What Nobody Tells You About Entrepreneurship

Working for yourself is a dream for every young Ghanaian today, but often leads to dissapointment. Discover why and learn how to make entrepreneurship work for you. At this very moment, a significant number of people in Ghana are dreaming about leaving their jobs and going into business themselves.

These fantasies are fed by the times we've been to believe in ourselves, to embrace the 'YES WE CAN' dream of going our own way and doing it for ourselves.
There's no doubt that leaving behind a routine job and becoming your own boss is exciting, and many of those who set off on that path find personal and professional fulfillment there. But in any endeavor, reality is better preparation than fantasy. And when it comes to entrepreneurship in Ghana, the reality is complicated.

Here are are some of the things you don't hear about it but you should. 

• There is a dark side: The sad truth is up to about 90% of new businesses including entrepreneurial startups fail within a few years. It's inspiring to hear about RLG or Multimedia Group Limited but the risk of not making is so real. 

• Passion alone won't cut it: We've heard it a thousand times, passion will prevail. And the long haul, success has a lot more to do with less exciting character trait; patience and endurance.

• It takes Years of hard work to build a business: Many believe that entrepreneurship means shorter hours and more free time. In reality entrepreneurship means building your business carefully and faithfully day by day over a period of years. If there is a true secret of success, it is hard work or more accurately very hard work. Being in business for yourself is definitely rewarding but you have to be ready to work harder than you have ever worked for someone else.

•  To Lead others: You must manage yourself. In the popular imagination, entrepreneurship is just about having an idea. But successful businesses, even those with just a single employee have a great leadership. And the best leadership know, above all, how they manage themselves.

• You probably won't get Rich: Another misconception is that entrepreneurship is a good path for becoming filthy rich. The rewards are many but if what you are ultimately looking for is wealth, creating a business is probably not the best way to go.  When you feel hopeless, you have to be able to work hard to overcome any self-doubt, any feeling of doom or any situation that feels overwhelming.

I have come to realize that entrepreneurship is  not for anyone. But those with the heart of an entrepreneur will always go through making more opportunities than they find.
 

Social Media Avenue For Businesses

REGISTER HERE:  SoMedia Avenue For Businesses

SoMedia Avenue for Business seminar is one of the series of workshops to help train participants about the reality of social media to change the way business is done in this digital age and how customers can be engaged effectively. The professional facilitator will share industry insights, strategies, best practices and case studies with the participants so they will learn what works on different social media platforms and how they can also position their businesses there for higher conversion rate in sales, customers and profit.

UNDERSTANDING MAJOR SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS
1. Setting social media objectives
2. Understanding Facebook
3. Understanding Twitter
4. Understanding Google+
5. Understanding Pinterest
6. Understanding Vine
6. Understanding Google Adsense
4. Understanding WhatsApp
5. Understanding Social Storage (Dropbox & Google Drive)
6. Understanding YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google Alerts & WordPress


WHAT PARTICIPANTS WILL LEARN
1. Understand the digital media revolution driven by the Internet
2. Know the web trends, mobile phenomenon and apps
3. Understand Social Media types, concepts, principles and features
4. Acquire the skills on how to use major social media platforms to power their businesses
5. Learn how to develop quality contents for social media platforms
6. Know how to develop, deploy and measure Social Media Strategies
7. Know how to position their brands strongly in the minds of online customers

Come and learn how to use social media to engage your customers effectively! Call 0243750022 Now!!!

CERTIFICATES WILL BE  GIVEN TO THE PARTICIPANTS

National Volunteer Day 2014

Volunteering: The heart of community development. Volunteer around September 21- September 20-22.

 National Volunteer Day , run by GhanaThink's Ghana Volunteer Program, is to encourage as many volunteer activities around September 21 which is Founder’s Day. We want to see more people in Ghana use the holiday to create, support and join volunteer activities. September 21 or Founder’s Day has been chosen as it's one that doesn’t have specific activities. 

How you can participate

Join a volunteer group or create one on your own.

Gather the youth of your community or friends and think of a volunteering opportunity i.e.

You can see various photos from NVDay, etc on the Ghana Volunteer Program Facebook & Google+ pages. Also follows us on Twitter.

Check out the #NVDay hashtag on Google+, Facebook and Twitter for more info. Stay tuned via Twitter, Facebook and Google+

Once, your event is planned, register here and tell us all about it. We can't sponsor your event but we can help in other ways, especially by getting you more volunteers. Once you register, your event will be added on this page where others can find your event and come support you. More information would be coming soon.

On NVDay, please shares pictures or posts on social media with the hashtag NVDay. We will be promoting all these volunteer events on social media and in some traditional media too. 

If you have particular questions, please email us at  volunteer at ghanathink dot org.

Have questions about National Volunteer Day 2014? Contact GhanaThink 

Source:  Ghana Think Foundation

The Vim Views & Versions - Blogs of a MIghTy African: Growing Kumasi Konnect (team, initiative and event...

I personally have a lot to share as far as #KumasiKonnect is concern. And for that I can't miss this second edition. 

The Vim Views & Versions - Blogs of a MIghTy African: Growing Kumasi Konnect (team, initiative and event...: The Kumasi Konnect initiative is growing. When we first promoted it, a gentleman called  +joseph osei  emailed us saying - "My name ... Tweets by @nayakjnr

Decision Should Be Based On Vision not on Sight

Sight is what you see with your eyes and vision is what you see with your mind. Your sight cannot go beyond one mile but your vision can go beyond thousands of miles and even across the oceans. Orphah and Ruth had a decision to make whether to go back to their mother land or follow their mother-in-law.

(Ruth 1:16-18). But Ruth Said: "Entreat me not to leave you, Or to turn back from following after you; For wherever you go, I will go; And wherever you lodge, I will lodge; Your people shall be my people, And your God, my God. Where you die, I will die, and there will I be buried. The LORD does so to me, and more also, if anything but death parts you and me." When she saw that she was determine to go with her, she stopped speaking to her.

If you read the passage carefully, both Orphah and Ruth had equal opportunity to make a Decision. Orphah made her decision based on sight and statistics available but Ruth made her decision based on vision and abundance of God. Orphah on a surface had a point. Naomi gave objective advice to her in-laws. Ruth accepted the available statistics but ignored them. She went with Naomi to Bethlehem and that singular thoughtful decision got her to the top.

Anytime you are making decisions, do not base it on current circumstances in your life. You may come from a poor home, you may be extremely beautiful, you may have a limited level of education and you may not be talented. You can recognize these limitations but ignore them and forge ahead trusting that God does not consult your limitations and past before He blesses you.

Anytime you are making a major decisions that will bring a monumental change in your life, make it a point to consult critical-minded people. Let them punch holes into your decision so that you can give a second thought to your decision or improve upon it.


Tweets by @nayakjnr

A group of entrepreneurs to converge in Kumasi as Think Ghana Host Second Kumasi Konnect

 #KumasiKonnect has been helpful to me. It has fueled the passion of entrepreneurship in me. Now I can boast of +DGWeb Technologies. Kudos to +Ato Ulzen-Appiah +kofi yeboah +Rasheeda Yehuza +Nana Yaw Koffo +Clement Achim Gyimah +Barcamp Kumasi +Watson Bedzrah

A group of entrepreneurs to converge in Kumasi as Think Ghana Host Second Kumasi Konnect

The 5 Most Common Twitter Mistakes

Twitter has helped transform numerous businesses, and there are more businesses using Twitter in order to get the transformation. However, many people and businesses are making these 5 common mistakes on Twitter. If you want to know if your account is good or needs to have some changes, read this entire blog post. These are the 5 most common mistakes people make on Twitter:

1. Having a bad bio. Many people know that not having a bio is a big mistake on Twitter, and that’s why few Twitter accounts don’t have bios. However, not everyone writes a good bio. These are some ways to write a higher quality bio with those 160 characters.
2. Not tweeting about your blog enough. The rule everyone has been led to believe is that 20% of your tweets should be about your blog while the other 80% should be about other things. Many people with thousands of followers (and some of these people have over 100,000 followers) make this mistake. I made this mistake until I reached 20,000 followers. I decided to tweet about my blog for most of the day. The result was a dramatic increase in traffic. I did not lose followers when I tweeted about my blog. In fact, I gained more followers when I tweeted about my blog. Twitter is all about building awareness for a blog or product while meeting other people. The more you tweet about your blog, the more awareness you are building.
3. Not interacting with your followers . HootSuite and other tweet scheduling tools are incredible. You don’t have to be on Twitter every hour in order to tweet every hour. There are people who use these tweet scheduling tools and forget to login to their Twitter account. Followers with questions don’t get answered. That’s a bad move, and all you have to do to avoid that is to check Twitter three times a day and reply to your followers when they want to talk with you or have a question.
4. Not interacting with your followers. HootSuite and other tweet scheduling tools are incredible. You don’t have to be on Twitter every hour in order to tweet every hour. There are people who use these tweet scheduling tools and forget to login to their Twitter account. Followers with questions don’t get answered. That’s a bad move, and all you have to do to avoid that is to check Twitter three times a day and reply to your followers when they want to talk with you or have a question.
5.  Not tweeting enough. Many people make the mistake of only tweeting a few times throughout the day. I define too few as tweeting 5 times in the day. In order to get more attention, you need to be tweeting more often. When you tweet more often, you should also tweet consistently. I consistently tweet once every hour (I’ll eventually bring up the rate to one tweet every half an hour). The more I tweet, the more followers and blog traffic I get.

 By avoiding these 5 common mistakes, you will be able to get more out of Twitter. By consistently avoiding these mistakes and tweeting along the way, you will be able to transform your business with Twitter.