People complain I don't read and reply to their Whatsapp messages, Faceboook messages, BBM chats and even email. The truth is I avoid checking my BBM, Whatsapp and Facebook messages. I am still trying to reduce my work/requests load and get a more healthy sleep daily.

image: overthinkingit.com

I spend most week days on the road from one client to another and spend my weekends trying to clear the list of work I am passed deadline in sending. The only time of the day I get to clearly see emails, SMS and messages are at night. Replying to them always eat into my sleep time and I end up sleeping less than 4 hours that day.

My work is split into two categories:

• category 1: work that generates immediate cash
• category 2: work that has a long pay cycle

I once spent 3 months coding a business process automation program for a client and got paid 7 months after. And I still have one project I completed that the payment is over 9 months due. You just have to mix all types of work. You can't simply turn down jobs because you want to have more time to read emails, reply SMS, chat more with friends or spend more time on Whatsapp. It's even hard to gauge the amount of work you can handle without cutting into sleep time.

The good side is that it gives me some leverage. Getting a lot of work requests has helped me pushed up my rates almost 6 times since the beginning of this year. When a potential client tries to over bargain the price I walk away without worrying about where the next job will come from. In fact, I am sometimes happy when a potential client walks away because of my pricing, it is the best way to lose a client. Better than telling him you have no time for his job. He will call you back when he's got a more worthy project and wants high quality service. Rather than he thinking you are always too busy and will not have time for his project.

I have been able to set-up our monthly training satisfactorily. I have put in place a working strategy that will help me achieve the enterprise product offerings/development I have always been talking about. The part of my business I am still struggling with is rightly charging for my consulting projects. But I know that just as my training pricing took a year and lots of training organized to get right, I will also get this right with time. Hopefully, I will be able to charge millions for ones I currently charge thousands. And now is the best time to start fixing that area. I will start raising the charges I quote and see the reactions. 

I guess it is the price one pays at the start of something one's entire life depends on.

Yesterday, I went visiting my ex-colleagues at the company I acquired most of my Excel skills. Once it was nearing 5:00pm they were getting set to end the day. I really envied them. My own day never ends. Even when I sleep, I still feel the grip of the jobs I have pending and about to miss their deadlines around my neck.

For me, it has been all work and little rest. It is already killing the little flame of social interaction left in me. I no longer keep up with emails, SMS, Facebook messages, Whatsapp chats, BBM chats, and even phone calls.

I used to think when people say "Knowledge is power only when applied" they were just trying to sound smart. But now I don't think so anymore. I have seen its truth play out repeatedly in my life recently.

The only reason I am making more money that I used to make just a year ago is not because I know a lot more now. I definitely do know a lot more now but the new knowledge I have acquired are not what is fetching me the bulk of my income. The bulk of my income come from knowledge I have had for a long time but just didn't apply/monetise well then.

All those things we read in books and know will only benefit us if we apply them in our day to day living. We all know exercising is good but only the people who put in the deliberate effort to exercise regularly will benefit from that knowledge; others will only be able to make nothing more than a good argument from their knowledge. We all that the best time to buy stocks is when they are down and selling at ridiculously low prices. Yet some people will never act on that knowledge either because they have genuine reasons or they are used to knowing without applying. Genuine reasons would be no spare money to invest, a deep hatred for stocks, inadequate knowledge on stock investing and better opportunities to put their money in. Reasons other than those are simply a reflection of an unwillingness to put to practical use the knowledge you have.

image: bornrich.com

Now is a great time to invest in stocks in Nigeria. And if you are not a great stock picker you will still do greatly well if you open a stock mutual fund (either with ARM or Stanbic). And that is what I am doing. I have resumed my monthly investment deposit to my ARM discovery fund. I no longer have the time to actively pick stocks. After looking at the performance history of my ARM discovery fund investment since I opened it in 2011, I have made more from it than from the money market. And even when I was running my own brokerage account, picking stocks myself, I didn't do better. So I will just have ARM manage the investment for me and do the stock picking.

Before I quit my job last year to start my own business, I used to make a monthly contribution of N60,000 to my investment accounts. Usually split as N10,000 direct debit to the ARM mutual fund, and N50,000 split between my ARM money market fund and ARM stock brokerage account. I stopped the N50,000 one immediately I quit my job in March. And I stopped the N10,000 direct debit in September last year when I had exhausted my savings. It was just two months ago I resumed the N10,000 direct debit to the ARM mutual fund account. And now I am restarting the N50,000 one too but will have it in the mutual fund rather than the brokerage and money market fund. It's now part of my monthly personal goals.

My reasons are very simple. Stocks are now ridiculously low maybe because the new investment hype is real estate and people are now more concerned about a predictable savings in the face of the current harsh economic environment. Banks are laying off staff in thousands, oil companies are letting go of contract staff and state governments are not able to make payroll. Very few people have cash and confidence to spare for the stock market.

Nevertheless, the principle is simple and always works. Those who make the most money in stocks buy when everyone is pessimistic about stocks. When you no longer see people reading the NSE price list section of newspapers and no investment firm is making buy/sell/hold analysis on newspapers. When the news is how the stock market is at a new low. These are the strongest buy signal you can ever get.

It's very fast!
I do a lot of analysis on files that are large, sometimes more than 1GB large. Excel 2010 usually crashes when handling such large files. Excel 2013 can be annoyingly slow. But Excel 2016, it's the real deal. It handles my large data files very well and is faster than Excel 2010. And that is the first thing I love about Excel 2016.

It's got cool new charts!
I make a report for MTN every Monday/Tuesday. It's a report that pushes me to the edge of every of my Excel skills -- analysis, data mining, data visualization, dashboarding and PowerPivot. Every new tool I get helps improve my work. And Excel 2016 has been a godsend. Its being fast has reduced the pain in getting the report done. No more waiting 2 mins for formulas to populate across a million plus rows. Then it's got new cool chart types -- Sunburst, Histogram, Waterfall, Box and Whisker, and Treemap. Now I have begun incorporating them in showing new insights in my report.

It's feature packed!
New formulas. Most of which I will get to know with time/use.

Ability to leave handwritten notes (Inking).

Data menu on steroids. In-built forecast tool! And other new/modified tools.

And most importantly, I love the new interface. It's a lot like Excel 2013 but a little slicker.

In one of the books that most motivated me to believe in myself and my ability to start a successful business -- Street Smarts: An All-Purpose Tool Kit for Entrepreneurs -- the author made one statement I'll never forget. He said as an entrepreneur you shouldn't bother too much about writing down all the feedback you get, that the really valuable ones will come so frequently that you won't need any help remembering them.

image: wowcher.co.uk

And that is what has happened to us recently. So many people have asked for a Financial Modelling class from us that it's obviously a major need we can't keep ignoring. So I am compiling practice files from real life financial modelling jobs I have done -- both for Nigerian clients and foreign clients. I would be modifying them a lot to not break any terms of agreement, just replicating some of the structure and putting in dummy data. And in some samples we would us a publicly traded company, do a complete LBO Valuation of it by

• computing its weighted average cost of capital (WACC), 
• getting its cost of financial debt (either from its corporate bond rate or interest payment from the P&L and debt liability from Balance Sheet)
• getting its cost of equity (using the Capital Asset Pricing Model)
• discounting the free cash flow (DCF) using WACC to compute the present value of the company by picking the right forecast period and continuity period
• adding the other assets to it to get the company's enterprise valuation
• removing debt to get the equity value

And in doing this we would be covering

• the rules of valuation, 
• the recommended way of doing it in Excel, 
• the financial terms and their meanings in my usual very explicit way, 
• the formulas we need to make a robust dynamic financial model, 
• the special charts to give extra value and clarity to your model, and 
• the usual checks that must be in place to detect errors in the model.

Also we would pick other examples that will require building a financial model for a new company. Using values from sales or its estimate.

It would be one of the most in-depth and practically oriented Financial Modelling training. The participants will go home with enough sample valuation files and templates that will cover almost all situations they'll encounter.

We are almost done and will definitely let you know when the first class would be holding.

I see a lot of people who focus too much on soft skills. They are constantly reading and attending training on:

• Public Speaking,
• Emotional Intelligence,
• Body language and Communication,
• Art of negotiation,
• and many similar others.

Sometimes I think we have too many soft skills expert than hard skills experts. Too many people who know how to dress up to impress, people who want to speak always, who are constantly emotionally classifying people, who are too concerned about the parts of life I call "Value Add" rather than the core aspects of life.

image: ngodabusiness.info

Soft skills are great and one can't have too much of them. But they are to help us brighten what is in us. You still need a hard skill. A core skill that will still make you valuable even if you had no soft skill.

Look at the most influential people in Nigeria: Aliko Dangote, Mike Adenuga and the others. Again look at the wealthiest people in the world: Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Carlos Slim. Armancio Ortega, Elon Musk and the rest. They are not the guys with the best soft skills. Some are even not good public speakers and avoid limelight as much as possible. Also a couple have little emotional intelligence. Yeah, they all have excellent negotiation skills. It comes with practice and running a business gets you more than enough practice.

If you watch them speak on TV, you will see that it's not soft skills that got them where they are. Nor even contributed the most to them getting there. It is a doggedness built on some set of hard skills.

The guys with all the soft skills and no hard skills are often leeches. They need to be around bigger people and in a ready built system. They need someone to wow with their soft skills and hope they get a big favour in return. They have to feed off others.

Soft skills aren't enough. You need to be crazy good at a technical skill. A skill that requires deep learning and practice in a narrow field. It is what provides the foundation of what soft skills should enhance. Your soft skills are meant to complement and beautify your hard skills; not replace them.

My company, UrBizEdge Limited, is dedicatedly a business data analysis and Microsoft Excel consulting company. We consult for other companies and, occasionally, individuals. My role is as the Lead Consultant. When the marketing team helps us win a project, I do the bulk of the actual work. So I'm a full-time consultant.

image: onlineatom.com

What is it like to be a full-time consultant in Nigeria?

1. It Takes A Long Time To Convince People That You Are 
When people think of consultants, the idea they have in their head is a university professor who works part-time for an oil company on a research project. Or a retired old man who was so good at his job that the company had to take him as a consultant after his retirement. Or someone in between jobs. 

The truth is if you are not retired nor a university professor, most people just think you are in between jobs and don't want to say so. And it's not just random people but the people you are hoping will help link you with clients and get you consulting gigs. They rather start telling you to get a regular job in a big company and make more money for less work.

There is a good side to it all, though. After a year or more, they begin to get convinced. Usually after they've seen you turn down many 9 to 5 job offers.

2. People Expect You To Mix Everything
"What? You do only Microsoft Excel?" 
"Don't you know other Office programs? Add Microsoft Project, it is more lucrative."
"Don't target just businesses and working professionals. Go to secondary schools, universities and NYSC camps."
"We need an XYZ training instructor. Can you handle that class?"

They do this out of a genuine concern. But it's left for you to decide the breadth and length of your consultancy practice, and stick to it. 

I am not a good negotiator and constantly undersell my services. So I would rather focus on the market segment that is not too price sensitive. People who wouldn't be fervently bargaining price. That is why I focus on businesses and working professionals. And that has left students and recent graduates out of my core market target.

And I do things at an intense level. Whatever I put my mind to, I give it my best and a crazy amount of dedication. That makes it really difficult for me to do too many things at once. I will have a nervous breakdown. I have to pick a narrow field and be the best at it. And that is why I do only Excel and Business Data Analysis. Luckily, I am constantly learning new tools and acquiring new skills but I won't add them to my professional profile until I find them more rewarding than my present line of business focus.

3. You Must Learn To Forget What Went Wrong
Last month, I made a loss in organizing our monthly training. On the day of the training, only one person showed up. Some were kind enough to cancel just one day to the training and some preferred to cancel on the day of the training. I made a big loss. And still had to handle the two days training without letting the unpleasant situation show on my face. After the training, I moved on fast and we started calling the people who didn't show up and today (just 2 weeks after the loss) I am having a special one for those who cancelled during the last one. Though again people cancelled at the last moment and one person didn't show up after promising the night before that we should get his materials and certificate ready. I didn't make a loss this time. Made enough gain to cover my last loss.

And that is even a good example. There are some losses that you can't recoup. I am still having issues with CAC, GTBank won't let me withdraw from my company account because of a spelling error in one of my account opening documents, and recently FIRS has decided to give me unnecessary troubles (they kinda lost my files). Many things will wrong and for reasons that will only drive you mad. So you just have to learn to forget things and move on.

4. Work Live Crazy And Have The Big Picture Always In Mind
I work from the moment I open my eyes in the morning till I close them at night. Some work don't even bring money. Then there a lot of small requests from very many people. There is always someone I am unintentionally annoying and lots of pending work.

So I just keep the big picture of building Nigeria's most reputable and profitable enterprise solutions firm always in my head and don't worry about the present high pressure demand/work I encounter daily.

5. You Will Now Feel Full Force The Amenities We Lack
You will spend on generator.
You will spend unreasonably high on a work quality internet.
You will get stuck in traffic more than most other people.
You will have to provide everything the government should have provided, and not just for you but for some of your staff too.


It's a hard job to be a full-time consultant in Nigeria.

Yesterday I got the payment of June earnings from my online course on Udemy. By next week I would be getting a payment from Upwork for a freelance job I do for a UK company monthly. Later in the month I would be getting the payment of another earnings from Google Adverts placed on my blog. And I just checked Amazon for my book sales and it shows that I would also soon be getting a payment from them soon.

And those are just a couple of earnings I get sweatlessly from different sources.

I also sell iTunes gift cards. Takes just about 3 mins to do and I get to make between N800 and N2,200 as profit on each transaction. Every month I get calls from other training companies that want me to facilitate training for an Excel class they have put together.

All these are extra income sources for me beside my core business/job.

image: digitalbloggers.com

So how do you easily build multiple income streams?

It's a tricky question because all you have to do are easy but when the money will come is usually outside your control. It could take between minutes to years for you to see the result of your efforts. For me it has been a mix of all. I had income streams it took me just a few days to build and see significant results from. And I had others that took years to get any significant results from.

But the task in itself is an easy one. There is just one rule -- you get what you go after. Extra income streams will not come uninvited. They will not come looking for you and forcing themselves on you. You have to go find them. You have to think of all you can do to make extra income and start doing them. You have to evaluate your current position and the resources you have in abundance to spare towards earning extra income. It could be time, money, a less used skill, a rare talent or physical assets (land. a spare room, extra car ...).

For me, that resource has been my technical abilities and computer know-how. I have never have too much time. And I am just starting to build up physical assets. So for a  long time I focused on what I could do that wouldn't require much time and physical assets but just excellent technical skill. That was how I came up with the iTunes card selling idea. It's a genius idea. I use a very ingenious technical way to get the iTunes card in less than 2 mins and complete a sales transaction in less than 5 mins. Get paid and move on with my life. It is also how I got the freelance job for the UK company. They wanted a tech savvy Nigerian to help with a telecoms network quality test on a monthly going basis. I fit the profile well. All I do is to just keep two phones on 24x7 and at the end of the month I get paid. Almost like free money. And it's the same principle I used to get the income from Amazon and Udemy. I use my technical skill to come up with an excellent book and a great training content; now I get free money from sales, even while I am sleeping.

For you it could be that extra car you have. Turn it into a taxi. Hire a highly recommended driver and get some form of guarantee. Let it start making you an extra income. And if it is extra money, don't just let the banks use your money for business for free; have an investment. Put your money to work.

And if you can write, start a blog. It might take a long time before it will make you monthly money like mine now does but it will bring many people and opportunities your way.

In a sentence, the easiest way to build multiple streams of income is to put every extra resource you have to some value creating and money making use.

I recently entered for Microsoft Internet of Things competition. I would be building an automation system using Raspberry Pi 2 model B+ and Microsoft IoT Core.

I had to get a Raspberry Pi 2 kit. And got the well recommended Canary Raspberry Pi Ultimate Kit

The project has been viewed over 496 times and respected by 6 people. One went further to leave an encouraging comment. It will fall under my programming practice jobs. I would be using Visual Studio 2015 and C# in building the home automation system. I plan to have it use the internet to relay information to me and get commands from me from wherever I am.

I will be sure to let you know how I progress.

My Project description on Hackster.io is as follow:

In 2009, I designed and constructed a home automation system that works well with the peculiar nature of power supply and user behaviour in Nigeria. It worked so well that a company wanted to built a commercial version of it and pay me royalties.

I also put up the design, programming and construction document online and it has been downloaded 10,422 times as at 14-August-2015. Mostly by other Nigerians and lots of Indians. It probably solves a need for them over there in India too.

In this new project, I would be using Raspberry Pi, Windows 10 IOT core and Windows Azure to rebuild the home automation system and give it more features than the original one I did in 2009.

I recently got a Microsoft Lumia 640 phone. It is a Windows phone. 

image: o2.co.uk

It's a lovely phone. And I got it cheap via Amazon. Less than half the price it sells on Konga.com.

So if you've got a Windows phone like me, how do you make the most of it.

Number One
Change your region to USA. Or you won't get some apps in the Store.

Go to settings.

Scroll down to time+language 

Tap on region

Set it to United States


I will also suggest you change the Keyboard (just below the region setting) to English (United States) so that you don't have to dig deep to look for keys like $.

Number Two
Add your Google, Yahoo, Twitter, LinkedIn and Work Email.

Again, it's under settings. Scroll down to accounts.

Number Three
Go to the Store and install the following Apps

Amazon Kindle

Audible

Files

VLC Player (plays almost all movie types)

Number Four
Get an external memory card. I got a 64 GB class 10 one for mine. 

image: mymemory.co.uk

Bonus
Get a pouch for the phone. Protects you from expensive repairs.

And those are my tips for making the most of your Windows Phone.

image: ndmonline.org

I had a chat with a big man yesterday. He is a briton who has headed multinational companies in Nigeria since the 1970s. He was to interview me for a consulting role in a company he now serves as a non-executive director. It ended up being a very friendly chat.

After we discussed the business I was to do for them and how long it would take as it was a project I had to deliver, we talked about other things. I asked him how the Nigerian business space had changed since the 1970s. He was really generous with his reply and told me a lot I learned from. Because of his management/head role in the companies he worked for he knew on a personal level so many of the big shots in Nigeria then. He said it's now their children running the shows now.

In his reply to another of my question, he mentioned how important it is for people to grow from nothing to something. That when leaders are hand picked based on criteria other than competence and experience, it causes a lot of issues for everyone. And that stood out for me.

Don't just plan to go from nothing to something, rather plan to GROW from nothing to something. It is the best way to go from nothing to something.

It got me re-evaluating my life. Maybe, I am doing great then. I am growing everyday and encountering new opportunities. It was even how I got referred for the consulting role. Everyday I feel myself growing and in the direction I want to head. And hopefully, into the someone I want to become.

I also learned that relationships/contacts matter. Even if its just a passing, hi-hi relationship. The more the faces that recognize you, the better your success story will be. So I guess I will have to re-start attending professional events and networking events where I will be sure to meet new faces. Hopefully, it will hasten my nothing to something.