About 2 years ago, we traveled to the Ewe land and visited a yam farm. At that time, I scooped out a proverb from the barn of yam which explained how the rotten yams eject themselves from the good ones. Do you remember it?
Today, we shall look at the barn of yam again, but this time around we shall look at it from a different angle.
The elders of our land would say, “Edɔ mewuame wotoadzo ‘texɔ o”. Thus, when you are hungry, you don’t have to burn down the barn of yam in order to feed yourself.
What shall we learn from this today?
It requires managing your expectations while under stress to get things done quickly. In English, we say “more haste, less speed”. Some of us destroy things or destroy the whole process in a bid to get things fixed. This is because we couldn’t focus on the process or identify ourselves with how things work naturally.
When you burn down the barn, you would have ended up destroying the seeds for the next production season or destroying the products that would have been stored for future use. Of course, you can’t eat all the yam from the barn when you succeed in burning it down. Possibly only a tuber you could eat. A tuber of yam is even too much for one person to eat, you would need to share it with others.
That brings me to one of the management principles—focus and niche strategy.
Many of us, out of necessity, lack, or one want of the other, enter into any and every business. We mostly ended up not achieving anything at end of the day. We do destroy our careers too quickly or develop health challenges along the line as a result of “carrying the whole world” on our shoulders.
Develop a niche for yourself, instead. Move into things that you can do best, and develop them to the highest of your ability. That is also called focus strategy. A focus strategy is a competitive strategy to direct marketing and sales efforts to a specific market segment. This strategy seeks to exploit underserved or undiscovered segments of a target market.
People could approach you and tell you that “oh this or that business, there’s a lot of money in it, why don’t you invest in it”. Your answer should be “I don’t have an understanding of that business yet. I need to study the market and if I know what it takes to succeed, then I shall invest in it”.
I see many people rushing into a lot of businesses that they have basically no idea about. They don’t know the demand and supply conditions; they don’t know the seasonal nature of the business, they don’t know when and where to get the customers, and above all, they don’t know how the finance could be tied in. But due to the fact that they are hungry for success, they enter and thereby end up “burning the barn of yam”.
With this, they destroy their potential for the next successful business, they get bogged down, get discouraged, and could not stand on their feet again.
Don’t destroy the barn, my friend. Focus only on what you know, and what you know best. Develop a niche market for what you do, and develop it to the best of your ability.
In the future, you can form the conglomerate or group of companies that you dreamt about; but not at the initial stage.
