Ambition Is Not Enough

This article was meant to go out last Sunday, but I couldn’t put my thoughts together.

I had so much to say, yet I felt like I had so little time to say it. So I struggled.

Eventually, I found a way to narrow everything down to four things: knowledge, skills, direction and strategy.

…because ambition, by itself, is not enough.

That is something I have learned in my course of doing business.

In the early days of Xymbolic we didn’t have a lot. One thing we certainly didn’t have was money.

Everything we got, we got through sheer guts, bravery and the belief that anything was possible.

There was this time I negotiated the purchase of our first 50 acres of land with only ₦2 million in our account, even though the land was worth about ₦120 million.

To do that, I needed guts and ambition.

I even came up with a phrase at some point and it has remained with us until today, the phrase is,  “Impossibility does not exist.”

It simply says that anything is possible, if we put our minds to it.

We even put it up on the wall of our office for everybody to see.

So we didn;t have an ambition problem, we’ve never had one

But ambition alone was not enough, a few important things were missing.

Let me give you an example.

In 2021, set a revenue goal of ₦1 billion. We wanted to make One Billion Naira at the end of the year. 

What we did not do, was to properly consider whether we had the inventory, the people, the structure or the resources required to make it happen.

We just set the goal and by the end of the year, i don’t think we even did 60% of that.

So we had ambition but some other important things were missing.

That same year, we started building our first set of bungalows and just like that, we decided that we were going to stop selling land, for context, our major source of revenue (actually, our only source of revenue), was the sale of land.

…but we started building bungalows and we said we were going to stop selling land.

It sounded like progress. We believed we were moving up the value chain.

It was exciting.

…but what we didn’t have was a strategy for maintaining healthy cash flow while making that transition.

We soon discovered that we had made a stupid decision.

Are you getting the picture now?

One thing ambition does for you is that it allows you to set huge goals without knowing exactly how you will achieve them.

And the truth is that, as an entrepreneur, you need a healthy dose of that kind of ambition to win.

Blind ambition.

Set the goal, refine it later.

But it is in that process of refinement that everything else comes into play: knowledge, skills, direction, strategy, resources and time.

Ambition may give you the courage to start. It may even take you through the first few doors.

But ambition cannot tell you which doors to enter, what to do when you get inside or how to build something that lasts.

For that, you need more.

Looking back at our journey, there are four things I believe every ambitious entrepreneur must deliberately develop.

Let me take them one after the other.

Knowledge.

Before I began running operations at Xymbolic, I attended a business course; the Certificate in Entrepreneurial Management at the Enterprise Development Center, Pan Atlantic University (Lagos Business School)

It was like a mini-MBA. It taught me the basics of accounting, taxation, operations and several other subjects that introduced me to what it meant to run a proper business.

Before Xymbolic, I was running Lands and Houses. I focused mainly on selling real estate and educating people who were interested in investing in Lagos.

But selling real estate was not the same as building and running a structured company.

I knew that I needed to learn.

That course did not teach me everything I would ever need to know about business. What it gave me was a foundation. More importantly, it opened my eyes to understanding that I needed structure to run a proper business, and so I needed more knowledge. 

Almost everything I know today about business, structure, operations, finance and leadership came from somewhere.

A book.

A course.

A conversation.

An adviser.

An experience.

Someone who had already done what I was trying to do.

And many of the things I still struggle with are probably things I have not yet studied deeply enough or found the right knowledge to solve.

So these days, whenever I want to do something, I start by asking:

Who has done this before?

What can I read about it?

Is there a course that can teach me?

Is there someone I can speak to?

What do I need to understand before I begin?

I have come to believe that the distance between where I am and where I want to be is often filled with knowledge I do not yet have.

It is probably the same for you.

Perhaps you want to raise capital, build a team, expand into a new market, manufacture a product or develop 10,000 houses.

You may have the ambition.

But do you know how it is done?

Ambition tells you what you want.

Knowledge begins to show you what will be required.

Skills

Knowledge and skills are closely connected, but they are not the same thing.

Knowledge is understanding what to do.

Skill is developing the ability to do it well.

You can read ten books about negotiation and still be a poor negotiator.

You can attend courses on raising capital and still be unable to raise any capital. 

You can understand the importance of building a great team and still make terrible hiring decisions.

Knowing is not the same as doing.

As an entrepreneur, there are several skills you will need to develop.

– 

• Raising capital.
• Building and managing a team.
• Developing products.
• Selling.
• Negotiating.
• Communicating.
• Allocating resources.
• Making decisions 

You develop these skills by first acquiring knowledge and then applying that knowledge repeatedly.

You try.

You make mistakes.

You study what went wrong.

You adjust.

Then you try again.

Over time, what you once struggled to do becomes something you can do with confidence.

Of course, you do not need to become an expert in everything. Part of building a business is hiring people who are better than you in specific areas.

But even when you hire experts, you still need enough knowledge and judgement to recognise good work, ask intelligent questions, know when something is going wrong, know when people are b*llshitting you.

Now we’ve covered Knowledge and Skills, but one important thing most entrepreneurs don’t think of is:

Direction

Where exactly are we going?

It took us about three years to articulate the vision for Xymbolic properly.

Our vision statement today reads:

“To build an ecosystem of real estate products and solutions that transform the way Africans use and invest in real estate whilst being profitable.”

Once we articulated that vision, it gave us a clearer idea of what we were trying to achieve and the kind of company we wanted to build.

We began creating products, making decisions and designing our strategy around that destination.

Before then, we mostly did what other real estate businesses did.

We sold land because other companies sold land.

We launched projects because that was what real estate companies were expected to do.

But even when things were going well, I often felt unfulfilled. It felt like we were building without a clear sense of purpose.

The funny thing is that I believe I always knew what I wanted Xymbolic to become. I simply had not articulated it clearly enough.

And because I had not articulated it, it was difficult to explain it to other people. It was also difficult to build consistently in that direction.

Today, the vision is not just written down somewhere.

We share it with the team.

We use it to think about our products.

We use it to decide which opportunities make sense for us and which ones do not.

We are gradually building the business around it.

That, for me, is direction.

Direction means that even when you want to move very fast, you at least know that you are moving towards the right destination.

Another real estate company may announce that it wants to build 10,000 houses in one year.

That is fine.

But I do not have to become distracted simply because someone else has announced a big goal.

Their destination may not be ours.

Their business model may not be ours.

Their vision may not be ours.

Without a clear direction, however, it is easy to spend years building your business around someone else’s vision.

You chase their goals.

Copy their products.

Enter markets because they entered them.

Measure yourself against numbers that may have nothing to do with what you are actually trying to build.

You get the point?

Good.

Once you know where you are going, the next question is how you intend to get there.

That is where strategy comes in.

Strategy

“We are going to build 10,000 houses in 10 years.”

That is an ambitious statement.

But how are we going to do it?

That is a question of strategy.

How do we plan to acquire the land?

Where will the money come from?

Are we going to raise equity, borrow, work with joint-venture partners or use a combination of different funding options?

Where will we find the right people to execute the projects?

Who will buy the houses?

Who exactly are we selling to?

What will the price points be? 

Will be able to execute the project with these price points and still be profitable?

How will we maintain quality as we grow?

What systems and standard operating procedures will we need to produce at that scale?

What must happen in year one for the ten-year goal to remain possible?

These are strategy questions.

The same applies if we set a goal to generate ₦1 billion in annual revenue.

That cannot be the end of the conversation.

What products are we going to sell?

How many units must we sell?

At what price?

Do we currently have those products?

If we do not, how will we create or acquire them?

Do we have the marketing, sales and human resources required to achieve the target?

If we generate the sales, do we have the operational capacity to deliver what we promised to the customers?

Will the sales generate healthy cash flow, or will we achieve the revenue target and maybe end up with an unhealthy business?

When you begin to answer these questions, you will no longer measure your success by the success of another person.

You will understand where you are, why you’re there and what you’re doing to achieve your own goals.

.

Strategy forces you to move beyond what you want and begin thinking seriously about how you intend to achieve it.

It also forces you to make choices.

What will you do?

What will you not do?

Where will you invest your money, time and people?

What must happen first?

What can wait?

What assumptions are you making?

What could go wrong?

This is an entire topic on its own, but you get the point.

Ambition sets the destination.

Direction ensures that the destination is yours.

Strategy creates a path towards it.

I’ll add a bonus Point: Time

No matter your level of ambition, you have to respect the concept of time.

…and when I say time, I do not mean that you should simply set a goal and wait patiently for it to happen.

No.

What I’m saying is that you must recognise the time it takes to become the kind of person who can achieve that goal.

One person may launch a business today and get it listed on a stock exchange within three years.

Someone else may launch a similar business and take 10, 20 or even more years to achieve the same thing.

They may both want the same result.

But they may not have the same knowledge, skills, strategy, resources, network, experience or ability to execute.

Every goal contains work that must be done.

You need to understand what that work is, how long it is likely to take and what you must become capable of doing within that period.

Time is not an excuse to move slowly.

It is not permission to procrastinate.

It is simply the reality within which knowledge is acquired, skills are built, strategies are tested and businesses are developed.

Some things can happen quickly.

Other things require years of focused, consistent work.

The important thing is to understand the difference.

So, my friend, ambition is not enough.

But do not get rid of it.

You still need the courage to set the big goal.

You still need the bravery to believe that something is possible before you have all the evidence.

You still need that small amount of blindness that allows you to begin before everything is perfectly clear.

Just make sure you build around it.

Be ambitious enough to set the goal.

Be humble enough to acquire the knowledge.

Be disciplined enough to develop the skills.

Be clear enough to choose your own direction.

Be strategic enough to create a realistic path.

And be patient enough to respect the time required to do the work.

Ambition may get you started.

But these are the things that help you build something that lasts.

Got it?

I’ll see you in my next article.

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Cheers!