Success is the payoff but failure is the career - Bright Simmons to upcoming entrepreneurs

The Founder of mPedigree, Mr Bright Simons, has advised upcoming entrepreneurs to brace themselves for failures in their quest to succeed in their respective businesses.

Sharing his entrepreneurship experience, he said success was the pay off in the entrepreneurship journey, but the career itself was full of failures.

Mr Simons was speaking at the graduation ceremony of the Cohort five of the Ghana Climate Innovation Centre’s (GCIC) business incubation programme. The incubation programme is targeted at entrepreneurs who are offering green solutions to tackle climate change.

“Success is really not the grand structure within which entrepreneurs operate so your overall expectation should not be a series of success. I have discovered that success is a payoff and the unexpected delightful outcome, but as entrepreneurs, it looks like failure is really the career.

“We are experts in failure; we  specialise in failure and have become so effective in understanding failure. We build this repertoire, skills and internal capacities that makes it very likely that unlike other people who also fail, we see it pay off,” he explained.

He said the only thing that distinguished entrepreneurs from other people was that they were so good in understanding failure and had become specialist of failure and because of that, they had the potential unlike other people to transcend the failures and succeed.

You cannot do it alone

Mr Simmons also advised the entrepreneurs to form strategic alliances between themselves.

“There are lots of opportunities in the green space but you cannot do it alone. No matter how great you are as an entrepreneur, in the domain that you want to operate, which is the social change domain, the kind of entrepreneur you have to be cannot be the traditional successful entrepreneurs in the country who succeeded on their own.

“It is not possible to focus on our own project design, our model and make a huge impact. The kind of things that have to change for new industries to emerge which will make us successful require a multitude of changes happening simultaneously which means we have to operate through ecosystems.

“We have to work in tandem with other forces in order for us to create a new industry and new market. You have to work together to build industries from the scratch,” he advised.

Graduation

Twenty-nine entrepreneurs graduated from the GCIC’s incubation programme which seeks to identify entrepreneurs who are into climate mitigating ventures and support them with the skills and knowledge to become successful.

These entrepreneurs, making up GCIC Cohort 5, bring the total number of incubated businesses to 112 since the inception of GCIC in 2016.

At the virtual graduation ceremony, the Executive Director of GCIC, Ms Ruka Sanusi, urged the graduands to put in hard work and to be persistent in order to thrive in the face difficulties, if they sought to accomplish their dreams of success.

She encouraged them to be resilient and have in mind that the tough journey started now.

The Founder of Green Campus, Papa Yaw Agyekum Addo, who read a speech on behalf of the entrepreneurs, said they have learnt very useful skills and lessons through the programme and expressed their gratitude to the GCIC.

“We have learnt a lot and some of us landed our first support to accelerate our business ideas through the GCIC. The programme was timely and has laid the foundation for exponential growth of our businesses,” he stated.

The Entrepreneurship Consultant of the GCIC, Mr Abdul Nasser Alidu, for his part, said the centre wanted to grow an economy which was powered by entrepreneurs who were green.

“We want to grow the economy while protecting the environment as well,” he stated.