Author name: Dr Maxwell Ampong

As businessmen and entrepreneurs, we are all constantly trading in futures, in a sense. We trade in our time and resources every today and bet that at every tomorrow, we shall get fair value in return. That’s the contract we have with Life. Once you’re living and breathing, you are constantly altering the set of events that are most likely to happen to you the very next minute. The problem with an invisible futures contract with Life is this: the contract and its terms are invisible. You still have influence over the probability of things ultimately going in your favour, or not. Knowing this, if we want to get the best out of every next tomorrow, we have to reverse engineer the desired result to get the required contribution to offer every single today.  I hope the above is understandable because it leads to my main point below. For a species so terribly apprehensive about our imminent death, our vast majority do very little to slow down the inevitable dying of every single one of us. We always hear “health is wealth”. Yet, being wealth-chasing entrepreneurs and businesspeople like you reading this very text and myself, we fail to see how fundamentally true that is. So, if health really is wealth, and we desire wealth, it is obvious then that what we need to do is to strive for good health. You need a good, healthy body for good health. And that brings us to the heading of this writing. Being businesspeople and entrepreneurs, we would be addressing the topic in a way we are familiar with. Like with any business, being able to properly manage means you have to communicate clearly what you want, motivate your team, and plan operations efficiently. That is how to make any company flourish. We need to apply similar concepts like these to our healthy living agenda. These aren’t new ideas but they are really helpful to me and to many others. When you think ‘Exercise’, think ‘Money’. Mining cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin is very real and popular now. Bitcoin miners receive Bitcoin as a reward for completing “blocks” of verified transactions which are added to the cryptocurrency’s blockchain. So, it shouldn’t be hard to think of being rewarded with abstract cash after you have completed exercising. The reward of completing exercises is an improved state and improved movement capabilities. That has value. Ever since you started moving as a child, you have been building up your ‘motion reserves’ to be able to move about the way you do now. People that spend many years in a coma cannot move right because their reserves are depleted; it’s like getting back to square one. Within the construct of your body being your business, Exercise is Cash/Money and Movement is Expenditure. And as we all know, cash is king. Whenever you complete an exercise, you get rewarded with more movement capabilities and then increase your proverbial cash reserves, just like the cryptocurrency guys do. As you continuously sweat and improve your limits, you’re able to buy motions that you previously couldn’t buy. The rich ones can buy the Lamborghini of movements, like run an entire marathon. In real life, if you buy anything without money, that gives you debt. It’s the same here. Without the exercise that gives you the proverbial cash to purchase a greater range of movements, you will then have debt that you pay afterwards by way of pain or injury or even death. As grim as that sounds, it’s the truth. Your bank account needs to always have enough cash such that when you need to make a sudden withdrawal, you’ll be ready and set to go. That is why when you’re out of shape and you suddenly sprint, you feel pain and discomfort. That is why when you stretch yourself too much without prior exercise, you risk injury or worse. Build a good team. The secret to any great business is a good team. If your body is your business then your body parts are the team members. You must learn to build a good ‘team’ by making sure that you take very good care of your body parts. You do this by operating just as you would with your company’s team. Communication is key within a team. When targets very well communicated and understood, the team can then understand what the end-goal of their endeavours should be. Targets shouldn’t just be about monetary milestones. It should include the type of culture you’d like to encourage in your business, the business environment you’d want to foster, and even the pace and stress limits that would be most optimum for growth. With your body as your business, that would translate to setting clear goals from the beginning with respect to what you want from your exercises. As you exercise, there are various outcomes that can come out of it and depending on your lifestyle, these exercises should fit well into that. It also means you should consider the environment of your exercise. If you target exercising at home, or at the gym, or outdoors, or even in the office, setting targets help you manage expectations better and gets the most out of your efforts. Your boss recognising your good work and giving you a bonus sure feels goods. It makes putting in the work a little easier. Frankly, it also pushes you to put in that extra work that wasn’t explicitly required of you. When a team member is disgruntled, you start having issues in the flow of operations. For companies that have different parts dependent on other parts, it can be a real problem. Have you ever exercised with a targeted number of repetitions and then when you get there, you like “I could go a couple more”? That’s what’s going to happen when you reward your body after good exercises; it gets ready to put in more work. You reward your body by, for example, giving it good, healthy food that

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