The Founder and Executive Director of LVSafrica, Chief Alhassan Andani, has called on African leaders to deliberately orchestrate business enterprises to enable them compete globally.
He explained that giant enterprises around the world were planned by the governments of the countries they originated from.
Mr Andani said this last Thursday, in Accra at the Building Enduring Businesses conference held under the theme “Survival and Business Growth in Times of Economic Turbulence, Weathering the Storm and Thriving.”
The conference is an outreach programme aimed at assembling business owners and decision makers to share ideas on how to adapt to challenges as well as understand the true value of enterprises.
According to Mr Andani, enterprises matter because they could re-adjust, were the bills of modern society and could deal with the problems of their local area but unfortunately Africa was lacking behind in having such global enterprises.
“In Africa, most of our governments are just “laissez-faire”about how companies are formed and throw a lot of resources at Small and Medium Scale Enterprises (SMEs) adding that SMEs are good but they do not rule the world.
“They only give livelihood to people but the focus should be to build a global beating company so that even the SMEs being built could feed into them,” he stated.
Mr Andani indicated that enterprises had a correlation between Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth and the number of enterprises and that building an enduring enterprise was about giving them a life to go around the world irrespective of the conditions around.
He mentioned that some of the programmes introduced by governments were not consistent saying such initiative should be deliberate and consistent as well as have a plan.
“We produce cocoa, have we deliberately orchestrated a Ghanaian company that will produce cocoa liquor that will be solely from Ghana because this is where the best quality grains come from.
“It is rather international companies that come to convert what we have, if we also build sustainable enduring companies, we can take our companies outside Ghana,” he stated.
The Executive Chairman of AB and David Law, Mr David Ofosu Dorte, said in order to have an enduring business, the mindset of leaders when venturing into it was important adding that the ability to differentiate between business and family was necessary.
He mentioned that entrepreneurs should identify people who can take over from them and that for a business to thrive, there should be a life beyond the founder adding that “the best time to hand over is when you are at your peak.”
Mr Dorte urged businesses to have a mind share explaining that the business should occupy a particular portion in the minds of its customers.
He called on business owners to motivate their staff adding that the best time to motivate them is when times are difficult and urged entrepreneurs to build enduring businesses in order to fill the unoccupied spaces in Africa and the world.
BY JEMIMA ESINAM
KUATSINU
