 Boahemaa Ntim, CEO ejobs GhanaWhat strikes you in your normal conversations?It may be the thrill of the story or the humor of the conversationalist; but something else stimulates Boahemaa Ntim, CEO of eJobs Ghana Ltd: ideas. She may glean her next business idea from an ordinary conversation with you. “If you are an entrepreneur, you try to find the business in every conversation,” Ntim says. That is how she generated the concept for one of her rewarding enterprises which distributes Hexagen automobile lubricant products. In a casual chat with a friend who used to work at the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA), their conversation drifted to cars and the growth pattern of car imports. Unknown to her friend her entrepreneurial mind had been triggered. She started to research how she could take advantage of the trend. The result was Hexagen. Three years after starting with just one (shipping?) container a month, Ntim now brings in 15 containers each month is planning to eventually blend the lubricants in Ghana. Aside from her conversations, Ntim gets ideas from problems that confront different sections of society. “I believe that instead of talking about it, I find solutions. If you are lucky, you get a good business, if not you cut your losses and move on,” she says. G-Life, a micro savings and loans scheme she has been operating since February 2009, started as a desire to support the section of the business community that find it hard to meet the criteria for borrowing. Ntim saw that need while working at Citi Savings and Loans and in her current job at Intercontinental Bank Ghana. Again, the Bank of Ghana had talking about the amount of money in circulation outside the formal banking system . Although it had almost become cliché, Ntim had taken note. To date, G-Life has over 6,000 active subscribers with over 40 agents in the Greater Accra Region. It has also collected over 600,000 in deposits. The success of G-Life is the dividend of Ntim’s research. Before she started the scheme, she discovered that fraud was one of the major setbacks of that business. “Fraud by the agents hurts the reputation of the company,” she says. To address the problem of fraud, she turned to technology. Her agents in the field are equipped with a mobile phone installed with banking software as well as a mini printer. Accounts can be opened instantly by keying in the details of a new client; deposits which existing clients make are keyed into the software on the phone and receipts issued from the mini printer. All their transactions are registered on the company’s server in real time. A client can deposit as little as 50 pesewas, a low minimum deposit rate that differentiates G-Life from other providers. Not all of Ntim’s projects have all been successful. The maiden showing of her latest project, the Made in Ghana Fair, was not as successful as she anticipated. “Patronage was not as much as we expected. If we had said Chinese fair, a lot of people would have come,” she says. The fair took place during the last quarter of 2009. The Made in Ghana Fair was an offshoot of her most publicized enterprise, eJobs Ghana. Ntim had noticed the continual decline in the job market and conceptualized the fair to drive sales of local enterprises. She reasoned that if the sales of the companies are boosted it would open up more jobs. EJobs itself was initially started as a formal internship placement system, but once it started, companies began asking for more experienced staff. It became a full fledged human resources company. It was an extension of a project she had started in her previous job at CAL Bank as the Head of Marketing and Client Service. At CAL, she radically expanded their internship program: she had about 200 interns in the marketing department at one time . Ntim is married and has three children. She obtained her first and second degrees in finance at the University of Ghana. |