The Modern GhEntrepreneur

The latest trend in Ghana these days is being an Entrepreneur. The days of the doctor, engineer or even musician have been superseded by the newest fad; "I'm an Entrepreneur". It does not matter what you do as long as you work for yourself.

I have numerous opinions about this current trend, and to be honest many of them are negative because i feel that my generation is just looking at the whole entrepreneurship thing wrong. In that regard let me begin my rant/monologue.

I have decided to donate my two cents; So these are essentially what i thing is wrong with the way many of us seem to be doing business.

The ominous rise of social media

Social media is the opium of the people. Everyone wants to be present on every platform, from the Ghanaian favourites Facebook, Instagram and twitter to the lesser used networks like G+, LinkedIn and Pinterest. Then there are the over-glorified mobile chat apps like Whatsapp and Viber that people presume to be social networks (insert laugh here).

Social networks are the place to be, everyone needs to be seen, and seen they are. Especially the GhEntrepreneurs. They have profiles, pages, business listings that they keep posting to and talking about how amazing their business is and how everyone is patronising whatever it is they do.

Blowing your own horn is relatively lame. Does the Coca-Cola owner go on twitter everyday positing pictures of people who drink coke?

I have noticed that everyones business looks perfect on Facebook, giving a false sense of achievement and the misguided notion that "all is well" with the industries we work in. The truth of the matter is that we all know that doing business in Ghana is hard. But social media is not the place for realism, its the place for idealism.

Don't get me wrong, social media is an excellent marketing tool for the right kind of businesses. Social media makes me money, and a pretty decent amount of it, but its not applicable to all kinds of businesses. Some may ask why are all the big businesses on social media? Well the truth is that  many of them  make no money from marketing and "socialising" on social media and rather use it as a means of communicating with their social media hungry clientele.

The One-Man Show / Famous Personality / CEO

By the looks of it, many Ghanaian startups fall loosely under the category of sole-proprietorships. Not in the legal sense of the word since everyone likes to register their businesses as Limited Liability Companies but rather in the sense that they are everything in the business. To tell the truth its really understandable, when you are starting a business you often don't have many people who share your beliefs and thus you may have go it alone. But there is sense in the old adage that there are strength in numbers, but financial and intellectual (when it comes to businesses). I have found that many (effective) partnerships do well because the partners can share the load, even though this is not always the case.

Another thing i have noticed is how everyone likes calling themeless a CEO.

Wikipedia defines a CEO as: A chief executive officer (CEO) is generally the most senior corporate officer (executive) or administrator in charge of managing a for-profit organisation. The CEO of a corporation or company typically reports to the board of directors and is charged with maximising the value of the entity.

What was that? In charge of managing/administrating? Reporting to a board? Hmm, you are the only "entity" in your business, you have no employees, no board, nothing... so how exactly are you a CEO? At least use a better word like Founder. Wait a second? Is your business even profitable? Anyway, just saying.

Everyone is a celebrity these days. Or at least they appear to be on Social media (see previous section). We spend so much time online that we are slowly beginning to believe our own well crafted fictions. Maybe we should spend more time working than appearing to succeed and we might just be able to make more money for it.

Oh and don't let me forget all those "back-to-school" inspirational career talks. And i must say I'm a bit of a culprit here. You might not have really achieved anything beyond a Facebook page and a Blog. Wait till you have something to show for what you have done instead of becoming an example of someone who once has a "promising future".

Everything is about Branding

EH? You say wot? Its all about branding eh. Please lets not be confused. No amount of "branding" will get a useless product or idea to sell in the long run. The true basis for every business is ... a viable business. The salad dressing is put on a salad and not eaten on its own.

People will tell you about Coca-Cola, Nike, Rolls-Royce, Facebook, Apple ... what do all these companies have in common. They are multi-billion dollar entities who can afford the best advertising agencies and "brand experts" in the business. They also have MASSIVE businesses with well established and awe inspiring products, distribution channels and everything else i cant think of at the moment.

To have a good feel of what i think about branding in general, have a look at this beautiful parody video below. It's both a scathing laugh at millions of commercials as well as my favourite commercial of all time. Period. This is branding, the best way of selling a great product. Not cheap salad dressing.

If you want your branding to succeed you must first and foremost have a product to match or exceed your branding efforts.

A viable business for the wrong market

This is going to be relatively short. You have a great business idea but essentially Ghana just isn't ready for your awesomeness yet. This will result in frustration and feelings of depression. In fact many "returnees" (Ghanaians who have lived abroad and just moved back home) get that shock when they come to Ghana to start a business. They have great skills in specialised fields that just don't exist in our economy. Simple as that.

In that same vein i feel sorry for all the wonderful mobile app developers in Ghana, they have great ideas but a really small market. and if you think i'm lying just take a drive out of Accra to any surrounding colonies like Pokuase, Oyarifa, Kasoa, etc and see how many people there are using smart phones.

But we need these people. Their ideas are going to be the cornerstone of the next Ghanaian revolution ... whenever that will be, zzz.

The We-don't-have-anything-to-put-on-TV-shows & The African Success Story

I for one feel that our Tv-Stations have barley enough viable content to stay afloat, but in a country which has a literacy rate of roughly 72% (and even that may be un-confirmable) on average i guess bad content on TV is to be expected. But with the rise of the Ghanaian talk shows we will inevitably run out of real successful people to interview and start interviewing every Facebook CEO we can find. They in turn get an inflated sense of self worth since everyone saw them on TV, which then gets pasted on Facebook, which then makes them seem more important and then the vicious cycle continues.

On the foreign spectrum the large news networks like BBC and CNN are interested in promoting the African success story and randomly pick African entrepreneurs and "put them out there". But it does not really seem to make much of a difference either.

The Un-Registered business

Your business is illegal, in fact under that technicality you are actually engaged in a paid hobby. Your are part of Ghana's large and undocumented informal sector and as such in many cases cannot do real work with other corporate entities. Nuff Said.

What I think is a successful Business

Well thats a no brainer, Its a business which is actively making profits, not money, profits. One thing we need to learn as new GhEntrepreneurs (a group to which i am a staunch member of) is patience. We look at our parents and see the houses and cars, we look on the internet and see Kim Kardashien Mark Zukerberg, Everywhere we turn we see success stories forgetting that not a single one of them happened overnight. We need to know that in most of our cases it will take years and years (possible decades in some cases) for our business to really achieve what we want it to.

Facebook was founded in 2004 (10 years ago), Google in 1998 (16 years ago), Twitter 2006, Coca-Cola 1892 (1.22 centuries ago). Give your business time to grow, don't expect to be famous and making oodles of money in a year or two (unless you inherited a fortune, are a politician or stumbled across an oil container).

The good news!

Real businesses need to be profitable to survive. That means that all the jokers will be weeded out in a couple of years and be replaced by the next set of gullible treasure hunters. On the other hand people who are taking their jobs seriously will be seen 5 years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now and they will still be there, their business will still be there and they will be the richer for it.

Adios. #melaninevilspirit