“As an entrepreneur you may derail, don’t ever be afraid of begging or being humble or lowering yourself…”Chief Executive Officer of Allure Africa Group Dzigbordi K. Dosoo has advised.
Addressing a room packed with entrepreneurs in Accra, the highly successful business icon noted that due to challenges that are associated with owning businesses there was the need for owners to embrace reality by going back to work as employees to finance their struggling startups.
Citing her experience Ms. Dosoo revealed that she had to beg to work as a consultant in order to finance her own business which was on the verge of collapse, a tactic she refers to as ‘creative failure financing’.
“I had an issue with my business many years ago, things went wrong, I expanded really fast and I began to lose major amounts of money and my business began to struggle….”
… I went back into the market and I used that money to come and pay back my debt and rebuild my business. I was not afraid to beg, I was not afraid to now become an employee again. A lot of times you forget that you’ve been an employee before. What we do is that we just take that knowledge and say we want to stay as entrepreneurs.
I went back and I worked for two, three different companies. The same way you remember when you were working for that company and you started your business, you can go back, make your business part-time and make somebody’s company fulltime”, the Allure Africa Group boss indicated.
She further stated that business owners who are able to step down to go back to the drawing board to start again were much more respected.
“You are actually more respected for having that knowledge and power and authority to be humble, you’re actually more respected in your humility and your begging than the other way round, I call it creative failure financing. Use that, work and bring it back. After a while you will understand that your business can take off again..”
