Juliana Taylor, founder of Start Smart Ghana, has urged entrepreneurs to be cautious about bringing in investors too early, as it could influence how they run their business.
Speaking to HumanIPO, Taylor said such entrepreneurs may not get a good valuation of their company, one of the things her organisation was seeking to assist with.
HumanIPO reported earlier this month Start Smart Ghana was founded with the short-term goal of changing how Africans think about entrepreneurship by encouraging them to learn and understand best practices.
“We’d like to make more headway first because sometimes if you pull in investors too early it influences how you’re able to run the business and also if it’s too early stage it is harder to get a favourable negotiation,” she said.
She said Start Smart is presently running a fundraising campaign to raise money for offline and online marketing so it can begin to scale to its efforts.
“To date we’ve done things either out of pocket or through the revenue generated, however since we’ve just launched and have been operating on a smaller scale, fundraising will help us to move beyond where we currently are,” Taylor said.
She said donations are expected from anyone who is interested in entrepreneurship, either from a for profit or non-profit perspective, “or anyone that is just passionate about entrepreneurs and Africa”.
“Our goal is to reach US$5,000 for now. I think that’ll get us off to a good start, then we can figure out if we have additional need after that,” she said.
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