Ahabwe Collins

__Presentation is extremely important. In July 1997 I learned about a public tender for a GSM cellular license taking place in the southern African country of Botswana. I decided that we must submit a bid, even though I knew the competition would be fierce. Having purchased the bid documents, I sat down with my team and carefully went through each page, line by line. We must have spent three days, working over 20 hours a day, reviewing this document which was not more than 50 pages long. # You must understand fully what is asked for. Seemingly small details make the difference between success and failure! I had a staff of 35 people and I divided them into teams, working on different sections of our response. None of us had ever submitted an international bid before, and we didn't yet even have experience operating a cell phone business. We knew there were 20 other bidders, and most of them were well established international operators like MTN, Vodacom, Bharti and Fra...

A few weeks ago I identified the most important skill in business as the ability to read. The second most important is the ability to count (work in numbers). I've also talked about this before. Now what is the third? It's the ability to sell! This is a huge topic and one of my favorites: Every entrepreneur must be a good salesperson. You must never stop selling, even if you're the richest man in the world. I remember listening to Bill Gates one day talking passionately about one of the products from Microsoft. I thought to myself, "Wow, he is the richest man in the world, but he’s still interested in selling his products!" And it's not just Bill Gates. __Every great entrepreneur has this skill: the ability to sell. Let's talk. First things first: When I was about eight years old, my mother gave me a packet of sweets to take to school. I sold the sweets one by one over the lunch break! After that, I bought my own sweets and sold them to my fri...

There’s a revolution taking place in China. Did you know that 8 out of the top 10 self-made women billionaires now come from China? In fact, China now has 93 self-made women billionaires compared to 31 in the rest of the World. The top billionare ladies The growth in entrepreneurial wealth in China is mind boggling in scale. This year the country overtook the United States for the first time with the most number of billionaires in total - and continues to grow by another 90 to 100 each year. China no w has 568 billionaires compared to 535 in the US, and Beijing has overtaken New York as the billionaire capital of the world (with 100 compared to 95 in NYC). The growth in China’s economy, and the trend of China’s entrepreneurs going global, has led to two big phenomena. The first is greater equality, as women see they have equal opportunity to men when they launch their own business. The second is in the dramatic drop in poverty levels. From 1990 to 2000, China’s...