Close to drowning, I took 2 years off to breathe and here is what I learned
you have to remember that all resistance and pain come from not being in flow with the universe and thinking you have any sort of control over it. You cant simply force things to happen as you expect but you must be present and open to accept things as they arise.
I like to think of myself as a very intuitive person and I made a decision to follow my heart and chase my dreams of building a company that empowers creative people(SENPAI)4 years ago. The dream is quite simple, create a company that can empower creative youths in Africa and is able to do so in a sustainable and profitable way while also harnessing their creativity to solve various problems faced by humanity. Ok maybe it's not so simple but you get the idea.
This isn't a traditional business model but rather a community and people-focused model which brings in even more complications for a first-time entrepreneur with no experience and capital to deal with.
Focus on the community
The first 2 years of building senpai where very hard and stressful, I had just moved out of home to Lagos and was homeless for the first year while trying to balance growing a community with surviving. The goal was simple, just focus on the community and good things would happen. So that's what I did, the nameless and faceless entrepreneur behind the brand was just going to focus on building the community and good things should indeed happen.
Well, the community grew the most in those years, there was a certain rawness about the experience of building a community of connected creatives and sharing my stories with them in hopes to inspire them to chase their dreams. But the goal is to be able to sustain this and also turn it into a business. You see unlike most people, I came into this from wanting to impact and empower creative people and then figured out it needs to be sustainable if I wish to have a large impact on the world. It was a passion before a business.
First attempts to monetize
The joys of building a company like Senpai is that there are very little to no rules on ways creativity can be utilized. I had and still have a lot of good ideas on how to monetize
- Training
- Talent outsourcing
- Consulting
- Product and service design and development (RnD)
- Freelancing
I dabbled in freelancing but never really enjoyed working with clients. Since I didn’t have much other skills, I went with training as it was going to directly impact the community. The first training course Design 101 beta* launched in 2018 and It was a free course, We had over 400 people enroll for that course. The idea was to build a pipeline of talents and seek job opportunities for the ones who make it to the end of our training program.
The cracks begin to show
who would have thought that after training people you have to “sell” the idea to other businesses that they should hire from your talent pool? not me. So here I was 2 years of work later, I picked out the best talents from the training with the promise of getting jobs for them not being able to deliver on that promise and not having the skill or experience needed to deliver on that. One by one people I thought would be more patient with me started to “leave” Senpai to seeks better opportunities. I knew I couldn't do much to stop it, It was painful but it was part of the process.
At this point, I felt I was slightly against the flow of the universe
Focus on Self
I took a breath, looked at the situation, and decided I needed to focus more on myself. I felt like I put all my hopes on an idea of what I expected from the universe and kinda lost perspective of Self. At this point, I had no solid personal brand and most people only Knew Senpai and not much about me turns out this also isn't good for business. I didn't know how sales worked, I had average social skills and was slacking off on developing other technical skills.
So I put myself first and everything else on pause
I stopped posting on social media, I started learning more about sales, business, picked up coding from where I left off. I began to feel my value increase and with that my confidence. I was less anxious and took things just a little bit slower. I got an apartment to myself and this allowed my brain to reflect deeper. Its been a year and a couple of months after I decided to take a breath and though it may seem to others like I've lost steam or I've lost my passion, I assure you I haven't. You see a lot of times you need to be able to take 2 steps back before you make a jump.
The present
I've since gotten better at sales, Gotten better at grooming myself, Started working out, started dating again, got better at coding, and find myself rather code than just design. I've built 3 web projects and currently working on Senpai Academy. I feel more confident in my abilities to earn money as I now possess more expertise than I had previously. I feel my energy coming back and I would slowly begin to share that energy with the community again soon. I feel better thus my life would be better. As we all know 2020 isn't really what we expected but the goal is the make the most out of it.
So here is a summary of the most important lessons I've learned
- Things take time
- Build value in yourself before you decide to build value through a company
- Never be a rush
- Trust the process
- Listen to the universe
- Love yourself
- Focus on self-development always
- The journey is the reward
- Good things come when they come
- You are loved
