The bedrock and cornerstone of every establishment is the availability of empowerment and support systems from all possible avenues. The same is true when it comes to business, regardless of whether it is that of an individual or a family. Access to empowerment goes a long way in shaping the future of such establishments in the right direction.
Although I'm not from a wealthy family, in our little ways, we've set up different businesses at one point in time or another, and it's the power of together that gets them thriving until they could serve as a cornerstone we can fall back on during difficult times. Right from a tender age, I've been instrumental in playing my part in enhancing each of the businesses my family established, which to many may be seen as a bad or not idea for a boy of my age to indulge in, but I still learned loads of lessons that are now helping me.
As a young boy during my elementary school days, I remember most times after school hours, I go home to eat, relax, and do my homework, and once it's evening, I play my part in helping my grandmother hawk some of her goods around our neighborhood so we can have more sales, and such goods can be more accessible to those who live far away from us and won't have seen what we're selling if we only leave them in the store.
Then we used to sell different items—food items like Garri, Eko, rice, and other items like brooms, soap, and the like—and in the evening I hawked across the road of our neighboring street. On most of those occasions, I tend to sell almost all the items I hawk around the street, whereas on the days I don't hawk, we hardly sell half of what I sell when I do.
Empowerment is mostly tagged as monetary assistance, but that's not always the case. Empowerment can come in different forms, aside from money. You can empower someone with your words of advice, you can empower someone with your recommendations to influential people around you, and you can empower others by rendering manpower support to others, just as I was doing back then for my grandparents business.
A photo of Eko
My grandparents were the ones I grew up with, and as of then, they're very old and couldn't do much hard labor or activities like they would have done when they were much younger. Since I stay with them and I'm still younger, I try to contribute my energy and time as an empowerment to the family business by either staying in the shop to sell items to customers or hawking it around for better sales.
With that business, given the fact that both of them have retired from active service, they mostly depend on the sales from that business to make ends meet alongside whatever their children send them at the end of the month, and me being a young boy who stays with them, I think within myself that since my childhood friends who stay around us do hawk, then there's no big deal in me doing the same to help our family business, and that was how I started.
With that act, we began to have more customers that buy some of our goods, especially the Eko, a popular food made from maize. During one of the days when I was hawking, I walked past a bar, or better yet, a beer parlor, or should I call it a pepper soup joint, where most people sit in the evening to drink beer and eat pepper soup. So while passing, the shop owner saw me and brought all the eko I've had on me.
She then told me she has been in search of where to get it for a long time but hasn't found any. She asked if I'd be able to get as much as 2 dozen of eko for her daily because her customers usually like to eat it alongside pepper soup whenever they come to her joint to drink beer. and told her I could do that, and that's how we began to have more sales daily, and the money was pushed back into the business to get more items, buy food at home, or pay my bills at school.
I know I'm probably too young to do all of those back then, but. It's what it's; had I been from a more financially stable family, I wouldn't have done that, but this period taught me some lessons about running a business, how to deal with customers, and some financial principles that's helping me presently.
I'm grateful for everything, and even though I appreciate those periods, I don't want my children to go through the same, and that's why I'm working around the clock to change my story and financial status to be enough to establish something that would benefit my family and teach my children soft skills without having to go through the stress of hawking.
That's about it for my response to the Inleo initiative prompt for the month of April. That's #aprilinleo. I hope you enjoyed the read. I'll invite you to also participate, make sure you read the announcement post so you can stay up-to-date on every topic.
Thanks so much for your time. Have a good day ahead.
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