Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.” (Winston Churchill) Over the next few weeks, some businesses will gingerly begin to re-open. A lot of damage has been done to both lives and livelihoods since this pandemic hit in late 2019. The damage to both is ongoing, and it’s not yet clear if Africa’s COVID-19 cases will still…
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_Let’s get practical, now! So far no one has asked me yet exactly what I mean by the word “pivot” in the title of this series. You might think you know, and you may, but let’s get practical now. Pivoting takes preparation. To pivot is not simply to jump into the #Digital Age without proper research, learning and very often, upskilling. If…
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Generation Africa: Celebrating Africa’s young agripreneurs __Case studies: Moving from pitches, to prizes, to profits! Today I wanted to share this video from Davos in January and also to update you on some of the exciting achievements of our young finalist #agripreneurs since the GoGettaz Agripreneur Prize Finale Pitch contest last year in September in Ghana. These young entrepreneurs are the future of our…
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__How to develop a product for @DiasporaNation. As I wrote last week, there are an estimated 50m+ Africans working and living outside their home countries today. We generally refer to this collection of communities as the “Diaspora,” so I coined the phrase “@DiasporaNation”. According to official statistics, these guys send home about $65bn per year. If this is 10% of…
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Over the Christmas holiday, I got a seasonal greeting from a former employee who recently launched his own start-up since leaving the company. It is based in South Africa, operating out of his home, and he now has customers all over the world, including UK, US, Africa and even Dubai! He has 800 customers, some of whom travel to SA…
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Did my grandmother invent Coca-Cola? In the Business Wars podcasts, one of my favorite battles is Coca-Cola vs Pepsi. It is the stuff of legends and a battle that goes on to this day. I have known about the history of Coca-Cola for decades as I also own a Coca-Cola bottling franchise. After I first read about how it was…
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_Let’s grow entrepreneurs and transform food! A year ago this week I was in Davos, Switzerland to hold a fireside chat about innovative ways to support and inspire young entrepreneurs in the agri-food sector. We also shared ideas of how to improve the whole ecosystem in which agribusinesses operate, across the African continent. We called our emerging start-up vision: “Generation…
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Going through podcasts like #Business Wars, you will by now have realized that some of the greatest entrepreneurs were motivated by an indignation they felt over injustice, mistreatment, or simply a bad service. As an entrepreneur never waste your energy on unnecessary complaints; turn it into an energy to produce something better! Let me give you a recent example: I was looking…
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Can you adapt? In my career as an entrepreneur I have often had to adapt to very dramatic and drastic changes in circumstances, again and again. Usually it is not of my making. Today, the 22nd of March, it will have been 20 years since I was told that if I did not get out of my country that day,…
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As an entrepreneur, if someone asks you, “How does the Clean City or a similar ‘Uber type’ business model actually make money?” would you be able to take a pen and paper to explain how it works? This week I have asked the CEO of Clean City, one of our companies in Harare, to do just that. First the backstory:…
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