By Mubita C. Nawa The Resilient Lozi Boy.
Many years ago I made $5,641 in one business transaction. The year was 1998. Today I want to share with some young people how I grew my business gross income from $2 a day to $5,641 in a single day.
I shall share 5 steps to eccentricity and acceleration of one’s capital.
STEP 1: START WHERE YOU ARE
When I completed school in grade 12 in November of 1992, I needed to figure out what to do. So I started selling bones from local butcher. At the same time I started taking pictures with my A110 camera. These two businesses gave me innovation in capital. I was 17 years old but I was not broke. I was contributing to the GDP of my parents home. I was buying tomatoes and bread.
STEP 2: DIVERSIFY YOUR BUSINESS
By September 3rd 1993, I got a job at a Bank. I was now a banker. I had to stop selling meat and bones and I then started something else. I found that a lot of the bankers at the time either had no taste of clothing or just did not know how to budget. So I started going to Soweto to buy second hand suits, taking them to the laundry and giving them out on credit. Around the same time my capital was growing. So I opened a grocery shop at Town Centre shop number 13 ChaChaCha road.
My employee was Ganizani Ngoma who later became a brother and a family member.
STEP 3: INVEST IN REAL ESTATE
I was a handsome young 18 year old with money. I had a good job and two good businesses. At that point I bought my first property. A bare plot right behind ShopRite Chilenje. I spent K3,000. I quickly built a wonderful wall fence and that was my first building project.
STEP 4: TAKE THE NEXT STEP
By this time my capital and grown. I was now driving, living 15 houses away from the “big house”. My clothing business was not Salaula clothes anymore but clothes from South Africa. How you start in life does not matter.
I was traveling to South Africa and ordering clothes from the UK as well. I then said let me invest in another business. So I started ordering used cars from Japan.
And that is how I ordered my first car. It was a 1989 Toyota Mark 2 Ballon type white in colour automatic transmission. When it arrived in Durban in 1997 I traveled to get it. I took leave from work and my boss Mutale Chanda permitted me to go for a week (deducted from my leave days).
STEP 5: CASH IN AND CASH OUT, THEN CASH BACK
I arrived in Zambia from Durban on a Friday. I came back driving my new car. So by Monday I was at work. Later that week a Customer named Mr. Chisanga came to the bank. “Mubita where have you been?” He asked. “I went to South Africa to pick my car.”
To cut the long story short, he asked to see my car. I walked out and showed him the car. Right there and then he liked it. He asked me to sell it to him. I agreed.
Within hours he sent Trevor Simumba to pay me that money cash in US DOLLARS. And the car was gone. But my pockets were loaded. In that moment, all the pain of five years paid off in one day. Patience pains but it pays.
CONCLUSION
In order to be successful and to build wealth you need to be flexible and willing to start where you are. You will need to be determined, focused and to be a long term thinker. By the way that $5,641 had a profit of $1,500. I invested that money again and this has been our formula all these years.
Your salary is not small. Invest it. Your capital is not small. Build it. Your time at the bottom is not useless. Treasure it.
Run your race and build each day. One day you will smile. There is power in dirty jobs. God will keep you enlightened.
MCNLIVE
