Do you guys listen to Bob Marley? If not, you should. In terms of poetic depth, I think he was more talented than even Shakespeare – that overrated English man who walked around London in pleated skirts, writing sonnets that have never really made sense to me:
But Bob. Oh Bob. He keeps his shit real:
Babylon system is the vampire, yea! (vampire)
Suckin’ the children day by day, yeah!
Me say: de Babylon system is the vampire, falling empire,
Suckin’ the blood of the sufferers, yea-ea-ea-ea-e-ah!
Every entrepreneur should familiarize themselves with this weed-inspired form of poetry. This song (the babylon system) is essentially talking about capitalism. It’s a vampire that will suck the blood out of you and leave you wounded.
It’s getting harder and harder to extract money out of people because everyone is cutting back as this global recession takes root and I was having a conversation with a business owner about this very issue. i.e. how hard it will be for some people to cut costs, especially those who own businesses because at some level, that cost cutting is going to involve getting rid of someone’s job.
So, he was saying that he was actually in a good position because when he started his business, he made a conscious decision not to hire any employee’s and not to rent out an office. He decided to do everything himself and he was able to do that because he embraced technology. Also, since he had no employee’s, he could work out of his house. If he had to meet clients, he either rented out an office for the specified time (usually an hour or less ) or he met them at a coffee shop. So, he was essentially saying that other business owners who were in the same field as him were going to have to adopt this same model of efficiency & get rid of the idea that you have to have a big office and a secretary and all those other uneccessary expenses.
Then, I was talking to another friend of mine on the phone and he remarked to me that a friend of his was going to construct a 70-room office tower in Nairobi off Ngong Road and I thought to myself….why would people want to rent out all these office spaces if their revenue streams are going to be tightening up? Is this concept of having an “office Space” becoming somewhat over-rated for some businesses? Especially given the advancements in technology and the increased use of mobile phones and laptops and all these things.
So, if you are a younger person who is more technologically astute, is this model of not wasting money on office rent something that you’d be moving towards as a way of cutting down on your costs?