Remember the time when your teacher asked you in school…what do you want to do as a career? I’m sure the most common model answers were doctor, lawyer, professional athletes. I bet a lot of us never thought about re-selling sneakers to be a career. Well I would have never thought so either…but here I am. The model careers mentioned above to be honest…99% of us will not achieve…its a harsh reality but that doesn’t mean you can’t do well in life in other aspects.
I didn’t study business in school because I had no clue what it meant and wasn’t even interested. Even when I knew what i wanted to do in life, there seemed to be many MANY obstacles and limitations to where I wanted to go. I always wanted to work at Nike…I didn’t know what i wanted to do, but I didn’t care because anything Nike is what I wanted to do. I tried numerous times to apply for Nike jobs, but no luck. That’s when I eventually found my niche in reselling Nike shoes (shoes that I actually love) and then eventually came a business – Netmagnetism.
Let me make it simple for you…do you know what a Balance Sheet and Income Statement and how they relate to each other in a business? If your answer is No, then you should learn if you want to do well in the long term of a business. I briefly studied Business 101 in first year university as an elective course, but god damn its finally paying dividends. It surely wasn’t my favourite course back then and obviously I didn’t score well in it either, but it was certainly the building block to what I know now. A lot of times when we are studying we don’t really have much interest because we don’t know how and when we can use the knowledge and more importantly how it would be useful in life. However, your attitude and focus changes completely when you can directly relate to it.
Here’s why going to school is important…The subject we study is not what makes us who we are or become, BUT rather its how we learn. In my opinion, my biggest W from going to school was learning how to learn. I know it sounds weird, but you’ll understand once you’re through it. Once you learn how to learn, you can do anything in life. 10 years ago if you threw me these financial statements I would have no clue what it meant or how to decipher through the numbers and understand a business. I wouldn’t even be able to converse with my accountant on which part of the business I can do better and which areas I can make it more tax efficient. If you’re really good at re-selling shoes…GREAT, but if you don’t know how the manage and have a decent understanding of how the money flows through the business then you might hit a BIG problem down the road. I’m not saying you need to understand and know how to create journal entries and create ledgers for your books, but you need to understand how income and expense and equity flows back into your balance sheet and know the bottom line inside out.
Some of you reading this may be too young to understand, but what today’s focus and take home point is if you want to run a successful long term business, you will need to be good at other things aside from just re-selling sneakers or your core business. I’m sure we don’t all start a business just to expect it to be a short term thing…we do it with an intent of being in it for the long term. Sure, most of us will say…I’m good…I don’t need a company because I ain’t paying tax…I used to think like that too…but if you want to expand, starting a business and incorporating and paying tax will help you move the business forward. Last thing you want is CRA or Tax man chasing you for all those years you have been selling on eBay and Paypal…Moreover…tax evasion is ILLEGAL.
blog.netmagnetism.com 