Below is an exact scenario of what one of my many mentors goes through and coincidentally I am going through the same these days. That is not having enough time to respond to emails, messages on social media etc. I hope you all will understand. Nevertheless, I will surely reply / respond to your emails and messages, even if it takes long. I'm sincerely sorry :)
Around 2006-ish, I was quietly failing at my then glitzy startup student magazine, Brash. I was casting around for investors and / or money when I remembered I was loosely connected to a young. somewhat prominent black entertainment entrepreneur in London. I had never met him but our parents knew each other from the village and I remember going to their house once every 3/4 years. That was it. That was my chance to reach out and have a conversation. Young wealthy black folk (in my humble experience) are few and far between in the UK so I shook a few trees and wrangled an initial phone call, then excitedly told him about how I was going to revolutionise publishing across the UK and hyped up how I was getting keen interest from investors. At best, he was super polite and asked really intelligent questions. I fired across a business plan (forgive me, this is 2006 and I believed they were important) and eagerly awaited a reply.
Around 2006-ish, I was quietly failing at my then glitzy startup student magazine, Brash. I was casting around for investors and / or money when I remembered I was loosely connected to a young. somewhat prominent black entertainment entrepreneur in London. I had never met him but our parents knew each other from the village and I remember going to their house once every 3/4 years. That was it. That was my chance to reach out and have a conversation. Young wealthy black folk (in my humble experience) are few and far between in the UK so I shook a few trees and wrangled an initial phone call, then excitedly told him about how I was going to revolutionise publishing across the UK and hyped up how I was getting keen interest from investors. At best, he was super polite and asked really intelligent questions. I fired across a business plan (forgive me, this is 2006 and I believed they were important) and eagerly awaited a reply.
I didn’t get one.
Boy was I outraged. F**k him. F**k everyone, all these non believers not even bothering to respond back to my carefully crafted 30 page propaganda pamphlet. Just wait and see. I am going to be worth $100m and show them all kinds of stunting! (remember this was me in 2006. I was only 26 after all). Ranting aside, I was hurt. I genuinely believed that he owed me at least a goddam response. But it never came and I was pissed for like 7 years. In 2013, I actually met him for the first time. We were at his mum’s place for Christmas. No doubt my fortunes had changed. I was good now. Didn’t need any help anymore. Was ready to go all look-at-me-now on him. But then a strange thing happened. We ended up having a really good conversation. There was no agenda. Just two Igbo boys talking shop. He remembered our 2006 conversation and asked me how it all went down in the end. He apologised (I think) for never getting back. He said things were crazy in 2006, he said building a business means he missed things. Couldn’t always reply to everyone’s messages, he said.
And I understood. Then I didn’t. Now I do.
I get hundreds of emails daily. If I responded to all of them, I literally wouldn’t be able to get anything else done. Anything. So 80% (even the ones from iROKO employees) I simply don’t respond to. Unfortunately, I must ignore them. I read them, but don’t respond. Let me not get started on the random inbound social media requests from people reaching out. I struggle to read long emails / messages. Bullet points and concise 100-word emails work best for me. Otherwise my intellectual bandwidth taps out. I just can’t.
When we first started Spark almost two years ago, I vividly remember not wanting to be that guy. The person who doesn’t respond to emails. So I would attempt to respond to every message sent via the website or directly sent to me. I couldn’t do it in real time so I tried to leave it a few weeks then respond en masse on a Saturday or Sunday. It worked until it just simply didn’t. I lost an entire weekend responding to investment requests that I decided to just give up. No doubt there were hacks around this. But figuring that out itself became a problem.
Time is limited. The demands of my time are brutal so I have to be as efficient as possible with how I deploy it. So I miss things. Forget things. Can’t respond to everything sent my way. Not because I am a bad guy, but because I am just one person.
I have been meaning to write this for the longest time but with me working at 40% capacity, it’s become more acute. It’s inevitable I will miss the next Titans of Nigerian and African business in my inbox with this approach. For that I am sorry. For that I say no vex. This building business thing. It makes a person miss things.
CREDIT: JASON NJOKU'S BLOG
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