The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of McDan Group, Dr. Daniel McKorley, has passionately appealed for young entrepreneurs to fully embrace digitisation in their dealings – noting it has “brought us closer to success than we can ever imagine”.
Dr. McKorley made the call during a recent Business Executive Breakfast Series organised by MTN, themed ‘Accelerating SME Growth and Development; The Role of Digitisation’.
“Businesses do not need a strong personality; they need strong systems and structures. So, as you practice discipline, you also have to look at your systems and structures; and that’s what digitisation is bringing to us now,” the influential business leader stated.
An avid promoter of youth entrepreneurship for wealth creation, Dr. McKorley also cautioned young entrepreneurs to never put themselves ahead of their businesses.
Recounting his entrepreneurial journey, he said for a successful business enterprise, the business should be treated “delicately” otherwise it will fail. “Let your business be ahead of you. You have to ride behind your business. I ran my business for over a decade, and nobody knew who (Daniel McKorley) was. I have gone the length and breadth of this world, and when they mentioned McDan a lot of people in those days imagined it to be a foreign company,” he stated.
With strong systems and structures, young entrepreneurs will surely survive, Dr. McKorley observed, warning that joking with them will lead to collapse. “It is not rocket-science.”
On his part, Eric Osiakwan, the Managing Partner of Chanzo Capital, urged the government of Ghana and governments on the African continent to create the needed enabling environment for digitisation, which he observed will prove very critical to the success or otherwise of the continental free trade area as well as building successful entrepreneurs.
“Digital breaks barriers, digital solves corruption, digital creates enablement, and digital creates effectiveness and efficiency. So, there are so many benefits that if governments put their heads to – and begin to drive their economies toward – digitisation, it is going to create a strong, enabling environment that drives a lot of the entrepreneurship needed; which will create a lot of the incentives entrepreneurs need to lead the solutions that will push economies forward,” Mr. Osiakwan stated.
According to the African Union (AU), intra-African trade is estimated to increase by 52.3 percent (US$34.6billion) under the AfCFTA.
The free trade area will cover a market of 1.2 billion people and a gross domestic product (GDP) of US$2.5trillion across 54 member-states. The continental trading bloc is expected to be the world’s largest free trade area since the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) formation in terms of the number of participating states.
Mr. Osiakwan stressed that governments on the continent need to create a policy framework for innovation, so that the continent’s young entrepreneurs can envision creating new solutions for existing problems.
