I remember a few years ago I was very lonely, not because I didn't have people around me but because I wasn't in their league anymore. You know that saying that birds of the same feather flock together, you don't need to have different feathers before you stop flocking together, you just need a stain on the feather and you will be segregated completely. This is the story of how I lost my business capital a few years back.
I had my first mini grocery store or what I could refer to as a mini mart about 8 years ago and I had dreams to see it grow. It was my baby and it was always on my mind and for 3 years, the business was doing well. I started to feel untouchable because I was doing things the right way so i thought but then I began to experience a reduction in money remitted by employees after the day's sale. While sales were recorded on the store POS machine, the staffs were collecting cash.
At first, they were sincere, doing their jobs and I was impress but little did I know they were just pretending as they were petty thieves. I decided to travel for a 3 weeks event and since I trusted them already, I left without putting them in the hands of a manager. Well, the rest is history as they say. I got to see my store almost empty with no products. They were selling goods, they were pocketing the money for themselves and they were not repurchasing them from the vendors as instructed before leaving. I tried buying goods back into the store but soon, the inflation rate of the country became another problem as a result of bad government policies that didn't favor small business owners. I went out of my business location for about a month, and everything went south, and the government wasn't helping out so I had to close business.
The first mistake I made was I didn't create a company that could run behind me. They needed to see me to put the business the way I wanted. While without any reasonable doubts, they were just thieves, I believe if I had given them a more reason to see that the business was ours and any hurt it had would affect us, then they might have done better, although I still doubt that fact because one who wants to steal do not care what you let them know or how included you make them feel. Not setting the right measures to check them and checkmate them when they are about to engage in their fraudulent activity was another reason why the business failed.
While I closed down my store, a friend of mine requested that he needed assistance with a very fast transaction and needed me to borrow money for about 48 hours before he was able to access funds. I would have blatantly said no, but I didn't want my friend to be out of business because I couldn't help so I decided to assist with my business capital.
I borrow the friend my small business capital, and I never saw the money again. After lots of back and forth, I realized that my friend who didn't know anything about crypto trading or Forex trading at all, came to me to borrow money so he could trade futures. He gambled my entire capital on futures and left me broke.
I wasn't going to pursue the case because I didn't even have enough to feed more less to pay lawyers but I learned my lessons on the spot. In business, there are no family members, they are all humans looking out for themselves first. Also another lesson was never to give, borrow, or risk your business capital for anything because once lost, it cannot be gotten back. Well, I have gone past that now, I made my business mistakes, learned from then, and now I am taking better steps that has started improving my business and my way of life.