July 2020

Never say never. This piece isn’t to persuade you to flat out put aside your efforts for external funding. The world is still spinning, albeit amidst a full-blown pandemic. But if ever there was a time to look internally for value first, this would be it. COVID-19 did not spare the investment and venture capital (VC) space. There is less interest in putting money out there and more risk averse behaviour towards spending of any kind. This is true all over the world. This coronavirus has not been fully figured out and most investors and VC’s would prefer to wait to see how things pan out before leaping back into the game. I’ve been reading on how COVID-19 has affected international  diplomacy. It hits me now that it’ll reduce the preferred face-to-face due diligence processes that most investors and VC’s like to undertake. When flying out is not the first choice, foreign investors will opt for local investment opportunities on their turf rather. Don’t even get me started on company valuations. I mean, who knows anymore. Multimillion corporations have been reduced to dust during this pandemic. Apropos that, who can tell what’s worth what within the startup space in a time like this. But it’s definitely not the end of the world, literally. So, in the current times and space where things are not looking so good, I believe what we’re saying is LOOK WITHIN. Enjoy the following article, written by Simon Turner, Project Operations Director at MEST Africa, and Marco Rovagnati, Founder of Poapoa. Have a lovely week! ♕ —- ♕ —- ♕ —- ♕ —- ♕ —- ♕ —- ♕ —- ♕ —- ♕ All too often we see startups obsessing over funding, especially when they’ve only just started out. Funding is seen as a holy grail, the solution to all problems and too often considered the only measure of success. This is a common pitfall for entrepreneurs, all the way from Silicon Valley (USA) to Yabacon valley (Nigeria).  When it comes to the African continent, it’s not surprising that we have the tendency of putting capital on a pedestal, given the challenges that entrepreneurs face when accessing finance. As humans we crave what we can’t have, which is why we must beware of red herrings.  Funding will not solve all of your problems. In this article we are going to debunk some of the myths around funding, emphasize the importance of bootstrapping for the early growth of your business, and give you a set of guidelines to understand whether you are truly ready to raise capital and how to make sure your business is in the shape to do so.  Any advice on funding should be tailored to your stage of development and specific needs, but if we have to make a blanket statement it would probably be: bootstrap as long as you can and try to think of ‘revenue’ as your primary funding strategy. In other words, don’t raise money until your business is making money.  Obtaining funding does not guarantee success or prevent failure, and as soon as you acquire funding, you also have to manage other people’s interests and agendas. You become beholden to people who want to make their money back (at considerable multiples). Some cynics would argue that once you raise money you basically end up working for someone else, so why are you in business?  What are the values driving you? For example, if you are pursuing entrepreneurship because you seek freedom and flexibility then accessing institutional funding (e.g. from a VC), might not be for you as it will turn your dream of freedom into a full time job with targets and accountability.  If you are extremely ambitious and driven to build the next tech unicorn, you need to prove that your idea can work and generate cash (also known as MVP, Minimum Viable Product). To achieve this, you don’t need millions of dollars but a few thousands will take you great lengths.  So, how do you get your first cash injection? We often see successful entrepreneurs being their own source of funding (savings, double jobs etc) and when things start to look promising they then reach out to their immediate circle of what we like to call ‘friends, family & fools’. Remember that this is your journey, don’t compare yourself to others and scale at your own pace; you are in the driving seat and you should seek funding when you least need it. The more mature and successful your company is, the more attractive you’ll be to investors, and the better the deals you’ll get. Being desperate will almost certainly get you the raw end of the deal. Besides, chasing funding is a full-time role that requires a lot of preparation and leg work and a lot of knowledge. You’ll be expected to be an expert and know your business and market inside and out.  Thus, if you’re not careful, chasing the dollar can distract from your core business. This is true when you are raising equity and even more when it comes to grants.  A well-crafted grant application requires several days of work and a really good track record, therefore, do not apply to every grant that looks remotely relevant, but focus on your business and be laser focused with a putting together a few outstanding applications. As a rule of thumb, the best applications and funding sources will come from within your network, hence you should focus on nourishing your connections with the entrepreneurial ecosystem rather than applying blindly to all the grants out there. Losing focus is a key danger for any entrepreneur and should be avoided at all costs. Bootstrapping your business will help you build a strong MVP (minimum viable product) and define a clear value proposition to your company, meaning that your product is well defined, your team is strong, you have traction (sales), you know your industry and competition and you have your financial projections.  You also need to be absolutely clear about the type of (funding?) you want (such as debt, equity, grants) and how you’ll use it. There are many different sources too. We’ve come

Speaking of millions of millionaires, I am not tone-deaf to the billions of people currently suffering from the harsh economic effects of this pandemic. I am merely recognising the fact that I can almost confidently say that you reading this article right now is into some form of “business”, or at least you have seriously thought of it. Looking at the current times, who hasn’t?  This pandemic has transformed everyone into businesspeople. Selling at a slightly higher price than you buy is the simplest form of “business” that a lot of people are looking to do to make up for lost income. The technical word for that is TRADE. Everyone’s a trader now. From selling facemasks to peddling mansions at “giveaway prices”, everybody seems hot. There’s massive interest now in generating alternative income now. Even the well-educated and well-to-do are adopting the hustler’s attitude. That’s a great thing! It is the recognition of this fact, coupled with the pan-African side of me that lead me to say that if people come to understand the utility of an African Continental Free Trade Area, they will make millions of it! Of course, the complexities of setting up the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is largely understated if you go by what you’ll read in this article. All things get quickly complicated in the geopolitical landscape. AfCFTA presents the idea of creating an infrastructure to support intra-African trade and economic collaboration. This article is about the glorification of that idea, and will say nothing about the efficacy of its execution. So don’t shoot the messenger.  It’s really hard not to support the idea of being able to seamlessly trade next door as opposed to overseas. Initiatives like AfCFTA identify the need to promote entrepreneurial capitalism within Africa as an escape from suffering. If properly marketed and if information dissemination efforts prove effective, I can see how many Africans will transform into business tycoons, in time. Let’s take a look at China. China has become the country with the most number of millionaires, with 4.4 million millionaires. When I first read about this late last year, I wondered how a communist country can rake up such a statistic. If we will all admit, the word “communist” doesn’t readily ginger up sentiments of individual riches. But as the facts currently stand, 100 million Chinese citizens make up the top 10% of the richest people in the world. THINK ABOUT IT: even a communist country like China must release a big enough dose of capitalism to fuel their campaign of being a powerful world market economy. Supply and demand has always been simple to understand but without the supporting infrastructure, you end up having an Africa that has all the supply but she exports way too much out of the continent when the demand can be met within ourselves, evidenced by importing way too much as well. Take Salt for example. The Ghana Export Promotion Council (GEPC) once identified Salt as important for the diversification of Ghana’s economy. One of the biggest purchaser of Salt is our friend Nigeria. Nigeria imports almost all of its Salt from Brazil. Ghana and Senegal together produce about 350,000 tonnes of Salt annually, and can do much more. If you want an oversimplification of AfCFTA, then see it as the scenario where Ghana can sell this Salt to Nigeria with very little wahala from import tariffs and border issues. As the mantra suggests, it’s to create a One African Market. My work with Agricultural Commodities Trading has indeed highlighted the fact that there are many people in Ghana, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Nigeria and many other African countries that are operating with significant amounts of working capital but have very little grasp of basic concepts that are necessary for effective trading, like turnover and costing. But trading is how Africa thrives. Trading come naturally to us; it’s in our nature. Even without a strong grasp of the basic concepts aforementioned, millions of Africans continue to thrive doing business and possess skills that cannot be taught in classrooms. This is why it will not be enough for our leaders to have a political agreement and call it a win. Like earlier stated, nothing is simple in geopolitics. But to businessmen, life has to be straightforward and towards one goal: profit. With the current spike in the interest of people to become entrepreneurs, the size of our prospective “Private Sector” just ballooned. For AfCFTA to be a certified hit, the people of the private sector need to be actively engaged because their level of involvement would indicate the efficacy of the initiative. That is why it is important to have headlines like “How the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) could create millions of African Millionaires.” I don’t think Ama the Instagram slayqueen is aware that the crochet top she’s pushing on Facebook to Ghanaians has 50 million potential customers in Nigeria that she can very easily sell to when AfCFTA is implemented. Public education on AfCFTA and support for the initiative is important. Granted, the mention of “open market” brings with it the usual concerns but these concerns with AfCFTA have been seen before. Towards the end of the 1980’s, when the European Commission needed to convince member states and their citizens to accept their Single Market Programme, it was not an easy task. There were some countries that were concerned about opening up their markets, not too unlike Nigeria’s brief hesitation to join AfCFTA. To curb the fears and concerns for the Single Market Programme, Researchers in Europe published in 1988 what would later become “The Cecchini Report”, a detailed research into the cost of “Non-Europe”, putting a value on what’s actually at stake. This Report opened the eyes of critics and became the foundation and intellectual debate for a united Europe in commerce, paving the way for the Single Market Program being implemented on January 1st, 1993. You can make the case of increased competition from open markets dampening the chances of local markets to thrive, but a

Oh no… I’m not self-promoting for your employment. Please, there’s a far simpler explanation for the header and headline: it’s clickbait. This is a much more attractive heading than ‘ways to apply for a job’. I expect this article heading to stand out and make you want to read at least a couple lines. THIS is the kind of attitude that I feel is needed in these dire times if you seek a hire. It’s an absolute fact that if you seek to be employed during a pandemic, impressing your prospective employer is a definite must. Remember when many Ghanaians joked “June deɛ kwata kwata”? Yeah well it’s July. The threat of coronavirus is still very much alive and many business sectors are still unsure of how this pandemic will affect sales in the coming months, even years. Most employers are much more concerned with survival than expansion. Most employers are much more concerned with reducing salary expenditures and how to beef up or maintain sales numbers.  You (or your business) now more than ever need to stand out. Unemployment rates have skyrocketed around the world and these last few weeks, we’ve had way more people walk into our building asking to meet our officers for some “urgent business” only to realise it’s to plea for employment. I have personally met more than a couple. Still, BUSINESSES HAVE NEEDS even during COVID-19 and if you concentrate on those three words (“businesses have needs”), all you have to do is convince the guy signing the cheques that you deserve one, and yes even during a pandemic. Alan hired this very expensive sales manager and I was so confused until I realised it was for only one reason: the guy proves to be able and actually is beefing up sales numbers. So you CAN get hired during these times. There’s a pandemic. The default answer before you ask is a big NO. So if you have the chance at changing it to a yes, recognise the opportunity in the context of present times and make the most of it. Here’s what I think impressed me or would have impressed me during the last few weeks. Practice before we meet. I realised many of them did not know what to do; with their hands, with their briefcase or purse, even with their heads. This awkwardness gives you away as being uncomfortable in the setting. If you have one shot at a meeting with a would-be employer, prepare, practice practice practice every move, every detail, and nail that meeting. Breathe in, sit down, adjust your balance and make eye contact. These things are easier when you practised it many times before. Many might say “…but with time I will be better”. Not many have been willing to take that chance before all this, how much more now. It’s this kind of thinking you should do away with. Others were very fluid in their speaking but you can clearly sense the “I was just passing by and decided to try my luck” vibe. That leads me to my next point. Customise the message. What our Group would requires in, say, our Business Development Department, would be different from other companies’ needs. Don’t generalise the message. Don’t sound like you’re reading from a textbook. This isn’t your usual job market. Something is different and it’s that many more people are saying what you’re saying to who you’re saying it to. Find a way to convey the message of “I was born to work here” and it’ll increase your chances. I don’t mean to say do that the arrogant way. I mean, let employers know that you know the company more than the next guy. Don’t make simple, avoidable mistakes. One guy had his resume dated July 2019. That threw me off. I didn’t even know resumes came with dates at the top-right corners. Grammatical errors are total turn off as well. Again there’s a much greater need that you stand out. Simple avoidable mistakes like this give your application a bad feel. Answer the simple question of “what can you do”. The keyword there is ‘can’. In a tumultuous job market, what you have been doing and/or what you prefer to do should all take a back seat. What CAN you do? Weaponize your other abilities if the present ones you’re used to don’t work. My wife, through online courses, got some IT training many years ago and she kept building on it. Working from home due to the pandemic freed up some time and I am surprised to find out she’s getting paid for IT work on the side, because she’s in Finance. If you have other abilities, start bringing it to the forefront. Show me the money! Instead of telling me to try you and see, why not lead me to exploring exactly what I will see within a specified time frame. I believe that’s what Alan’s new Sales Manager did. “Do not pay me now, but let me work with you and within one week, if I am allowed to do A and B, I believe I bring the company C and D”. Use this tactic if you are sure you are THAT good and only need one shot to showcase what you have. Because most often, nobody knows, and nobody cares like you do. Speaking of this… Nobody knows what you can do. Nobody cares like you do. It’s a harsh reality. A few of them spoke like if I googled them I would find everything I needed right on page 1. Well, as good as you might be, I probably don’t know you. And in these times, most employers are distracted with keeping the ship afloat. Like I earlier said, in these times, the default answer is NO. In order to beat this situation, you’d have to empathise with the guy sitting in front of you. Place yourself in the shoes of someone that doesn’t understand that he or she needs you. Take your time to explain what your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is. Beforehand, take your time to craft what your