An entrepreneur must have a strategy, identify his partners for growth, embrace strategic planning, and be innovative in order to build a sustainable business venture, the chief executive of Slot Systems Limited, Nnamdi Ezeigbo, has said.
Ezeigbo, who spoke on the theme, “Building sustainable ventures in Africa,” at the Covenant University Edustart Conference 2020, in Ota, Ogun State, said entrepreneurship means creating value for people, but regretted that business people are mainly concerned about making money.
He said: “Africans need new mind-sets to build sustainable businesses. To build enduring businesses, there must be genuine leadership; when people do business to meet human needs while tertiary institutions, industries and governments collaborate to achieve growth.”
Ezeigbo informed that he started business as an apprentice in a friend’s engineering company, adding that he leveraged the apprentice model of entrepreneurship, adding that non-graduates could be trained as business owners on operational and managerial skills.
“In building an enduring venture, you must have a growth plan, organisational structure and trust capital. In franchising the business, the owner must develop a business system that can build a franchising firm by using information technology to drive the venture,” he stated.
In his opening remarks, the Vice-Chancellor of the University, represented by his Deputy, Prof Akan Williams, said it is imperative that African governments and multinational development partners evolved sustainable development strategies to exploit market opportunities available on the continent.
Earlier in his welcome address, the Curator of Hebron Start-up Lab, and the Convener of the Edustart Conference, Dr Stephen Oluwatobi, noted that the maiden edition in 2018 focused on the future of education, while that of 2019 focused on the quality of the future teacher. He, however, asserted that the new decade starting from 2020 belonged to those who imbibed entrepreneurship.
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