YOUWIN And The Fallacy Of The Businessplan

When I had begun to cheer federal government, I realized YOUWIN would be blighted by the factors that have been chasing Nigeria and foreign businesses to neighbouring countries. It is just that we have put the cart before the horse.

One of those factors is absent or deteriorating infrastructure. When I say infrastructure, I mean both the soft and hard. From protection of intellectual property issues, red tape and varnishing physical infrastructure, YOUWIN would have to crawl for now. Our business ecosystem is severely challenged by anti-business policies like multiple taxation, insecurity, just a few and government shies away from shoring purchasing power of the consumers who are hit daily by new regulations. And so startups will have to innovate to overcome staggering cost of business maintenance or die like wisp.

Internet access and speed is a trouble. While urban center internet speed is snail-like, you can imagine how frustrating rural internet is. For these reasons, rural aspiring entrepreneurs have had to contend with low speed and even YOUWIN is sensitivity to internet speed.

If you don’t remember what YOUWIN is it is Youth Enterprise with Innovation in Nigeria (YouWiN!) programme. A collaboration of the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Communication Technology (CT), and the Ministry of Youth Development that will launch an annual Business Plan Competition (BPC) for aspiring young entrepreneurs in Nigeria, in line with the Federal Government’s drive to create more jobs for Nigerians. This programme is expected to be funded by the OPS.

Critically, YOUWIN suffers from its own inherent weakness as well as our weak infrastructure. Fat is that Businessplan can hardly handle market realities-the x-factor is what businessplan competitions of this sort can’t grapple with.

Steve Bank on his website wrote, business plans are a poor planning and execution tool for startups. He went further to explain that “businessplan competition perpetuates everything that is wrong about trying to make plans that were designed to be used in large companies fit startups…Market opportunity, reward to risk, strategy, implementation plan, financing plan, etc, all of which may be true in large companies. But little of it is relevant to the chaos and uncertainty in the life of a startup.”

It is not hard to see that we might just be having creative writing exercise as it is noted that many competitors never become a brilliant start up or even take off.

Above all, the ferocity of the marketplace makes businessplans almost a wasteful exercise especially in this age of great disruptions. Like a commentator stated on his website the key to success for entrepreneurs is the ability to rapidly adapt the business model to a customer jobs-to-get done… and for that you need business model prototyping & testing and not business plan writing. For now we have to contend with business plan writing competitions like YOUWIN and waiting that those who survive the scrutiny will finally become a startup. Then create the needed jobs.

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