He said this at the maiden L’ainee Foundation Startup Workshop held at the LOC Events Centre, Adabraka, on Thursday.

The workshop, which was under the theme, “Building Sustainable Businesses for a Thriving Economy” was aimed at equipping budding entrepreneurs with the know-how of running a successful business.

Nana Addo-Dankwa, an entrepreneur, highlighted the need to be innovative in the hiring and managing of staff, and to be adept in the balancing of the company’s books.

He reiterated the importance of finding talented expertise who share the same ideas and visions of the company, as well as building a brand that will appeal to the target audience and inspire customers.

“It is ideal to start small, have an effective plan to enable your business to grow, take calculated risks and keep everything simple,” he added.

He urged the participants to be mindful of their financial, environmental and social risks, as well as obligations and opportunities with regards to taxes and regulations that govern businesses in the country.

The Business Strategy Officer of L’aine Services, Mr. David Mills, entreated participants to prioritize management of performances of their business and pay key attention to who they hire in order to drive the goals of the business.

He called on business owners to identify the strength and weaknesses of their teams, develop and coach those who need help to achieve the desired results.

Mr. Mills concluded “Entrepreneurship begins the moment you decide to make a difference. The good news is that you do not need money to make the decision.”

A session also gave participants the opportunity to socialise, exchange ideas and build corporate and personal networks to improve businesses.

–

By: citifmonline.com/Ghana

The post Maiden L’aine Foundation Startup Workshop held appeared first on Citi 97.3 FM - Relevant Radio. Always.

The launch was graced by the Deputy Minister for Youth and Sports, Pius Enam Hadzide and Sport, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the National Entrepreneurship and Innovation Plan (NEIP), John Kumah and some officials from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI)

The book is co-authored by a Ghanaian, Gertrude Opare, and Nigerian writer, Gbenga Richmond, who have demonstrated a passion to see the youth empowered to do things for themselves.

The authors believe the time has come for young people to look beyond salary jobs and employment, and instead focus on coming up with ideas for businesses in order to reduce the alarming rate of unemployment.

Speaking to citifmonline.com,  Gbenga Richmond said the book is not the end of their initiative to encourage the youth to empower themselves.

“We are launching a book, it is just the beginning, the book is not an end in itself. It will lead to incubator centre, where people can come in, and learn on entrepreneurship, and also there will be all kinds of opportunity for young people to be empowered” he said.

According to the authors,  they are in constant communication with the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Employment, Ministry of Trade and Industry and the Ministry of Development to achieve the purpose of the book.

Other bodies like the Youth Employment Agency (YEA), and National Entrepreneurship and Innovation Plan (NEIP) have all embraced the brilliant ideas the book has to offer the youth.

–

By: Farida Yusif/citifmonline.com/Ghana

The post ’47 Ways to Win’: Entrepreneurship book launched at Kempinski appeared first on Citi 97.3 FM - Relevant Radio. Always.

Entrepreneurs are crazy people. Let me share my story of crazy:

On 21st March 2013 (I remember because it was the day Chinua Achebe died), I couldn’t get a flight from Lagos to Asaba so I went by road. Upon reaching Asaba I sat on an Okada and crossed the Niger River, with my laptop in a bag on my laps while zipping through 18 wheeler articulated trucks.

It then hit me as the bike was jumping along and I was inhaling the musky smell of the riders armpits in broad daylight that if I fell from the bike that day, my brains spilling from my skull will probably be the last memorable image people will see.

I met a client from Abia who came to meet me in front of the Onitsha market, after which I took another car to Owerri. Right in the middle of Ibo Heartland, and all I could speak was Ghana pidgin, in a part of the country where there were absolutely no friends.

The next week I went to Jos, where every 500 meters was a military roadblock that had soldiers armed to the teeth, and there was sectarian violence between Christians and Muslims. The day before, people had been shot. The day after I left, a number of houses got burnt in violence. I went there and made my presentation.

Once when on the Sagamu road, we were stopped by some police vigilante type guys with sawed off shotguns in the bush, who kept waving their guns at me and asking if I wasn’t an armed robber.

I have been to places where I couldn’t speak a word of any local language, where I had to eat foods I never knew about, talk to people I might never meet again, shared seats with strangers I might never meet. All for the hustle, all to get the client, all to spread your market.

Some will hawk, some will do crazy things, some will even get hurt and arrested, rightfully or wrongly. But the life of a businessman in West Africa isn’t all about an airconditioned office and an Apple MacBook.

At the end of the day, the degree you have and your academic qualifications are not tattooed on your forehead. Even if they were, people will care less.

Those who know the grind will tell you that the degrees you got on the corridors of KNUST, UGBS, Stanford or Yale mean nothing to Kwame Despite, Adonko Bitters or A1 bread.

What matters is whether your product is important and adds value, and what you do about your product, whether selling or creating or evolving the product to meet your clients needs, and whether that MBA or degree adds value in how the products are presented and packaged to the class of clients who are your target market.

Then you have to do things like compliance, ensuring that you have all the requisite papers to do business, win tenders, do audits, pay workers, pay bills, pay duty and spend money on stuff when your own family is hungry.

Entrepreneurship isn’t for the fainthearted. You have to be ready to grind with the truck pusher and sip champagne with the Finance Minister. Most of the time, you will be loading things on the truck pushers truck and helping him push the truck in the hot sun at Makola.

You will always be different, laughed at, scorned, asked questions of, thought as stupid, eccentric, too-known, etc. Because you will choose not to be comfortable. You will always live outside a comfort zone. That’s the labor pain to create the legacy. There isn’t any idle moment. There is always a hustle. And sometimes, you gotta step right into the pit with your employees, work in the sun with them, eat with them, cry with them, laugh with them. Because that’s humanity.

There isn’t any idle moment. There is always a hustle. And sometimes, you’ve got to step right into the pit with your employees, work in the sun with them, eat with them, cry with them, laugh with them. Because that’s humanity.

That’s what it is. There aren’t any shortcuts.

Champions are not bred in bedrooms. They grow on the battlefield.

God bless your hustle.

–

By: Selorm Branttie

The post Selorm Branttie: This thing called entrepreneurship appeared first on Citi 97.3 FM - Relevant Radio. Always.

However, social enterprises are not charities – they generate revenues that are re-invested into their organizations to create financial sustainability and substantially increase their ability to create long-term impact.

In recent years, an increasing number of social innovators in Africa have turned to social entrepreneurship as a model to convert their solutions into sustainable impact and to work to create wide-scale systemic change to improve lives.

Faraja Nyandu is just one an example of a local innovator who tapped into the power of social entrepreneurship. Based in Tanzania, she leads Shule Direct, a digital solution for teacher shortages across the country.

Faraja’s is working to implement a lasting solution to the teacher shortage issue in Tanzania’s educational sector and to provide engaging, quality educational content to students on various electronic platforms.

In 2014, Reach for Change Africa and Tigo awarded Faraja as a Tigo Digital Changemaker and provided her with a financial grant to fund her social enterprise as well support in Reach for Change’s incubator.

Since then, Faraja has received coaching, mentorship, networking opportunities, trainings and more through the incubator. This has helped her develop Shule Direct into financially sustainable social enterprise that is scaling throughout Tanzania.

Through its incubators and accelerators, Reach for Change helps social entrepreneurs like Faraja build scalable ventures with the power to alter societies and create better lives for children, youth and women. Reach for Change Africa supports social entrepreneurs to track and communicate their social impact, prepares them for scale, works with them to build financially sustainable social enterprises and sets them on a path to create lasting system change.

Reach for Change Africa supports social entrepreneurs to track and communicate their social impact, prepares them for scale, works with them to build financially sustainable social enterprises and sets them on a path to create lasting system change.

Reach for Change Africa supports social entrepreneurs to track and communicate their social impact, prepares them for scale, works with them to build financially sustainable social enterprises and sets them on a path to create lasting system change.

Reach for Change Africa Programs Manager Lindy Larson says local solutions from Africans are the best way to combat poverty and other socio-economic problems pressing the continent today.

“In addition to our accelerators and incubators, we are working to draw attention to social entrepreneurship as an important driver of development in Africa,” Larson says. “It’s been especially relevant during Global Entrepreneurship Week — when we are talking about how we can support the development of African entrepreneurs — that we also advocate for the unique needs of social entrepreneurs.”

Social entrepreneurs will be playing a crucial role in reaching the UN’s sustainable development goals and Lartey says that Reach for Change Africa and its partners are committed to creating supportive ecosystems across the continent to help social entrepreneurs succeed.

Reach for Change Africa recently founded Social Enterprise Africa, which supports the establishment of national social enterprise networks throughout Africa. SE Africa also promotes learning and innovation, works to increase funding for social enterprises, advocates for supportive policies and programs, and conducts research on the social enterprise sector.

As the social entrepreneurship sector continues to grow in Africa, there are increasing opportunities to invest in sustainable development and change.

There is a need to build more supportive ecosystems for social entrepreneurship growth, and to provide social entrepreneurs with the tools and skills that they need to achieve success.

For Faraja Nyalandu, the Reach for Change incubator has supported her to improve education for tens of thousands of students.

With more supportive ecosystems for social entrepreneurship, Nyalandu, and other innovators like her, will lead the change for better lives for millions of Africans.

–
By: Reach for Change Africa

The post Transforming Africa through Social Entrepreneurship [Article] appeared first on Citi 97.3 FM - Relevant Radio. Always.

Personal and professional knowledge have always been instrumental to preparing for unlimited success in every aspect of one’s life. Knowledge of your business, abilities, interests, strengths, weaknesses, and traits is essential to riding the front end of the wave of change into the new century. It gives you an extraordinary edge over the competition. However, most entrepreneurs are losing sight of the three most important elements that determine their success in the business world and these are the acquisition and use of the – right knowledge, skills and business tools.

People have taken almost all other risks that exist in the opportunity market, but it is no longer effective today to take uncalculated risks as the level of uncertainty is increasing in the competitive world. It is more effective and critical to understand the whole dynamics of entrepreneurship and success by investing time, energy and effort to learn and seek for empowering knowledge and skills, and to adopt the right business tools to increase certainty of business success.

This will help you take well informed risks and enable you live up to your true potential to be successful in any venture or project you set your eyes on.

The acquisition of knowledge and skills of entrepreneurship, which is the new global power, is a life-long experience, not a finite collection of facts or skills. Not long ago, what you learned in school was largely all you needed to learn to secure a career or build a business. With knowledge expanding exponentially, this is no longer the case.

Every thirty seconds, technology changes to invite more innovations and one’s formal educational knowledge has a short shelf-life to catch up with this. Life-long learning has become absolutely vital to continued success. You need to continue gaining knowledge and avoid thinking like you are already an expert.

The first and foremost step if you have or do not have experience in the business world and are looking for a way to get your business off the ground, is to come up with the most practical and innovative business plan. The clarity with which you operate your business is the key to your success. Therefore, the business plan serves as a model and framework to guide your clarity and success.

It is only with a good business plan that you can hope to attract the eyes of potential investors who are always extremely wary of what they invest their money in and why. The main thing that is going to attract an investor – and, in turn, cement the rationale for your business’s existence – is coming up with a compelling vision and purpose on which your business will be built on.

The role of strategy in growing your business will truly place you on the pedestal of greatness. However, it is not any other strategy or strategy by itself that works. Great commitment to implementing your strategy is key to your massive success. This calls for consistent business knowledge to adapt and choose the right mix of strategies. Never settle for an ordinary strategy.

Otherwise you will get ordinary results and achievements. If you do not know where you are going, any road could lead you there but you would not know when you have arrived. You will commit entrepreneurial suicide if you do not clarify where you want to go precisely and marshal all the resources needed to get you there.

Getting a good measure of your success and your potential for growth does not only require analyzing your own business – you must also analyze the competition. Conduct extensive research or seek professional assistance to examine all the factors that could be a threat to or opportunity for your business.

We need a real revolution in the way we conduct our businesses. Our customers and clients out there are asking for innovation and creativity. Let us don our armor to provide them with the best products and services by improving our knowledge and awareness of what it takes to be a great entrepreneur. We should move away from blindly copying what others are doing. Do not go into business because your colleague is prospering in that particular business, which is what is happening in most African countries, including Ghana.

This reminds me of the period that we set out to make business consulting accessible to small and medium scale enterprises (SMEs) in Africa. Armed with clarity through careful business planning, coupled with consistent implementation of strategy, today, we are operating in two countries and we will be expanding to two different countries within the next two years.

It was as a result of a shared passion coupled with consistent learning through real life experiences and seeking of knowledge around business consulting to understand the needs of SMEs and young entrepreneurs. When you maximize your talents as an entrepreneur, you will be automatically committed to life-long learning, which will spur in you an unwavering commitment to succeed.

It will also increase your level of self-control and discipline. More so, you will have an extreme clarity and definiteness of purpose as well as plans and decisions with a keen sense of justice. Finally, you will have the spirit of willingness to assume full responsibility for your entrepreneurial development, and exude a more imaginative and innovative personality. Today take action to:

• Increase your reading, while decreasing your television watching.
• Attend business seminars and read a business development book at least once a month.
• Share your ideas, plans, and goals with a trusted friend to gain more insight.
• Reflect on what you are learning everyday about yourself and your business.

It is my hope that you will make a conscious effort to add value to your entrepreneurial potential. May this material bring new insight, produce an awakening and spark renewed desires and passions in you to commit to being the best entrepreneur in this 21^st Century.

Taking action to add value to your knowledge as an entrepreneur is no longer a luxury but a necessity. You have the keys that will open the door to your desired future. Jumpstart your entrepreneurial engine now!

–

By: Jonas Nyabor

The post The entrepreneur of the 21st century [Article] appeared first on Citi 97.3 FM - Relevant Radio. Always.