Building Discipline for your Finances as a Business Owner

Barr. Mary-Anne Momoh-Ige, owner of “Gifts and Moments” shared insights with us on how she and her team build discipline for her business finances.

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In an introduction, she spoke about the value offerings of her business, “Our business is called “Gifts and Moments'” (@giftsandmomentsng on Instagram). We commenced operations in 2019 after undergoing extensive training in the gifts business. 

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We offer personalized gifting services to various clients within and outside Nigeria.

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We specialize in providing gifts for all occasions such as birthday gifts and surprise packages, wedding gifts, anniversary gifts, souvenirs, corporate gifts, festive hampers for Christmas and Ramadan, etc. Our mission as a business is “making every celebration memorable” by curating gift packages and experiences that linger in the hearts of your loved ones.’’

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She spoke on the need for businesses to adopt financial discipline “Financial discipline is very important to build a sustainable business because every business requires capital and finances to experience continuous growth.’’

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Sharing her key strategy for building this discipline, she said “Our key strategy for building financial discipline while managing our business is to ensure that all business income and expenditure are properly tracked. 

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And the Dillali app is very helpful in this regard. By carefully tracking our income and expenses we can plan for business growth.”

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She goes further to say “We plan financially for our business by ensuring we don’t spend our profit carelessly or take a salary from the business. Rather, we channel all our profit back into the business as capital for restocking new goods and also use part of the funds to enroll in relevant business development courses to help our growth.’’

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Budgeting is also key when building healthy finances in your business, she gave a detailed explanation of this.

“We discipline our spending and ensure we stay on budget by having a disciplined Chief Operations Officer who is very thorough in financial management. In addition, we conduct market surveys to determine which products have greater potential for sale to avoid stocking products outside our budget that will go to waste and negatively impact our finances. Furthermore, we explore viable investment opportunities to help our profits grow and beat inflation.’’

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She tells us about some challenges they face due to the constant decline in the naira and how they avoid losses “A rocky financial experience that has impacted us in the past is the recent rapid devaluation of the Naira. 

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This harms our business because most of the products we stock are imported from abroad and we realized that by the time we were going to restock we had essentially sold them at a loss and could not restock at the same price. This experience taught us to forecast relevant foreign exchange trends and consider the possibility of currency fluctuations when calculating our profit margins to arrive at a reasonable selling price.”

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To close out our discussion with her, she shared some important tips for business owners to adopt,

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“The most important financial management tips for business owners are: 

• Always work with a budget  
• Keep track of your inventory if you stock products  
• Monitor your income and expenditure to accurately determine your profit margins 
• Do not prematurely spend your profit by taking inflated salaries as CEO, rather channel your profits back into your business as capital for continuous growth  
• Ensure you save and also invest to beat inflation."

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As you know, she uses Dillali to run a profitable business, and join her and other growing businesses here.

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