Every entrepreneur needs to have a friend, partner or a mentor who is an engineer and this is because business is going through a digital transformation. When you talk of digital transformation, then the first field that is affected is engineering. Way back it used to be finance people controlling business but the power was taken by engineers who are now leading all new business innovations.
The best example of how engineers helped entrepreneurship
When it comes to investment-finance people think of capital first. How much capital is available for investment and then apply investment models such as NPV, IRR, ARR and Payback. When you start with capital, the weakness that you will encounter is that your thinking is restricted by amount of capital available. If $10.000 is available, then you cannot come up with ideas above the $10.000 threshold.
Engineer’s Perspective: Engineers came up with a reverse model to investment. Realising the shortcomings of the above model-they came up with a model that starts with markets with capital coming last. Coming up with markets means that your thinking is not restricted and you can come up with more investment options or ideas than the finance people model. After coming up with ideas that are not restricted by capital, one can therefore end with the capital question where you can consider the following options;
- Raising funds from bank loans
- Raising funds through crowdfunding
- Raising funds through partnerships
- Raising funds through salary advances
- Raising funds through donor funds
- Raising funds through government funds.
So engineers made investment easy for entrepreneurs-the one with access to markets is King, so the focus of business should first be on markets and not finance.
Other contributions to the finance field by engineers
Balanced scorecard model
Kaizen theory
Total Quality Management
Digital Marketing
Big Data Analysis
Six Sigma
So make sure you have an engineer in your team and use their expertise and apply to the business world. Now does this make sense why the richest person in Zimbabwe is an engineer? Not surprising because the future of business is technologically driven.
