As we go into the new year, 2018, I want to share with you for free my latest book: Power BI for the Busy Professional.

 To let you have a glimpse of the value in it, below is the preface:

I started my data analysis career with Comviva – Airtel Africa creating daily, weekly, monthly and ad-hoc reports for the entire operations in the CRBT product unit across Africa. The company operated across ten countries in Africa then and I was creating between 11 and 30 reports daily. The company had just moved to Africa after Bharti Airtel acquired Zain Africa operations, so everything started from scratch – my colleagues and I had to build everything from scratch.

Power BI is the tool I wish we had then. I would have been able to automate all our reports with ability to drill down and drill through, allowed each country operations manager see only what is within their region/country while the big bosses overseeing the entire continent can see everything. I would not have needed to work on public holidays that were local to us since the other country guys needed their reports and were not on holidays.

Most importantly, I would have been able to build more insightful reports and ones focused on providing business intelligence, I would have had more time to do more strategic revenue improving activities rather than slaving away at recurrent reports making. And the management would always have all the data and reports they needed in a very interactive and real-time way.

This book is to give you what I lacked then; it is my own way of making it easy for you to learn and immediately start using Power BI without having to take a leave off work or risk migraines. I have used very easy to follow illustrations with a hands-on approach to ensure that it would be fun and easy for you. You are already a busy professional, this book is to fit perfectly into your life and not disrupt it.

And about me? I am a four-time Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) and the only one in my area of award in Africa. Helping people and companies make the most of their data is what I do full-time. I have also written books and created online courses that have been used by over 18,000 people across the world. You can connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/olafusimichael/



You can download the book from Amazon Kindle today for free at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B078NF5XYP or get the PDF version at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Mj_LRdhZJhoX5A6AxpT3wNDWtKqKB86c/view?usp=sharing 



Enjoy! And a wonderful 2018 to you!
Today's guest post is from someone I have lots of respect for and who wishes to be anonymous. Someone who has been there since before my life took a drastic turn -- even provided help when GTBank wanted to ruin me in 2014.

Enjoy!

image: smallbankmanager.com

There is no social security system in our dear country Nigeria. If you lose your job, lose your ability to hustle or get a terrible disease and you have no family to take care of you, you are basically screwed. For this reason we must self-insure by becoming financially independent. This does not mean all unforeseen disaster is 100% covered – war could break out, stock markets could crash, governments could fail etc. However, one can at least reduce risk to as low as reasonably possible by becoming financially independent. Everyone can become financially independent. Some will have an easier path than others: those in the middle class and above.

The first step is to save 50% of your income. This is a minimum savings rate. No buts, no ifs, no excuses. There are several sites that show how fast one will achieve financial independence as a function of the savings rate. In case you haven't come across one, check out this one here. This savings rate does not depend on your actual income. So whether you earn N20,000 or N200,000 or N2,000,000, the same minimum savings rate should apply. There are people who live on less than N10,000 per month. Do whatever it will take to live on only half of your income. Refer to the book “The richest man in Babylon” if you have any reason why you think this will not work for low incomes.

Max out your pension contribution. The law in the Nigeria is that employees contribute as a minimum, 8% of their earnings to a pension scheme with a minimum employer match of 10%. If you are self-employed, contribute 18% of your earnings to a pension scheme. It is very easy to open a pension account. Additional contributions over the 18% are tax deductible as long as you make no withdrawals within 5 years of making the contribution however since Dec 1 2017, it is no longer withdrawable tax free. Retirement age is 50 years.

Invest your savings. Invest in what you know and understand. I prefer real estate, self-owned business, low cost index funds and money market instruments (e.g. treasury bills, bonds). Diversification is key. Put your eggs in many baskets. Don’t fall for quick money making schemes. Invest in low risk instruments if you do not have the appetite for high risk investments. Invest with a focus on generating alternate income. Re-invest the income generated until you retire and wish to begin withdrawal. Your withdrawal rate must be lower than your investment growth rate after accounting for inflation. Being in Nigeria makes accounting for inflation a herculean task but it is still possible to do so.

Give out a minimum of 10% of your income. You may give to relatives, the less privileged, church, charities etc. The main concept here is to give to those less privileged and not to keep 100% of your income to yourself. Controversially, I will say, if your church owns a private jet, best to focus your giving directly to the poor. This is a personal opinion. As you mature in your quest for financial independence, you may increase this percentage.

The wealthiest people today are all entrepreneurs or inherited their wealth from their entrepreneurial parents. Stir up the entrepreneur in you if your parents aren’t multimillionaires.

Ensure you have a will so that your immediate family is taken care of if anything happens to you. I cannot over emphasize this.


Good luck!
And so we have the first guest post, by a sales coach. His bio is really long and loaded I don't know how to cut it down to a few paragraphs, so I'll just repost as sent. The article itself is not very long but still impactful. It has forced me to rethink my attitude towards phone calls and missed calls. I hope to see some good results as I imbibe the lessons he shared.

image: entrepreneur.com

Please check your phone and find out how many missed calls you had today, especially the calls you haven't returned.

Those missed calls could be missed sales.

I worked with a boss several years ago who punished us greatly when we missed our calls. We had a very steep target that year and he said we had to be very alert to block any loopholes from us missing opportunities to make money. He taught us that our phones were called 'Mobile phones' not 'Landline phones' so we were to take them with us everywhere including the bathroom😲.

There's some truth in this though because over the years I've seen him grow rapidly in his career attributing it to his attitude towards his phone calls.

I've seen salespeople who don't pick their calls or return missed calls yet they complain about the economy as a result of poor sales. Some, always have their numbers going to voicemail, that's a travesty. So how in the world will clients contact you for more deals or give you referrals.

We live in a fast paced world today. If you brand yourself for not picking calls or not returning missed calls, you would not be considered for opportunities. Therefore, you'll be missing too many opportunities and it will cost you a lot. Who knows, maybe what you thought the conversation would be about would be something else entirely that could move your sales to a whole new level.



LONG BIO

 Iyore Ogbuigwe is a highly sought after sales and persuasion expert for local, international and multinational corporations. He is co-leading the team that's training a 14,000 plus sales force across the six regions of Nigeria for a multi million dollar corporation and Nigeria's number one online retailer - JUMIA.

 Iyore has a wealth management background from the prestigious multinational - Standard Chartered Bank - where he successfully doubled a portfolio of $3.5 million to over $7 million in only eleven months. At Diamond Bank, Iyore was overseeing a portfolio of over 700 affluent individuals; he brought in 21 High Networth Individuals to the bank in one month and was rewarded with an all expense paid trip to the FIFA World Cup.

 Iyore is the managing partner at Katalyst Consulting, a training and management consulting company dedicated to helping individuals and organizations transit from potential to profit. They have a growing list of clientele, some of which include Jumia, GTBank, Access Bank, Stanbic IBTC Bank, Union Bank, First Bank, Shell, NNPC, MTN, ChamsAccess, Main One, Sage, Jobberman and the Nigerian Government.

 Iyore's sales and persuasion seminars tagged 'Peak Performance Selling' which hold in Nigeria, Ghana and in the United States of America have produced amazing results in the lives and businesses of the participants. Iyore is the creator of 'How To Sell When No One Wants To Buy®,' the most advanced sales system for exceeding sales targets.

 Iyore was a Lead Faculty at the Lagos Business School (Pan-Atlantic University) on 'Planning and Executing Marketing and Sales Strategy' for the JCI Annual Individual Development Seminar. 

 Iyore's availability is extremely limited. As such, he's very selective and he is not cheap. He is the author of 5 books on selling, he is a weekly columnist in the Guardian Newspaper on sales strategies; he has been featured on 92.3 Inspiration FM, EKO 89.7 FM and Lagos Talks 91.3 FM.

 --
Iyore Ogbuigwe
NIGERIA +2348034666403
GHANA +233579415743
katalyst Consulting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFtsig3CiPI
'Video of N8.8M Deal Closed Immediately After Sales Seminar With Iyore Ogbuigwe'

image: youtube.com

 First, my gift to you: If you have something of profound use to share, like an article on any general life topic or a even a technical stuff that you think some people will find of use, our friendship just got tighter.

 As my Christmas gift to you all, I now allow you, my esteemed readers and friends, to reach my over 2,300 daily blog readers, hundreds of thousands of annual visitors and close to a 100,000 twitter followers with your life impacting thoughts, ideas and tutorials. Let it be meaty, with a personal touch and include your byline (short bio) so you can own the audience too. 

 Just email me at michael@olafusimichael.com

 I also wanna sing you a Christmas song. Enjoy!

 Feliz Navidad
Feliz Navidad
Feliz Navidad

 I wanna wish you a Merry Christmas
I wanna wish you a Merry Christmas
I wanna wish you a Merry Christmas
From the bottom of my heart.   
I wanna wish you a Merry Christmas
I wanna wish you a Merry Christmas
I wanna wish you a Merry Christmas
From the bottom of my heart.

 Feliz Navidad
Feliz Navidad
Feliz Navidad
When you launch the Power BI Desktop, the start up screen you get has Get Data on the top left side.


The Get Data is the your first window into the Query Editor. If you are familiar with Excel, the Query Editor is the exact replica of PowerQuery. 


In Power BI, it is your main data manipulation and data cleaning tool. Once you connect to the data you want to analyse, it is good to go to the Query Editor to examine the data and, if the data needs some cleaning or transformation, do all that transformation in the Query Editor.






Clicking on Edit, when done connecting to the data, takes you to the Query Editor, and I recommend you always use Edit rather than Load which brings in the entire data without allowing for preview and modification/transformation.

 Below is what the Query Editor looks like and it always opens as a separate window from the main Power BI window.


 The Query Editor can be divided into four functional sections.


 1. Menu section
2. Queries section
3. Data Preview section, and
4. Query Settings section.

 The Menu section is more like the control panel housing all the tools you will need for most of your data cleaning and data transformation processes. In the end, it is a section you will have to be very proficient at and we will do a lot of practical demonstration of real world analysis that involves using this section.

 The Queries section mainly lists all the data sources you are connected to. Right-clicking on any of the data source gives you some very useful set of options.


 The Data Preview section shows a preview of the data selected in the Queries section. This gives the Query Editor some advantages over loading the data directly into the Data model, especially in a case of a large data set that would take too many system resources and time to load. By loading just a preview, one can get working immediately on the data and even set filters and formulas to pull in just the segment of the data set that is needed rather than pulling in the entire data set. It also has some useful features — like filter, rename, delete, replace errors and others.


The Query Settings serves as a very interactive and feature-rich audit trail. It allows you to see all the transformation steps carried out in applied order. You can modify any step and re-order the steps if you want.


 In future chapters we will do some real world analysis that will help us further dive into the Query Editor and see its practical usefulness.