Ahabwe Collins

What is a startup What comes into your mind when someone says the word startup? Innovation, new trends, disruptive technology, experimental business models, scrappy young entrepreneurs, instability, revolutions, universal impact, name it. These words and so many others keep crisscrossing one’s mind when one talks about startups and this can be depicted in the different definitions of a startup below Definitions of a startup A startup is an experiment in search of a business model – Solomon Kitumba C.E.O and founder YOZA. A startup is a young company that is just starting to develop, startups are usually small and initially financed and operated by a handful of founders or one individual, these companies ofer a product or service that is not currently being offered elsewhere in the market or that the founder believe is being offered in an inferior manner – ‘investopedia’ . A startup is a company working to solve a problem where the solution is not obvious and success is n

Uganda is considered number one in entrepreneurship, with the highest number of business startups in every single year according to research by international agencies. This is one side of the coin but on the other side of the coin, there is also a high mortality rate (death rate) for these small businesses in Uganda. Last week we had a heated discussion about this issue on one of our whatsapp groups (young treps), am glad to share with you some nuggets from this discussion and my personal ideas on how to reduce on the mortality rate of business in Uganda. Starting a business with one single idea of making money is all wrong. What if you don’t make the money, what happens? Can you hold on during tough times like the ones we are in today? So why would you start a business in the first place? If you don’t have any strong reason for starting a business chances are that you may not survive the first year in business. In this heated discussion the whole argument zeroed down to the

Image credit: ArtisticNaturee  www.facebook.com/ArtisticNaturee / __Always pay your workers first. You can’t call yourself an entrepreneur if you have the habit of not paying your workers on time, erratically, or not at all. Real business leaders always pay their employees first. Let's call it the first law of entrepreneurship. Let's talk. I began my business career as a construction contractor more than 30 years ago. My business entailed getting construction contracts, some which took several years to complete. I would sometimes have thousands of people working on my projects. 90% of my people were paid on a weekly basis. It was almost a ritual, whereby we’d go to the bank on Friday morning to collect the "payroll." Each worker was paid in cash, and we would sit and pack the money into little brown envelopes, after deducting taxes. We'd then travel to the sites and pay them their money. I never ever missed a payroll… except once, and it probably s