Frank Kwesi Botwey Shares Story of how he Co-founded Wekplace an Employment Technology in Ghana.

Frank Kwesi Botwey is the co-founder and managing member of wekplace a Ghanaian employment technology. Wekplace is an online human capital management technology and services provider, actively digitizing the way companies work. A company that started with making a few hundred Ghana cedis in revenue has grown over the past couple of years into making an average of $10,000 a month.

In an interview with Limitless Motivation Frank Kwesi Botwey narrated how he co-founded wekplace, a Human Resource company in Ghana after completing his tertiary education at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. And while on campus Frank was very enthusiastic about entrepreneurship and at a point he became the president of famed ENACTUS, which is the world’s largest experiential learning platform dedicated to creating a better world while developing the next generation of entrepreneurial leaders and social innovators.

Frank playing Chess with a job applicant

According to Frank he officially started his entrepreneurship journey with Tyla Agro Investment, an agriculture based company that was into mushroom and tilapia farming, but the business did not go as planned and consequently losing all the money invested. At this point Frank found himself at crossroads and was faced with the option of either finding a job or continuing on his entrepreneurship journey. And as someone who is a good student and a resourceful graduate one would think why not just look for a job.

However, the downturn of events in his first business did not discourage him, Frank was rather fired up to put to use all the experiences he had gathered from his past business. According to Frank he just wants to make a difference, he wanted to change some lives, and for him he wants others to benefit from the life he came to live that has been his major inspiration on his entrepreneurship journey. Starting afresh with zero capital, Frank believed that the only thing to do at this point of being an entrepreneur with no capital was to provide a service, a venture which is not capital intensive. In seeking to provide a service, Frank noticed that there was some gap in the employment sector making it difficult for new graduates to find jobs.

Having identified this problem yet with no start up capital, Frank was lucky enough to have a couple of people in the corporate space that he could leverage. He then decided to start a company in the human resource and employment space to help both graduates and companies find their right fit. Frank started alone, but later spoke to a Friend, Andrew Young who bought into the idea and came on board. These two together partnered with some organisations to find internship opportunities for new graduates. It was while Frank and his co-founder Andrew were finding internships for new graduates that they had the clarity of vision and decided to focus their company on job recruitment. Frank stated that this was around June 2018, when they officially came up with the idea Wekplace after understanding in depth the calibre of gap existing in the employment or labour market in Ghana.

They then decided to focus the vision of the company around providing employment technology to assist human resource managers in the recruitment and management of their staff as well as their staff optimisation. After coming up with this beautiful idea there was a challenge because neither Frank nor Andrew were web developers and neither were they even having the money to hire the service of one. All they had at this point was their brains, and how to develop a strategy to grow. Amidst all these, Andrew was schooling at Rwanda and around February of 2019 he called Frank that they had found an investor. Although the money was not huge, atleast it was going to give them a head start so they agreed to go with the investor.

They had some back and forth meetings and discussions and by August 2019 they incorporated the investor full time and then Wekplace became a fully fledged organization. Moving forward they still had some challenges since they did not have experience on staff management they lost some money and some workers as well, to the extent that Wekplace almost died out. And in 2020 when the company was getting back up came Covid-19 and the lockdown.

However, Wekplace resumed in May 2020 after the restrictions were lifted and Frank and his co-founder went in hard with all their mights and resources. They got some money and moved from their former office to a bigger office space, hired a couple of more hands, expanded their base, added technology development and partnered with an Indian company to develop their platform for them and also contracted some Ghanaian developers to develop some products for their clients.

Today Wekplace is a thriving Human Resource company in Ghana, with about 50 partner companies that they recruit for, seven in house team and about 150 outsourced staff in other companies. A company that started with revenue of few hundreds of cedis is now making five figure revenue approximately $10,000 a month.

Brief Biography about Frank Botwey

Frank had his primary and Junior High school education at the Lerato Preparatory School and his secondary education at Adisadel college. Frank then graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Disability and Rehabilitation Studies from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. For his national service Frank worked as a project manager at The Samuel Wellington Botwey Foundation (SWEB) a disability focused organisation (NGO) with the aim of supporting persons with disability in education and livelihood. Frank remained with organisation for three years after which he left to pursue his entrepreneurship ambition. Frank also holds a master degree in International Business Management from the University of Oulu.

Frank’s Final words: Never ever give up!

You can get in touch with Frank on Linkedin at Frank Botwey