February 2021

Learn How to Embrace Failure and Make Your Startup Thrive In the start-up world we often hear phrases like ‘fail fast,’ ‘celebrate failure’ and that failing can be the best thing that ever happened. But let’s be honest: failure sucks. At the very moment “the failure” hits you, often the last thing you’re thinking about are the positive takeaways, let alone documenting the failure – your heart is pumping faster, your face and ears getting hotter, your legs going so weak you momentarily question if they can even support your weight. Failure can be a wrenching feeling. Thoughts and memories of everything you have risked on this venture, and all the promises you have made on the hope of its success come flooding through your mind, bringing with them intense feelings of pain, hurt, loss, anger, vengefulness, embarrassment…anything but logic or rationality. However, time does heal, and reflection will heighten your perspective. That’s not to say the pain ever fully goes away, but that the value of the lessons learned because of that pain increasingly outweighs that initial emotion over time. This value becomes apparent in the new found clarity and focus – plus a touch of the confidence that experience brings – with which you take on another approach or venture in the future. While the initial high of success and winning may be euphoric, there is little long-term learning that comes from it. The emotional reaction to a loss, however, with perspective and hindsight, are far more instructive. You want to understand why you failed, and successful entrepreneurs will doggedly delve as deeply as it takes to understand “why” to ensure their next steps add way beyond the value of a win. “If, one day, you look in the mirror and see only success, know that you have in fact learned nothing, any humility has evaporated, and greater failure is on the way.” –Simon R Turner, Managing Director, Founder Institute Ghana (FI Ghana) The Topic of Failure A lot has been written on the topic of failure, and several studies (e.g., CBI Insights) have pinpointed the top three root causes of startup failure being product-market-fit, running out of cash and disharmony in the team. When we look at ‘failure’ from a distance, it is easy to romanticise and sugarcoat it with inspiring quotes about the struggles entrepreneurs and scientists, such as Walt Disney or Thomas Edison, who had to go through several failures before reaching success. But what does failure actually feel like for entrepreneurs, especially in an African context? How did they manage it, and how did they bounce back? To look at this with an African lens, FI Ghana held a virtual event with seasoned and serial entrepreneurs who have experienced successes and failures firsthand, with ventures spanning Ghana, Kenya, USA, UK, Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire We dived deep into failure as a potential fast track for finding purpose and success while providing some practical advice on how to manage failure, especially when it comes to losing people’s trust and money.  Accept failure as part of the entrepreneurial journey FI Ghana Mentors and panelists invited us to challenge the way in which we think about failure. It is not something we can control, but is part of the process of becoming a successful entrepreneur, not a deviation from what you’re supposed to be doing. “By default, you’re meant to fail to get where you need to be and, by default, it allows you to reprogram your mindset and get ready for it. Don’t shy away or avoid it but get through that as quickly as possible.”  – Samuel Baddoo, Founder, Fleri To build resilience in the face of failure, an important learning and mindset shift required is the decoupling of your own personal success from the success of your startup. That means the failure of a startup or project does not equate to personal failure, but might, in fact, be propelling you to your next personal growth phase. The “Founder First” principle, ie “Great companies start with great people, not great ideas,” is what makes a great entrepreneur, not just your successes but also your expertise built over years of trial, error, success and many failures. This is the reason why Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are increasingly talking about ‘celebrating failure’, because it is inherently linked with expertise. This is true in business as much as in any other discipline. Like physicist Niels Bohr once said, while studying the structure of atoms: “An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field.” Failure is part of any journey, and is arguably what makes it worthwhile, exciting and interesting, just like a Titanic movie without an iceberg would be as boring as watching a cruise ship cross the Atlantic (Sam). A mindset shift around failure is an essential starting point, but how can we prepare ourselves for the time when we hit that iceberg and the cruise ship starts to sink? Marco Rovagnati, Innovation Consultant and Founder of Poa Poa Soaps talked about the importance of setting up guardrails and intentionally designing functions in your organisation that allow you to experiment with failure, shifting the narrative from failure to prototyping. “After launching several businesses and at least half a dozen pivots,” he said, “I think about failure in two buckets: “avoid it at all cost” and “actively embrace it”.” The bucket of things to “avoid at all cost” are those that have been tried and tested, and that you can teach yourself online (which can be immensely time-consuming) or with fast-track, sprint programmes like Founder Institute. admin, operations, customer support, digital marketing – those are “basic hygiene” factors in business that are (relatively) easy to get right because they deal with the tangible management of the present. How to go about this is down to you, your team, and company culture. In the second bucket are all the future-focused activities, such as new product development, prototyping and testing new features, finding your next expansion

Death is a punitive reminder of our mortality, a rude expression of the old adage that one day we will all perish just like those that have gone and left us behind. Once you remain alive and breathing, you’re bound to experience grief.  My mother passed away a week ago and it has been as daunting as it has been revealing. The moment my sister set eyes on me that late evening, she fell on her knees, arms to the skies and let out a long, loud, hair-raising roar of despair. She has a business and has been struggling to keep herself together since. She will overcome this in time. I have a business and still feel like I got hit by a train that day. So how does one grieve and work? GRIEF IS AS A BUSINESS RISK When Mr Asare called, he was the first to mention that my being at work would be moot because of the way that grief is. Not that I can’t work now. He’s technically saying that my grief is bound to have an effect on my work. Ergo, my being at work is a risk to the company. And he’s absolutely right. When my wife’s boss heard the news, she almost instantly told her to take as much time as she needed off from work. These people understand that for the business, a literally malfunctioning employee should be sent for repairs. The delight and curse of running your own business is that the buck stops with you. As an entrepreneur, your main product, which simultaneously is your prized intellectual property, is your brain. Grief messes with that. Delegation is never easy with business owners, at least not for those that don’t own mega corporations. DEFINITELY TAKE SOME TIME OFF. Grief is more than just sadness. That much is true. However, I am seeing that it can manifest itself in many different ways. Common traits of grief include depression, anger, denial, shock, confusion, disbelief, despair and many others. Any version of any of these is not the ideal state to be in at the workplace. You’ll probably end up doing more harm than good. Also, it would be wrong to put your colleagues and customers through that. It should be expected for you to feel that you can do more for your business as you grieve. Do what you must and try to find actions that don’t get you engaging so much with the outside world. That’s how you take some time off. Limit activity. You have to admit to yourself that you need to grieve and allow yourself to go through it. GRIEF IS A TIME FOR REFLECTION While taking time to reflect on life, your loved one and what’s lost and gone, utilise your reflective tendencies by assessing your business, how it’s run and where it’s headed. A lot of things will reveal itself as you have been forced to take a couple steps back. Maybe things run just as smooth and you realise that you have more room for growth than you think. Maybe you realise the strengths and weaknesses of your staff. Or maybe you see that the ground on which your company is standing is shaky. Whatever it is, the reflection will be useful. Most businesses are jolted into growth out of necessity. At the point of grief, you will realise the utility of an improved business offering. You will definitely realise the need to create additional revenue streams, borne out of your appreciation for the line “anything can happen”. As businessowners, life is often fast paced. I have to follow in Alan’s footsteps and learn to pause. Every now and then, he goes to a remote place like the mountains to meditate. Currently, my head feels denser. My thoughts feel intertwined. I really would like some meditation about now. IT’S TIME TO THINK SMALL That doesn’t sound right, but it is. As entrepreneurs and businessowners, business development takes the bulk of our time and effort. It looks, sounds and feels just right to go after that next big client. That’s not wrong. But it’s not the right primary strategy either. Alan has also mentioned some time back that I should concentrate a little less effort on trying to get the next big client and more on smaller gigs, and then build from there. I now see how that is good advice. Smaller gigs are the foundation for non-mega corporations. Any project I have with smaller companies is much more secured in my absence than bigger ones. The breeds stability. It breeds steady growth. And most importantly it breeds predictability. During grief, when you realise that no one knows tomorrow, predictability, if you have any, would be your best friend if you had many small gigs like a couple of big ones. THINK “COMMUNITY”. The human being stands alone as one unit. The next unit of which you are a subset is the family. A group of families form a community… a group of communities form a society… and so on and so forth. That’s the basic concept. We are social creatures. This is never as evident as when “abusua” sits to talk. That’s when you realise there has always been a roll call and once you’re alive, you are marked as present whether you knew about it or not. My abusua is around and is talking. Seeing them, I am reminded that just like ants, I am part of a bigger structure with characteristic and unifying culture that makes us all “one”. If I need a business connect, I attend conferences. When in grief and need comfort, think community. Fall on your family, nuclear and extended, to be there for you. Many of them are grieving just like you. In my personal opinion, the labelling of “family”, “community” or “society” is really dependent on the level of interaction. A family need not be a small number of human beings. Likewise can a society be as big

You are the boss. YOU make your world go round. Your proverbial sun rises and sets where you command. The moment you allow outside money into your camp, all that changes whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not, whether you accept it or not. Celebrating the mere raising of capital is a mistake. The keyword there is “mere”, which means ‘being nothing more than’. Capital is good. It is however a total disconnect from reality celebrating the mere raising of capital, as I often do witness. It’s the good that the money does that’s a win. “Kofi & Ama Enterprises gets funding from ABC Capital and doubles its revenue”.  Now THAT is the kind of headline I am talking about. The hype around just raising capital is a disconnect from reality and reality is that a lot of new challenges are going to manifest with the raising of capital. It is prudent to celebrate the conquering of those challenges rather than its commencement of them. MANY ENTREPRENEURS FAIL UNDER PRESSURE Most people, especially entrepreneurs, forget that when it comes to money, it’s in very few instances that people care about anything else other than the subject matter: THE MONEY. Has anyone owed you money before? When it was due, how did you feel? What did you think? It’s already difficult raising capital, especially during a pandemic. Limited access to capital is one of the main reasons why entrepreneurs and SME’s fail. Yet, when the money comes, many do not have what it takes to stand the added pressure, or understand why the added pressure. Raising capital adds to your responsibilities. You’re merely trading one headache for another and that’s a fact. When you’re not ready for the responsibility and it comes, that’s when it turns out to be discomforting. Even when you think you’re ready, the path of growth is generally hard, also for successful people you look up to. The journey has always been hard for entrepreneurs. It still is. So, yes, discomfort will come. It is the recognition of that discomfort… the management of that discomfort… the mental labelling of that discomfort… the rationalisation of that discomfort that’ll make you a great entrepreneur, or not-so-great entrepreneur. WE ALL NEED TO BE MORE PREDICTABLE We are almost done with our company’s 5-year strategic plan. Over the next couple years, we want to be more predictable. We want to be more focussed. And most importantly, we want to be calculated. During a pandemic, predictability is credibility. When people do not know what will happen next, they move towards constants, something they can depend on, like their faith, or a company that’s open and predictable. Research on how many more people have bought Apple shares during the pandemic. Apple feels safe, and predictable. People are scared. Everyone is having some irrational “what if” at the back of their heads. So what do you do when everyone is scared, even the big, massive companies? We figure that breeding predictability starts with reporting and communication. We need to communicate our intentions, our plans. We need to communicate our operations when they’re happening, and retrospectively when they’re over. You also have to be genuine, to others and to yourself. Remind yourself of who you are and who you aspire to gradually be. Life is evolution. Many people will invest in the vision but the vision bearer is always part of the package. It’s just as bad lying to yourself as it is lying to someone else. Arguably, it’s even worse. Lastly when all is well, capital raising isn’t easy. Imagine uttering the words “trust me” during these times. That won’t work. So we need to also be honest about our strengths and be transparent about our dealings. Don’t expect much of blind trust these times. YOUR LACK OF INFORMATION CAN COST SOMEONE MILLIONS As I just stated, do not expect much of blind trust these times. It’s the harsh truth. I’ve been telling this guy Nii about how he uses the words “trust me” too many times when speaking with me. He’s very guarded. In response, he tells me the commonest story ever told among entrepreneurs, of how many people pass behind his back and cut him out of deals so he’s admittedly scared of sharing vital information. The harsh reality is that at a certain age, time flies, I wake up at 4am, blink, then it’s 6pm. If I started seeing opportunities as a factor of time, I wouldn’t have babysat some ideas for too long, especially when the downside costs me nothing. Nii’s million dollars might be the next person he talks to. But he seldom reveals anything and that makes me antsy. Because even though I know he’s a bright young man with lots of lucrative opportunities for him and I to collaborate on, his privacy can cost me a lot, literally. That’s when Alan came to mind because one of his favourite words is “report”. I suddenly started seeing things from his side of the telescope. Without reports, even if all is fine through my side of the telescope, all he sees through his end is RISK. WHEN YOU RAISE CAPITAL, YOUR PRIVACY IS DEAD So understand this: when you raise capital, accept that your corporate privacy is dead. When you want to raise capital, accept that a sizeable number of good, prospective investors will need to hear every secret you have under your sleeve to make a decision, that is if you don’t want to be rationally questioned. You can nail the pitch better than anyone but without adequate information, investors will pass. It’s just the truth. In that same line, after you raise capital, you no longer hold the only key to company information and processes. Members of the funding party, through regular reporting should get to know your supply routes, your most dependable suppliers and customers, how much money you make, how much money you spend, and many more. I feel like reading thing can maybe