Multimedia’s Kwasi Twum fires up young entrepreneurs
Many are those who have been waiting to hear and see the man behind great broadcast personalities such as Komla Dumor, Kojo-Oppong Nkrumah, Matilda Asante, Akwasi Sarpong, Nathaniel Kwabena Ankoye Adisi (Bola Ray), among others.
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But although he operates the largest broadcast media network in Ghana, he is one who is very media shy.
However, Mr Kwasi Twum will not turn down the request to mentor and encourage young entrepreneurs, especially at a time of high graduate unemployment.
Mr Twum believes that Africans can run businesses in a very transparent way and still be able to compete and turn a profit. He made this known when Kicking off the View from the Top series at the ServLed Friday talks.
Mr Twum encouraged the young entrepreneurs to make use of the available resources to study and qualify for the positions they confer on themselves at the start of their businesses. Using his own story as an example; coming from a distribution business to start Joy FM - the first privately owned FM radio business in Ghana without any prior knowledge in broadcast media; he gave himself the title of Chief Executive.
He was soon to realise that there was a lot more to know holding the title of CEO in his business. He asked himself if he would be selected were he to be interviewed for the position of CEO in his own business or any other. That got him into the thinking and habit of constant learning to earn his position.
His talk helped the participants to see the one major mistake entrepreneurs make which contribute to the demise of businesses - Customer Service. In this fiercely competitive environment, businesses that will survive are those that focus on meeting the needs of the customer. Often however, entrepreneurs start businesses with ideas on what they can supply rather than what the customers are asking for.
Mr Twum talked about how the HR strategy of a customer driven business focuses on hiring candidates that will fulfill the needs of the customer and not necessarily bringing in family members or friends in your business.
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He challenged the participants to always seek to do the right thing in their businesses and to live a life of integrity so they won’t have to worry and or have their children bothered about them being in the news for the wrong reasons.
He said, “If you do the right things in your business, pay people fair wages, you don’t cut corners but pay your taxes and all obligations and you can’t turn profit, then you don’t have a business”.
He ended his talk by encouraging the young entrepreneurs not to give in to the pressure of living large at the expense of building their businesses and to understand that for the entrepreneur, his life’s work is his business and to guard against anything that will be a distraction.
With the goal of building Ghana’s startup ecosystem, ServLed Africa runs free weekly talk sessions dubbed ServLed Friday, where accomplished entrepreneurs talk to a group of young and dynamic entrepreneurs about business strategies to help them succeed.
The company which started operations in 2013 has the aim of galvanizing a new era of African entrepreneurs poised to build sustainable World Class businesses which operate with transparency and integrity while generating profit for stakeholders