get to call the shots and answer to yourself.

Each of us spends 40-plus hours of our week in some form of work. That time could be spent doing something you love or doing something that makes you miserable and affects all other areas of your life. Here are five reasons why you should consider spending those hours on something that’s yours.
Related: 50 Signs You Might Be an Entrepreneur

1. The opportunity to control your destiny.

When you work a 9-to-5 you’re at the mercy of your boss and the company you work for. They can decide to hire or fire you, they decide how you spend your eight hours every day and what happens in those eight hours affects you beyond that time.
You have little control and in exchange, they give you a paycheck. The problem is today’s economy. Gone are the days of working at a company for years and retiring with a pension. These days entrepreneurship is the new pension plan. Your income is too important to leave in the hands of someone else.

2. Freedom to spend your time doing what’s important to you.

Life is short and time is the one thing we’ll never get back. This makes time one of your most valuable resources and you should treat it accordingly. Entrepreneurship gives you the ability to balance your time.
If you have family or other life circumstances come up, you can decide to forgo any work for that day. You don’t have that kind of flexibility at a job. Your work should fit into your life, not the other way around. The life part has to come first.

3. Unlimited earning possibilities.

At a job, your earning potential is set by the job or a contract a union negotiated. You can get raises and promotions, but those are the exception, not the rule. Your earning potential is capped no matter how long you stay at that job.
To be fair, you could earn nothing at your business, but those who jump into entrepreneurship are self-motivated to build a profitable business. Entrepreneurs aren’t happy with the status quo and continue to grow their business and income. The beauty of entrepreneurship is that there are no gatekeepers to keep your income regulated.
Related: You Might Be an Entrepreneur If You Meet These 3 Conditions

4. Location independence.

The beauty of having your own business is the ability to create something that supports you no matter where you are in the world. There are more than 2.5 billion people online daily, which means you could have an unlimited customer base and build a location-independent, online business.
No longer do you have to be tied down to any one location. You can have freedom to be where you want. This is great because different environments can foster innovation and creativity. Last year I got to travel to 12 countries all over the world and still made money. You just can’t beat that.

5. The chance to leave a lasting legacy.

When you build your dream business it can carry on to your kids and their kids. What starts as a quest for freedom can end as something that’s in your family for generations. A company like Ford has been passed down through the generations and continues to impact lives.
If your business is started out of something your passionate about, that passion will impact lives for years and generations. You can leave your children something you’re proud of.

The Most Boring Machine ARTICLE

A tunnel-making behemoth has already chewed up and spat out one politician, writes Mark Harris.

In 1926, Bertha Knight Landes became the first female mayor of Seattle — and the first of any major American city. After winning a landslide victory by promising to clean up city hall, she cracked down on police corruption and campaigned for municipal ownership of the city’s electricity company and streetcars.

In 2013, the freshly elected mayor, Ed Murray, is planning a 21st-century spin on similar issues: supporting a Department of Justice reform of Seattle’s troubled police force, planning city-wide wireless Internet, and pushing out light rail to more neighborhoods.

And yet Bertha may still rise up to haunt him. Fifty feet below downtown Seattle, the world’s largest tunnel-boring machine, nicknamed Bertha after the city’s progressive mayor, lies still. This remarkable vehicle weighs 7,000 tons, stretches nearly 330 feet long, and has a 60-foot diameter. When fully operational, Bertha has an intrepid crew of 25. (It also has its own Twitter account, of course.)

In early August, Bertha began carving out a two-mile road tunnel to replace the Alaskan Way viaduct, an ugly double-decker motorway that has been disfiguring Seattle’s waterfront since the 1950s. The viaduct slumped several inches during a 2001 earthquake; if the temblor had continued slightly longer, it probably would have collapsed altogether.

The viaduct has been living on borrowed time ever since. Dozens of alternatives were considered, including twin tunnels, another elevated roadway, and even scrapping the highway in favor of improved surface roads and better public transport. As it happens, politicians dithered long enough for tunneling technology to devise another option: a single tunnel large enough to accommodate two levels of multi-lane traffic.

The Japanese-made boring machine is a gloriously Rube Goldberg affair. As the five-story-tall cutting face spins, earth and rocks are ground up and mixed with a soil conditioner. This biodegradable foam stabilizes the soil to the consistency of toothpaste, allowing it to be transported via screws and a conveyor belt through the machine and out the tunnel entrance. Simultaneously, pre-made concrete panels are fed forward and lifted into place on the tunnel walls by two vacuum suction arms. Finally, grout is pumped around the new panels and the machine pushes itself forward.

Controlling and synchronizing these processes are the machine’s resident crew. During 12-hour shifts that will eventually require descents as deep as 130 feet below ground level, workers enjoy all the comforts of a modern workplace, including an air-conditioned conference room, bathrooms, an infirmary, and even a fully equipped kitchen. At Bertha’s maximum velocity of 6.5 feet an hour, they do not need seat belts. Even such sluggish progress, however, remains a dream. Since beginning drilling at the end of July, Bertha has traveled an average of less than 6.5 feet a day — a total of just 1019 feet.

Photo from the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT)

Initially, fiberglass rods in her launch bay wall proved unexpectedly difficult to digest. Then a labor dispute over which union would get the (four!) jobs transferring muck from Bertha’s conveyor belt to barges for disposal halted work for over a month.

Then after a series of minor repairs and tweaks, she was revved back up — and promptly hit a mystery obstacle. Workers are now pumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of groundwater away from the cutting face to see exactly what is blocking Bertha’s path. If, as they suspect, it is a boulder left over from Seattle’s glacial past, Bertha should be able to shift it. If it is something more exotic, simply ploughing ahead could damage her drills and blades. (An update on January 3: the obstructions are metal pipes left over from previous test digs by other contractors that should have been removed.)

Such caution is probably justified: once the machine has moved a total of 2,000 feet, construction crews following the borer will begin building the tunnel’s interior roadways. By sealing in the machine from behind, there will be no way to remove Bertha until she pops out in the shadow of the Space Needle, still scheduled for late next year even after all the holdups.

Many further challenges lie ahead, not all of them geological. Seattle’s soil is a chaotic mix of clays, silt, sand, and landfill from previous civic engineering projects, and the majority of excavated material is expected to be contaminated to some degree.

Even more seriously, tunneling through this unstable soil could cause subsidence at the surface. Over 150 buildings above the tunnel route have had seismic monitors fitted to detect movement. The viaduct itself has had a protective layer of carbon fiber applied and will be temporarily closed while the machine burrows beneath.

While the tunnel’s engineers express confidence in meeting their $2 billion budget and late 2014 completion date, history suggests that cost and time overruns are likely. The Channel Tunnel between England and France, which employed tunnel-boring machines as large as 29 feet in diameter (less than half Seattle’s monster), eventually came in 80 percent over budget.

Studies by the Washington State Department of Transportation suggest that even when the tunnel opens (possibly in 2015), it may not help Seattle’s famously snarled traffic. Proposed tolls would likely force motorists to divert to city streets and the nearby I-5 motorway, increasing congestion there.

When Murray’s predecessor, Mike McGinn, took office in 2009, he vowed to halt the tunnel’s construction, citing worries that cost overruns could affect the city’s basic services. His campaign culminated in a failed citywide referendum that shattered his credibility and has been blamed for his inability to win re-election against the staunchly pro-tunnel Murray.

Bertha has already chewed up and spit out one politician. As Murray settles in to his new role, he will surely be hoping that Bertha speedily finds her appetite for muck, not mayors.

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Mark’s most recent article appeared in issue 16 of The Magazine.

Mark Harris is a regular contributor to The Magazine. His most recent feature looked at red-light cameras, and how there is scant evidence to show improvemnts in safety as a result—just an uptake in fee collection.

Top 20 business idea you can start as a student

Posted by daremichael | micheltrendz

If you are a Nigerian student and you are reading this article, the truth is that you can start a side business as a full-time student and still keep up your good grades. How? I will show you 20 lucrative small business ideas that are guaranteed to earn you regular income as a student. This is a rather long article so I suggest you bookmark this page for future reference.

There are three excuses students usually give when the issue of running a side business in school is raised: “I don’t have time”, “I don’t have money” and “what’s the point? I don’t lack anything.” Before we go ahead to the 20 lucrative small business ideas, I feel it’s important that I address these excuses and rid your mind of them.

Time: The ideas discussed in this article are all side businesses. You only need a few hours every day to effectively execute them. Most of them you can work on during the weekends. These are times you normally spend on trivial stuff. Why not invest that time and create a beautiful and profitable future for yourself?

Money: You don’t need a lot of money to start any of these lucrative small business ideas; for some of them, you don’t need money at all. They are small business ideas – at the most, N10,000 to N15,000 should be enough to get you started.

Why? What’s the point: Here are 4 important reasons to consider starting a side business while in school.

1. You prepare yourself for life after school. The labor market is usually not pretty; nothing is guaranteed. The only way to make sure you don’t go through the painful process of job search is to start your own business and the school is the perfect place to prepare yourself for that.
2. You set up contacts, client base and networks that you can draw from when you need them.
3. You gain vital experience: this is usually the time you harness your skills and gather experience that takes you further after school.
4. With each success you increase in confidence and with each failure you increase in learning.

• Related article: How to develop small business ideas
• Related article: How to turn your hobby into your goldmine

While most of the business ideas discussed in this article need little or no capital to start, they require a certain level of mastery in some skills such as speed-typing, writing, graphics design etc. The slogan for your success is simple: whatever you do, do it very well! If you don’t possess the necessary skills to start any of these businesses, I urge you to invest the time and money to acquire them. Consider any of these lucrative small business ideas to start. Let’s get to it then!

Top 20 lucrative small business ideas for students:

1. Local Dropshipping

Dropshipping is a retail fulfillment method where a store doesn’t keep the products it sells in stock. Instead, when a store sells a product, it purchases the item from a third-party and has it shipped directly to the customer. As a result, the merchant never sees or handles the product. The biggest difference between dropshipping and the standard retail model is that the selling merchant doesn’t stock or own inventory. Instead, the merchant purchases inventory as needed from a third-party – usually a wholesaler or manufacturer – to fulfill orders (Source: Understanding droshipping)

To start this business, you need a personal computer, internet access and a Facebook account or a website. This article explains in detail how to start dropshipping in Nigeria.

Read This:  Apply for the IB PLC Foundation`s KICKSTART Entrepreneurship Initiative Season 2

2. Typing  and Editing Business

Most students have need to type their assignments, projects and thesis. If you have a personal computer, you can start up a typing business. You collect the handwritten assignments and type in the evening, after school. If you lack speed-typing skills, install a typing tutorial software like Mavis Beacon and start practicing. After typing, you take it to a computer center to print out at N20 per page. You can charge between N50 to N100 per page for each typing job. This gives you a profit margin of between N30 to N80 per page. If you can type 20 pages per day, that gives you 800 – 1,600 daily and 4,800 – 9,600 weekly in extra income.

3. Recharge Card Selling Business

There are 2 ways to run the recharge voucher business. Either you deal in bulk recharge card printing, which is still very lucrative although costlier to start, or you sell as a retailer. You can buy bulk units of N100 and N200 recharge cards and sell at a higher prize. Most wholesalers sell at the 10 units of N100 recharge card for N920, this gives you an N80 profit after sales. You can easily start up this business with as low as N5,000. Here is a detailed article on how to start the recharge card business in Nigeria

4. Tutorial Classes

You can organize tutorial classes for students in lower classes in your department. There are courses that are usually tough and difficult to understand, and students taking that course will not mind paying someone to teach them the course. I organized web design lectures for my course mates during those days in school and they paid me N1,000 each for the duration of the course. Another way is to charge say N100 for each tutorial you organize and if 50 persons turn up, that gives you N5,000 for the day.  To organize a tutorial, you need to find a place inside the school, and then inform the course representative to tell the class of an upcoming tutorial session.

5. Selling of Compiled Past Questions

Nothing sells fast in school like past question papers, especially as exam date approaches. You can get past questions from your department and other departments, solve the questions with the help of your text books, then convert it to short handout and sell to students during exams. You can sell the handouts for N200 or less depending on your production cost.

6. Used Clothe Business

This is usually known as the Okirika clothe business. it involves buying used clothes and reselling to students. N10,000 can get you started on a small scale okirika clothe business. You should focus on Jeans, shirts, shoes and tops. It is important to meet people who are already in the business for guidance before you make your purchase. This is to avoid burning your fingers in bad business.

7. Hair Plaiting/Styling Business

I had a friend who used hair plaiting business to offset all her school bills. What she did was, during weekends, she would visit student hostels and ask for students that wanted to make their hairs. She plaited and fixed weave-on. You can learn to plait hairs and fix weave-on, and offer the services for a fee in school. You can charge as much as N500 to fix a weave-on and N1,500 for plaiting of hair depending on the going rate in your location.

Read This:  [Motivation] 5 Ways I Keep Myself Going When I Feel Like Giving Up

8. Manicure and Pedicure Services

A lot of female students fix their nails especially during weekends. You can offer a home nail fixing service business. You can purchase the basic equipment needed for fixing nails with N3,000 and charge as low as N300 for each service rendered.

9. Barbing Salon Business

This is one of the most lucrative small business ideas in school. It takes a lot to start of money to start on your own, though. If you have the skill, you can look for barbing salons close to you and introduce yourself. Once any of them accepts you, you can attach yourself there and make your money in your spare time. Naturally, you pay a stipend to your host for accommodating you.

10. Blogging

You must have heard that people make 5 figure income online through blogging. Well, let me officially tell you that this is 100% true. It costs nothing to start a free .blogspot or .wordpress blog and if you understand how blogging works, you will be making your money in no time. I will be introducing a whole new course on blogging in later articles so keep an eye out for it.

11. Freelance Writing

If you have good writing skills, you are missing out on a lot of money. Apart from writing for bloggers who may not have the time to write, you can make a fortune from freelance sites like ODesk or Fiverr. Forums like nairaland.com are good places to offer your writing skills for a fee. As a starter, you can offer free writing services as a way of introducing yourself and getting positive feedback. This review will be important when you create your advertising pages.

12. Graphics Design

Graphics design is another money spinner for those who have the skills. There seems to be a shortage of competent graphics designers so the few of them are always very much in demand. Again, you can create a portfolio for yourself on odesk, fiverr, nairaland etc. Don’t hesitate to offer free services for people to test your work and give you feedback.

13. Become a Jumia Agent

Jumia agents help people to place orders and buy whatever they need on Jumia.com, Africa’s largest online shopping platform. As an agent, you get commissions on every sale made through your account. All you need to do is let people know you are a Jumia agent. You can also promote their offers on your Facebook, bbm or Whatsapp channels. You don’t need any money to do this and it takes very little of your time. To get started as a Jumia agent, click here to sign up.

14. Outdoor Catering Services

You can start this business yourself with nothing or join a team that offers the service to increase your confidence in cooking for events and occasions.

Catering is very lucrative, but you need passion to sustain your drive. It’s not about the money, it’s about the passion.  Catering funds itself. You want me to cook for you, you give me money and I cook. You don’t need millions to start. (Source: How to start a lucrative catering service)

15. Professional Cleaning Services

Before people move into a new house, they usually require the services of a cleaner to tidy the place up. This is money waiting to be made. To start, you will need a way of letting people know you are in the business. Facebook has made it very easy to spread the word about any service you offer. So you create an enticing Facebook page for your cleaning services, promote it for a little fee and you are in business. You can do this in your spare time and you need no money to start because when people call you for a job, they pay you a deposit fee which you use to buy the materials you need.

Read This:  Top 5 Free Apps Every Entrepreneur Should Have

Also read: how to create a Facebook page for your business

16. Photography

There are lots of open doors to be self-reliant in digital photography. The market is not saturated yet. I wanted to work in a big multinational corporations like every Nigerian graduate naturally would, but I looked inwards, took out time to learn the technology, and I have no regrets today. In fact, when I started, I was gate-crashing for almost one year, in other words, I would attend events in places as far as Abuja uninvited. (Source: business opportunities in digital photography)

17. Real Estate Agent

This never goes out of fashion and is always in demand. You help people find a house to live in and you get paid. You probably know a lot of people who do this. Reliability and access to genuine information should be your watchword if you are to succeed in this business. You will need a business card which you can always get for less than 4k. Word of mouth does the rest.

18. Sports/Physical Trainer

A lot of people struggle with weight loss and physical fitness. If you are a good athlete, think about starting a personal sports training service for helping fellow students. You can use either an on-campus facility or a local fitness facility off campus. You can also develop training manuals and videos and sell them at sports centers and gyms.

19. Pastries and Cake Making

Students need cakes for birthday celebrations and other occasions. If you have the skills, you can tap into this opportunity and make your money in your spare time. Once they know you are good, you will never run out of money. Word of mouth is a powerful advertising tool especially in school and out of it.

20.  Kerosene retail

You can set yourself up as a retailer to make your quickly. Kerosene is used by most students in school due to insufficient supply of electricity and cost of cooking gas. This is one of the most lucrative small business ideas for Nigerian students. Dealers have been known to receive 100% returns on their first investment

There are other lucrative small business ideas out there but these should get you started. Remember the most wonderful idea that remains in your head is basically useless. The time to start doing something is now!

source:

http://www.nextnaijaentrepreneur.com/

Retiring on $1 Million is Not Enough

Why savers are losers and spenders are winners in the modern economy

When it comes to getting rich, so-called experts are full of advice on how to save your way there. There’s no shortage of articles about couples who saved their way to $1 million or “expert” tips on how to save more money.

And these articles are true. You can save more money following their advice. But you have to consider the cost. Because the saver mindset is a very different and dangerous mindset about money than how the rich think about money.

All you need is a million?

Take for instance the couple, Carl and Mindy, who saved $1 million on four years. Their instincts were right.

“I was having this horrific day at work,” 42-year-old computer programmer Carl told Farnoosh Torabi on an episode of her podcast. “I was 38 at the time, and I'm like, 'There's no way I can do this until I'mr 62 or 65 or whatever age people normally retire at.”

Many people feel trapped in their jobs but do nothing about it. Congrats to them for taking action. But in the end, it is still the action of a poor-person mindset about money.

The couple started by analyzing their spending habits. “My wife and I wrote all of our expenses in a book,” Carl explains on their blog. “Every time we returned from shopping or paid a bill, we logged it.”

Based on their logs, they determined they could live on $24,000 a year. To be safe, they added a $6,000 cushion and bumped that estimate up to $30,000 a year.

To get there, they decided they needed $1 million saved up to retire by age 42. To achieve this, they did the standard saver playbook: they downsized and cut expenses, while working side jobs and investing in their personal residence and the stock market. read more

by www.richdad.com