Author name: Dr Maxwell Ampong

The meteoric rise of Zionfelix, GhKwaku, RonnieIsEverywhere, thousands of Instagram shops and tens of thousands of social media influencers are products of millions of Ghanaians running to the internet when the pandemic started. During the lockdown, the internet was inescapable. The impact of this on retailers in the short term has been divided. Those offering essential items such as food and cleaning products experienced high demand. But non-essential retailers such as those selling clothes and clothing accessories were forced to close stores or experienced a steep decline in sales. A year ago in May 2020, the Communications and Digitalisation Minister, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, shut down certain offices for not adhering to proper COVID protocols. Since then, the Government and other stakeholders have been consistent with their message for retailers to have sufficient hygiene measures in place in stores all over the country. So for me, I expected the focus of the ensuing 12 months to be on clean shopping, contactless technology and improved hygiene measures becoming the norm, especially after witnessing some pretty significant pent-up demand for regular outdoor activities. To a large extent, Ghana did not disappoint. The rise of Zeepay and other local tech companies, twitter choosing Ghana for its first African base, Mobile Money integration everywhere and the steady embrace of venture capitalism all send the right signals. However, within an election year in a developing economy, COVID protocols gets trickier to enforce, plus the pandemic keeps having a toll on the economy. For an industry like that of Fashion, all these mean that customers will remain cautious about buying, whether indoors or outdoors. I think people will continue to be cautious and also value conscious for the time being about anything fashion.  Here’s why. Within the short time that Ghanaians were forced into lockdown, many of us spent more time online buying essential items such as groceries to avoid long lines at the supermarkets and to avoid the possibility of contracting the virus through contact with others. Other companies selling non-essential items, like clothing, also saw an upturn in sales through online channels but this was not enough to mitigate the decline as consumers began prioritizing and limiting their spending in the medium term. Online sales has since continued to grow but to a large extent the focus will remain on essential items. During this pandemic, people have either lost their jobs and there are many that have fears about the future. So don’t let the trending Instagram photos mislead you into thinking that people are not limiting their expenditure. Many brands in Ghana are shifting their focus either solely or more predominantly to e-commerce innovation and these technology advances will make online shopping experiences more exciting. For the local fashion industry, the immediate goal has been to provide competitive prices and a quick, efficient delivery for consumers. Beyond that, they need to think about how best to translate the in-store experience online and provide more forms of convenience such as contactless delivery and curbside pickups. Curbside pickup can be as simple as its name implies: your customers pick up their orders from a convenient location somewhere else other than inside the store, like the literal curb or a warehouse closeby. As innovative as that sounds, I am aware that it won’t be as easy to leave your customers orders on the curb for them to pick up later. But isn’t that why we have these discussions weekly? Is it not to deliberate and brainstorm and talk through our ideas towards creating meaningful change however we can and wherever we find ourselves? It is. And if it’s about trailblazing in fashion, one person I know that’s done that is Susie Bubble. Susanna Lau, also known as Susie Bubble, is a writer and editor living and working in London. Susie started her fashion blog, ‘Style Bubble’ in March 2006, and is now one of the most prolifically read blogs of its type.  Style Bubble consists of Susie’s thoughts, personal experiences and observations on fashion with a focus on spotlighting young and unknown talent. Previously, Susie was editor of Dazed Digital, the website of Dazed & Confused magazine, from 2008-2010.  She now works full-time on freelance content creation for brands such as Prada and Gucci and also writes regularly for publications such as Elle, Grazia and Guardian. She also sits on the experts panel for the LVMH Prize. Recently she has been actively involved in the #StopAsianHate campaign, getting involved with spreading awareness online together with other prominent Asian American designers and fashion professionals. She is currently working on a project to support ESEA women in the UK. During the lockdown, she has also co-founded a bubble tea and bubble waffle shop called Dot Dot in Stoke Newington in North London to explore her Hong Kong roots. The following is authored by Susie Bubble. ♕ —- ♕ —- ♕ —- ♕ —- ♕ —- ♕ —- ♕ —- ♕ —- ♕ On how important one’s fashion is to entrepreneurial success. My own style has been pretty important to establishing both my USP in writing and I guess in terms of personal branding projects. I love young designers and experimental design and I’m not scared of colour and print. I think my style is open-minded and that in turn translates to the projects I do and the type of writing I do for publications. I’ve always wanted to promote fashion as a medium for self-expression on your own terms – not to please other people – but to please yourself! On where one can find and follow trending business wear. I don’t have a prescriptive notion of “business wear”. Those days of dress codes are definitely eroding and particularly post pandemic. I think it’s more important to feel comfortable in your own style and skin, whatever that may be. I feel most “powerful” when I’m wearing things that feel the most me – vintage Comme des Garcons pieces, Simone Rocha or Molly Goddard dresses. They’re not typical business attire but that’s the beauty of working for yourself – there is no dress code! On giving some tips on how to

Venture Capitalism is a wonderful thing, if you know how it works and how to get in safely. By the time you finish reading this, you should have just enough information to be a pocket venture capitalist right here in Accra, Ghana. This is the same information that makes so much money for Mark Cuban, Goldman Sachs, the many rich people of Wall Street, and soon, you. The reality is that, in the good old days, the rest of us could wait for a tech company to go public before we buy and own a piece of it. Back then, companies went public relatively very early. Microsoft went public not when it was valued at a billion dollars. Oracle went public not when it was valued at a billion dollars; same for Apple, and Amazon. If you bought those stocks back in those early days, and you held them till now, you’d be a multi-millionaire by now, maybe even a billionaire.  The problem is that these days, there are many valuable companies that have great prospects and easily demonstrate that they are the next trillion dollar businesses in the near future. But you and I are not invited to invest when it really counts. It’s not open to the public until the big guys get the most out of it, then they say “oh hey come buy shares in this company and hope things go well”. A venture capital is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which have demonstrated high growth. Private equity financing means you’re giving the startup money in exchange for ownership shares. Everybody knew very early that Uber was a game-changer. I wish I bought into Uber when it was only a few years old. Uber waited from 2009 when it was worth about $5M, till it was worth over $76 billion in 2019 before going public. Since then it’s stock has moved from just over $40 per share, to just under $60 per share. That’s not exciting at all. THE REAL MONEY WAS MADE BY THOSE WHO BOUGHT INTO UBER WAY EARLY BEFORE THE COMPANY WENT PUBLIC. THE BIGGEST VALUE IS IN EARLY STAGES OF THE JOURNEY, NOT 10, 20, 30 YEARS AFTER. That is why I advocate for increased venture capitalism activity in Accra. Because there really is a simple way so that you and I and the regular working guy can create or buy into private companies the way that the big boys and the big girls do, before they go public. How do you get started? Let’s get very basic. HOW TO IDENTIFY A STARTUP We toss around this this term a lot, but it’s really important to understand how a startup differs from a publicly traded company since venture capitalism targets startups to invest in. I have three main ways to rank startups: the business model, the scale, and the ownership structure. The Business Model: Don’t think of this as the actual business model that the startup has. It’s if there is a business model that’s already been established, fairly tested and that is ready to scale, but hasn’t been scaled yet.  A publicly traded company already has a business model that is working to some relatively high level of capacity and now in a public market. In fact that is why the company is now in the public market: to raise funds to scale the more. Unlike a startup, a publicly traded company has already solved a bunch of their major problems and now they’re looking to take it to the next level. A startup on the other hand, hasn’t really figured that out yet.  A startup is still looking for that repeatable and scalable business model, and so when you invest, you might be investing in the potential of a future business model that hasn’t really been proven out yet. Imagine investing in Uber before the company tested out and confirmed that the same model used in San Francisco, California can work in Ashale Botwe, around Madina. The Scale: Scale is really the size and the amount of impact that this company is already having. Think of ‘impact’ as from the perspective of impact on the world, or financial impact.  It is very common for a startup to make zero revenue; we call that a pre-revenue company, meaning it has yet to make any sales. Or, a startup might make a little bit of cash in a month but the size of “little bit of cash” depends on what they do. Point is, for their sector, its considered little. On the other hand, a publicly traded company is often times doing hundreds of millions, maybe billions in revenue or profit, just per quarter. So the scale we’re talking about is several orders of magnitude difference. It means a repeatable business model has already been found, and it’s really being put to work and that’s why it’s really showing in the scale. The Ownership Structure: Another core difference when it comes to investing is the ownership structure. So when you’re investing in a publicly traded company, the company is by definition “public”. In other words, when you invest in a publicly traded company like MTN, you are trading stocks and actually becoming a part owner. You also have the ability to transfer this ownership in a public market.  The ownership structure in a startup is private. In other words, only the founders or a few investors have control. And you can’t easily transfer shares in a startup company on a public forum like you can in a publicly traded company. WHY YOU SHOULD INVEST IN STARTUP COMPANIES To support the vision of company: Again, using Uber as an example, as an early investor some 10 years ago, you would have had the bragging rights as being one of the few to have spotted the great vision and contributed with your hard earned cedis, or dollars. You can’t really say that now if

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