PBS Course Menu

A first step towards gaining the tools and mindset to start a thriving business.

An overview of the focus of the course and how to use it.

Business is not about having a store or an office, or how much money you make. A business is any effort to serve others in an organized and thoughtful way that produces a profit.

Starting a business may seem overwhelming. But even the world’s largest and most profitable businesses started with a first, small step. How do we know our first step?

Are unsure if you can start a business? Maybe you do not think that you are good enough, smart enough, wealthy enough, or you are afraid of failing.

We’ve learned the purpose of a business and the first step of starting any great business. We end this module with some activities to help you start thinking about ways to serve your customers and come up with some ideas of potential businesses that you could start.

Iman Hadi lives in a small village in Yemen that has been heavily impacted by war. In 2019 she and 9 of her friends were together, wondering what they could do to help their neighbors who were suffering.

Now we will focus on knowing our customers. If the goal of a business is to serve customers, then we must know those customers and understand what they want.

What motivates you to choose one vendor over another? Quality? Price? Relationship? Understanding customer motivations can help you decide how to serve them.

Serving others makes our communities stronger, it makes us happier, it is honoring to others, and it makes our business more sustainable.

In this module we learned about knowing our customers. If we are going to have a good business, we must understand customer motivations, or the reasons that they spend money.

By buying fruits from small farmers, the company is creating value from millions of mangoes that otherwise rot and go to waste every year.

This module will help you use what you know about your customer to discover ways to serve your customer by delivering the best possible value through a product or service.

There are many different places throughout the supply path to serve your customer.

Learning about the supply path can help us serve our customers better, use our skills better, and make more money.

When deciding our place in the market we should ask ourselves two important questions: Am I able? How will it pay me?

We also need to network with others in business who are interested in serving customers. A network is a group of people who use their relationships to make their businesses better.

Once we understand our place in the market, we must learn how we can deliver the best possible service and develop customer loyalty.

It costs less time and money to keep current customers returning than it costs to find a new customer.

In this module we learned how to serve our customers.

Casas Bahia has grown to be extremely successful because of their commitment to knowing each customer, building positive relationships, and bringing value to the lives of their customers.

Now that we have discussed how to serve our customers well, we can learn about making a profit.

We will start learning how to pay ourselves by calculating how much money we need to live, or our Personal Livelihood Needs.

Once we have calculated our personal livelihood needs and we understand how much we need to make, we should understand our current activities and production to learn what income we are already earning.

Once we have calculated our personal livelihood needs and we understand how much we need to make, we should understand our current activities and production to learn what income we are already earning.

Once we have calculated our personal livelihood needs and we understand how much we need to make, we should understand our current activities and production to learn what income we are already earning.

We know we need to use profits wisely, and one of the best ways to use our profit is to grow it by reinvesting.

Once we are making a profit, we can then decide what to do with the money. We can consume or spend it, we can save it, we can reinvest it, or we can give it.

Even when restaurants closed because of the Covid-19, Richard learned how to market his passion fruit as a food full of Vitamin C that would help to keep customers healthy.

Now we will look at a specific tool, a ledger, to help us keep record of our expenses and income so that we can watch our money.

By writing down all of the money that you make and spend you can learn about your business.

We can use a monthly financial summary to look at one piece of paper and see how much money we made or lost instead of trying to understand what is written on stacks of paper.

After having trouble getting a job, Victor and his 2 friends decided to start a skin care company in 2007. However, they had many large competitors, and they only had Ksh 150,000 (US$1,900).

We should always be evaluating our work, our ability to grow, new opportunities in our market, and possible changes we could make in our business.

Sometimes serving your customers better means discovering ways to add value to what you do. For example, if you are selling groundnuts, you can add value to your product by processing it into a paste and selling the paste at a higher cost.

Use the following templates to practice financial planning for different types of businesses.