Dear Business Owner,

Thank you for being in business. Yes, it can be hard, but you

also know how rewarding it can be.

There is a lot of pressure for you to be bigger, or act bigger,

than you are. There are plenty of people who think you

should be focused on selling your business, being acquired

by another business, or building a business that scales to

make room for loads of employees or investors.

Yet so much of that counsel never considers the fact that maybe you want to stay small. Or it considers staying small the inferior mindset of second-rate entrepreneurs or executives. It never questions the unconscious assumptions of the value of growth for growth’s sake or the virtues of running a people-focused small business. And it rarely looks at the societal and environmental consequences that lie in the wake of businesses with the manifest destiny to dominate markets by driving humans like cart-pulling oxen.


Business experts also like to point out that bigger businesses hire more employees, thus providing more jobs than a small business does. They look at the 5% of the businesses they can see, count, and generalize from there. They don’t see that small business owners hire their neighbors, provide human-friendly work environments by default, and contribute to their local communities.

And because so much happens beneath the scale of zeroes that those experts consider worth remarking about – largely because you’ll never pay their consulting or research fees – your efforts don’t count.

There’s a discomfort that many of you are feeling about the pace of change and what it takes to keep up in today’s business world. Underneath that discomfort is the opportunity that will enable you to thrive. We live in an unprecedented time of convergence of accessible technology and a social shift away from the aberration in human development that is corporate capitalism. While people like to call this New Economy, the reality is that it’s a return to the old village economy.

Let’s get real about something else, though: there have been many, many gems cast aside when it comes to the art and science of business-building. Just because all of the rules of big business don’t work for you doesn’t mean that none of them do, yet so many of us have decided out of hand that there’s no sense in reading all that “irrelevant” stuff. Yes, I’m tired of reading about IBM, GE, Nike, Starbucks, Apple, Microsoft, and the rest, too – but there are lessons to be translated, learned, and repurposed for what we’re doing, too. You can continue to recreate the wheel and learn the hard way, but is that the best use of your resources? You can be small, great, creative, fun, AND informed.

Stay small. Stay focused. Stay agile. Stay human. Keep learning the business of your craft and the craft of business. Yes, it’s hard, but you can do it. Better to play the harder game that’s right for you and win it than end up miserable because you won someone else’s game.

Thank you for being in business. What you do matters.

Yours sincerly,
bestbuynaija.com