Business Development Skills

Identify and ideate: finding a business worth starting

Self-starting, future orientation and persistence as trainable business behaviours rather than personality; identifying an opportunity in the participant’s own market and testing the idea against real demand before spending on it; anticipating obstacles and preparing a second and third response before the first fails; financial bootstrapping, meaning growth funded from within the business before any external credit is sought; goal setting with a dated action plan that each participant leaves the day holding.

Customer, competitor and the marketable offer

Who the customer actually is and what she is choosing between; competitor observation as a field exercise in the local market, alongside using free AI tools to research a market and analyse a competitor’s pricing and offer; product and service differentiation, the practice with the strongest measured return in this literature; pricing from cost rather than from imitation; quality, packaging and presentation standards for goods sold into the Abuja corridor.

Common mistakes, and business money rules

The mistakes that most often sink a new enterprise — mixing business money with household money, spending before testing demand, and waiting for perfect conditions instead of learning by starting small; separating business money from household money as a fixed rule rather than bookkeeping theory; the owner’s salary; a single daily record of money in, money out and stock; digital payments, POS and agent banking as both a payment method and a record.

Formalisation, credit and the lender’s file

What registration is for and, candidly, when it does not pay; the Corporate Affairs Commission process, current statutory fees and the choice between a business name and a company; National Identification Number, Bank Verification Number and Tax Identification Number; opening and operating a business bank account; the documents every Nigerian enterprise fund actually demands, worked against the live instruments available in the State; cooperative and savings-group formation, and how a group record substitutes for a bank statement the applicant does not have.

Execute: applied practice and the pitch

Supervised full-day practical in which each participant completes a costed enterprise plan for a real business, not a hypothetical one; a market-day field exercise testing the offer with actual customers and returning with the result; presentation and defence of the plan before peers and facilitators as rehearsal for the closing-day pitch; competency assessment against which certification is issued; constitution of business clusters and savings groups for post-training support.