iEphraim

This piece is dedicated to my good friend. I know she won’t want her name mentioned here but she will definitely be among the first people to read this. Thank you for the inspiration to write this. At different times in life, we expect to move to the next stage; like after primary school, secondary school, then JAMB, then University, then get a job, then get married, have children, watch them grow, and live happily ever after with your family…hmmm!!! Life would indeed have been so interesting without waiting for too long at any of the stages, it’d have been all trilling and bliss etc, but many a time, what we expect and how we want things to turn out do not always happen the way we expect. The worst part of the whole thing is that those we think/know we are better than always get past us along the way. And we wonder why our case was different. Some would even ask, “God, but why me?” This is a difficult situation to be believe me, I’ve been there not once and not twice. You’ll feel inad...

B usiness owners fall into two categories- the self employed and the entrepreneurs.   The self employed are those who have talent and skill and they know there are people willing to pay them for their time, product and service. So they employ themselves rather than work for someone else. They begin marketing their products and after a while they have some customers. After a while, they find themselves working too many hours, they can’t take too much time off because without them there is no business or income. The entrepreneurs, on the other hand are the business owners who seems to grow their business effortlessly, and maintain steady growth. They can afford to take some time off to participate in other activities because they’ve empowered people to be like them.   What do they know that the self employed do not?   They have gained the entrepreneurial mindset. An entrepreneur is a great strategist and a master at getting others excited about helping them grow their b...

Tackling Management Accounting (MA)   Management Accounting was perhaps my most dreaded course in my PE 1 days. Even after the results were released and I passed, I was still scared!!!       Ok back to you and your MA at the PE1 level, the simple technique which I discovered after the exams was that, MA has standards! There are selected topics in the syllabus that are recurrent year in, year out. You must identify these topics and master them. Some of them are; Capital Budgeting, Standard Costing, Cost Estimation Techniques, etc. You must practice them again and again. When you finally master them, no matter how they twist the questions you will definitely find a way around it.       Passing Advance Audit and Assurance (AAA)   Somehow I’m tempted to say there are no standard ways of passing AAA, but deep down there are! I’ve seen ‘scholars’ write this particular course repeatedly for up to three (3) times! The way I’ve come to understand it is t...