Yasmin Boama: Turning frustrations into a bag of opportunities
Last week Tuesday at La Palm, Yasmin Boama was bristling with energy, coming alive whenever she had to make a connection with any of the other people in the hall.
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Her eyes would light up when it was time to sit and soak up the wisdom on offer. She had managed to fill the room with entrepreneurs from different generations. Five years ago, she was alone in her bedroom, and not quite planning this.
Her bedroom was also her office, her colleague and advisor, her mother. She had started a recruitment business – African Bagg Recruitment - because she couldn’t find herself a job in Ghana.
She would spend the dawns and nights, the free time between her day job at global diamond company De Beers in London, trying to get business from multinational corporations, and also trying to get good jobs for Ghanaian nationals. All this hard work was part of her comeback plan to establish her recruitment agency.
Yasmin spent her formative years in boarding school in the UK, where she grew a tough personality. In a white majority school where she was always thought of as an outsider, she made it to head girl in both junior and senior school. Then she landed her first job out of school in sales, cold-calling potential leads, most of whom would turn her down.
The beginnings
The Entrepreneur Solutions Summit which she organised on that Tuesday at La Palm, for the second year running, is a culmination of her interest and eye for opportunity. She has always been a networking buff, attending conferences anywhere she could afford to.
When it came to Ghana, it made more sense because “doing business in Ghana requires more face-to-face interaction to build the necessary relationships,” she says.
In the room, she had succeeded in getting Tony Oteng-Gyasi, Myma Belo-Osagie, Nana Akua Birmeh and Dr Chris Kirubi (all older and more successful entrepreneurs) to give some face time to herself and her generation of youthful entrepreneurs gathered there.
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Madam Belo-Osagie and Dr Kirubi flew all the way from Nigeria and Kenya to be there. After they had said their nuggets of wisdom and it was time to network at the end, her eyes lit up more.
Last year, she had Ken Ofori-Atta, Prince Kofi Amoabeng and others in the room to do that. All she wanted to do was learn. In the first year of operation, after she moved back to Ghana, her business was beset with challenges, chief among them power rationing.
While she was worrying over solutions to her problems, she decided she’d rather seek out her already successful seniors in business and have everyone else share in the lessons than attempt to reinvent the wheel and find solutions to common problems that other entrepreneurs must face. Having achieved success in the first year, she decided to marry the summit with her love for networking too, this year.
She admits these two years, the summit has taught her much. “Last year, I learned the importance of working as a team. Assign things to people and let them take responsibility. It’s important that people get involved. This year, the summit taught me the importance of perseverance… how to keep asking, and knowing what you want and not taking no for an answer.”
Not taking no for an answer has defined Yasmin’s story. When in her first attempt to move back to Ghana she found jobs hard to come by for herself and others, she decided to fix the problem for herself and everyone else. So she started African Bagg Recruitment, a subsidiary of her mother’s 22-year-old company.
The name African Bagg
African Bagg was the perfect name to run with because, like her mother two decades, she was determined to provide a bag of opportunities – albeit on the job market. Even when she had to return briefly to the UK for her job at De Beers, her 9 to 5 job could not keep her from her dream. She would fly to conferences to try and sign on clients, and would conduct telephone and skype interviews to find suitable candidates for companies to employ.
After several rejections – when she was turned down by clients, she still would not take no for an answer. Now her client roll includes the oil giant Tullow and the media group Viasat, an approval stamp for the meticulous care she takes to find the right employees for them.
What the best candidates lack, she offers in training that rounds them up. Getting good feedback after so much time to make the candidates right for her clients, “is the most rewarding part of the work,” she says.
Yasmin is grateful to her mother, not least for being the lifelong example of female entrepreneurship, having watched her as a single mother building a business and raising a family at the same time. Some of the best lessons, she has applied to African Bagg Recruitment.
“Now I have been able to put down structures in the business,” she explains, “with eight employees and an office in Osu.”
She still isn’t taking no for an answer, recently testing the possibilities in Nigeria, recruiting for some companies there. Yasmin’s recent achievements are a far cry from the humble beginnings in her bedroom.
She has turned frustration into an opportunity, and has shown the perseverance to see it through into a thriving business. Isn’t that what entrepreneurship is about?
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