Ahabwe Collins

By Dr Strive Masiyiwa Amongst the many things I wanted to achieve with this platform was to get young African entrepreneurs to reach out and start talking to each other, doing business deals, and partnering to find solutions to Africa's many other challenges. I'm not sure if you saw this comment I made during our discussion on partnerships a while back: "Afterthought: Here is a secret! The most successful Africans in future are those who master the ability to partner with Africans from other African countries... Shhhh! (Keep this secret to yourself, because there are many enemies out there who will try and stop you from believing this.)" As an entrepreneur, there are huge benefits for you if Africa can shift its economic narrative to what I sometimes refer to as "Africanization." We as Africans need to open up this continent to development by Africans. However, this should not be to the exclusion of working with partners from other parts of the worl...

By DR STRIVE MASIYIWA  C.E.O and founder  Econet group. __Start right where you are, today! This is one of my business secrets: I look for entrepreneurs all the time. The managers that I value the most are those who show an entrepreneurial flare.  To paraphrase Moses, "O I would that everyone who works in our organization was an entrepreneur!" The other day I stirred quite a discussion when I remarked that some of the greatest entrepreneurs I’d ever met were not in business… that I’d even met civil servants and teachers who were great entrepreneurs! Entrepreneurship is not just about making money. __Think of an entrepreneur as someone who hungers to see transformation, and goes out to do something about it in an innovative and sustainable way. A friend of mine who was a senior executive for a well-established business once came to me and said he was thinking of starting his own business: "I’ve been working for 20 years; now I want to be an entrepre...

Revolutions are started by unsatisfied people, people tired of being told what they can do and when they can do it, people fed up with their lack of choices and personal freedoms, people fed up with being controlled by others, fed up with being oppressed, fed up with being manipulated. people who wake up from their dream and say enough is enough and am not live my life like this anymore. They take full responsibility of whatever happens to them. The universal law of use states "whatever you don't use you lose" hence lack of use causes loss. Faith unused decreases, if you don't use your freedom you lose your freedom and if you don't use your skills you lose your skills. we do everything we can to spread all the suffering in our society and yet no one is willing to step up to be part of the solution. Our society is nolonger based on value it's now based on entitlement and senioriy. We act as if someone owes us a living and this is due to the drama...

Image credit: ArtisticNaturee  www.facebook.com/ArtisticNaturee / __Always pay your workers first. You can’t call yourself an entrepreneur if you have the habit of not paying your workers on time, erratically, or not at all. Real business leaders always pay their employees first. Let's call it the first law of entrepreneurship. Let's talk. I began my business career as a construction contractor more than 30 years ago. My business entailed getting construction contracts, some which took several years to complete. I would sometimes have thousands of people working on my projects. 90% of my people were paid on a weekly basis. It was almost a ritual, whereby we’d go to the bank on Friday morning to collect the "payroll." Each worker was paid in cash, and we would sit and pack the money into little brown envelopes, after deducting taxes. We'd then travel to the sites and pay them their money. I never ever missed a payroll… except once, and it probably s...

Four things make up 79% of all business failures: TOP TEN STARTUP MISTAKES #1 - Building something nobody wants (36%) #2 - Hiring poorly (18%) #3 - Lack of focus (13%) #4 - Failing to market & sell (12%) How to best avoid these failures: #1 - Always start with the customer, not the product. Get your beta group / user group of customers and work with them to deliver what they love. People will pay you to do what they love, not to just do what you love. #2 - Outsource to experts who manage themselves, not workers who need to be managed. Hire people who let you do more of what you do best, not people who take you away from your talents because they need to be managed. #3 - Once opportunities begin to grow, don't get defocused. Anything that doesn't add to your customer's experience isn't worth doing. #4 - Don't fail by having a great product that no one knows about. Don't rely on someone else to sell your product until you have more sales than you can h...