This edition carries stories that sit at both ends of the entrepreneurial journey — the euphoric and the sobering, often within the same industry, sometimes within the same year. Tope Awotona's rise from three failed startups to a billion-dollar company sits alongside the unfolding story of a Ghanaian fintech that once carried the same promise, now navigating a very different chapter. We've chosen to run both, deliberately, side by side.

That's a choice worth explaining. BEI Magazine exists to celebrate Black excellence in business — and it will always do that, unapologetically. But real excellence isn't served by only telling half the story. The entrepreneurs we most admire are the ones who understand risk honestly: who study failure as closely as success, and who know that the difference between the two is often a single decision, made under pressure, that either holds the line or doesn't. We owe our readers that same honesty.

Elsewhere in this issue, we shine a light on Ghana's entrepreneurial engine room — the founders building real businesses in agriculture, real estate and payments, often far from any headline. And we celebrate Fredi Nwaka, whose path from the streets of South London to the screen proves, again, that reinvention is always available to those willing to work for it.

As ever, Black Entrepreneurs International continues to build the community this magazine reports on — and we're proud to support their UK Black Business Show at Excel London this October. If you're building something, go and stand in that room.

Thank you for reading.

Mark is also the Co-Founder of Black Entrepreneurs International CIC, alongside Caroline Fagbemi. Together, they are building an organisation focused on empowering and supporting Black entrepreneurs across the UK, Africa and the wider diaspora — creating opportunities for networking, collaboration, visibility, growth and success.

When we started Black Entrepreneurs International, the idea was simple: build the room we wished had existed for us. A place where Black business owners — across the UK, across Africa, across the Caribbean, across North America — could stop introducing themselves from scratch every time, and start building on what's already there.

Three years on, that community numbers over 700 members strong on our WhatsApp group alone. This magazine is one more wall of it.

This issue asks something of its readers that I think matters. It celebrates Tope Awotona's extraordinary rise — proof of what's possible when you refuse to accept someone else's ceiling as your own. But it also sits with a harder story out of Ghana's fintech sector, because I don't think we do our community any favours by only ever showing the wins. Real entrepreneurship includes the moments that go wrong, and the discipline it takes to make sure yours doesn't. That honesty is exactly what BEI was built to hold space for.

I'm proud, too, that this issue introduces Curtis Goring's new column, The Nugget — real finance guidance, every issue, from someone who's spent his career on the right side of the lending table for businesses like ours. This is what BEI looks like in practice: members supporting members, expertise flowing freely, no gatekeeping.

If you're building something — whatever stage you're at — come find us at the UK Black Business Show this October at Excel London. Exhibit with us. Walk the floor. Meet the people in these pages in person.

We built this network to grow. Let's keep growing it, together.

Tope Awotona was twelve years old when he watched his father, a microbiologist and entrepreneur, get shot and killed in a carjacking in Lagos. Three years later his family moved to Atlanta, a city he'd later describe as reminding him of Lagos — big, chaotic, full of traffic. He studied computer science and management information systems at the University of Georgia, then went into software sales for companies including EMC and Dell.

He also kept starting businesses on the side. A dating site. A projector e-commerce store. A grill sales venture. All three failed. "I was chasing money instead of solving real problems," he later admitted. It took a fourth attempt — one born from his own daily frustration with the endless back-and-forth of scheduling meetings by email — to finally work.

He drained his savings and his 401(k) — roughly $200,000 in total — to build Calendly, then watched investor after investor pass. "I watched other people who fit a different 'profile' get money thrown at them for shitty ideas," he told media at the time. "Those VCs were ignorant and shortsighted. The only thing I could attribute it to was that I was Black."

Calendly survived on bootstrapped growth for years before taking outside investment at all. When it finally did — a $350 million round in 2021 — it valued the company at $3 billion. Today Calendly serves over 20 million users worldwide, and Awotona is one of only two Black tech billionaires in the United States by Forbes' count.

His advice to other founders has remained consistent: "Your background is what you make of it. It can be an asset or an excuse." He's since become a fixture in Atlanta's Buckhead neighbourhood, alongside fellow entrepreneurs Sara Blakely and Ben Chestnut — proof, he says, that the standards he refused to lower were the right ones all along.

Ghana is not simply recovering. It is gathering momentum. After navigating inflation, currency instability and economic uncertainty, this ambitious West African nation is attracting renewed attention from entrepreneurs, investors and the global African diaspora. The message is becoming increasingly clear: something significant is happening in Ghana.

More than a third of Ghanaians are aged between 15 and 35, representing a new generation of consumers, employees, founders and innovators. Accra also hosts the secretariat of the African Continental Free Trade Area, positioning Ghana at the heart of an initiative intended to connect a continental market of approximately 1.3 billion people. For investors, that changes the conversation. Ghana is not simply a destination. It could be a gateway.

But for entrepreneurs prepared to do their homework, Ghana offers something increasingly difficult to ignore: a growing economy, genuine commercial demand and a generation ready to build. For Black entrepreneurs across Britain, Africa and the wider diaspora, the opportunity extends beyond investment. It is about partnership, enterprise and helping create wealth that remains within the communities generating it.

The wave is building. The question is: who's ready to ride it?

For a decade, Zeepay was one of Ghana's proudest fintech exports. Founded in 2014 by Andrew Takyi-Appiah, a banker with stints at Barclays and WorldRemit behind him, the company bet on a simple but powerful idea: that Africa's mobile money wallets, not its bank accounts, were the fastest route for diaspora cash to reach home. It worked. Zeepay grew into a cross-border remittance platform spanning more than 20 African markets, raised over $26 million from investors, partnered with MTN, Vodafone and AirtelTigo, and positioned itself as one of the continent's most recognisable payments brands.

Then, this year, it began to unravel.

On 14 July 2026, the Bank of Ghana revoked Zeepay's Dedicated Electronic Money Issuer licence with immediate effect. The central bank's finding was stark: Zeepay had been issuing electronic money without holding the cash reserves required to back it — a "negative variance" that left customer, agent and merchant wallets exposed. Regulators said the company had ignored repeated directives to inject capital and wind the business down safely.

The licence revocation didn't arrive in isolation. Three months earlier, in April 2026, Ghana's High Court ordered Zeepay and Takyi-Appiah personally to repay more than $11.6 million to a businessman whose remittance funds were never forwarded — funds the court found had partly landed in the CEO's own personal mobile money wallet. That judgment is now under appeal.

South London born, the second youngest of six children to Angela and Francis Nwaka, Fredi Nwaka spent his teenage years moving between the backstreets of Brixton and the plush surroundings of Chelsea's King's Road — a duality that would come to define his career. As a teenager he became a member of one of South London's biggest gangs, the Untouchables. He also MC'd on numerous sound systems, earning the name "Fredi Kruga" through a combination of neighbourhood reputation and skill on the mic.

He built a genuine music career under that name, winning numerous awards and becoming the only UK artist ever affiliated and signed to the American hip hop powerhouse Wu-Tang Clan, opening up shows for artists like the late DMX and H Town, just to name a couple.

Before any of that, he worked close protection for some of music's biggest names, including Biggie Smalls, TLC and Donell Jones, and was part of Choice FM's security outfit.

The pivot into film came next, and it stuck. Nwaka acted alongside Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson in the UK gangster film Dead Man Running, and later appeared in Sky's Bullet Proof alongside Ashley Walters and Noel Clarke. He went on to star in numerous other films such as The Intent, The Last Heist, War Of The Worlds, She's The One and Brotherhood. But it's behind the camera where his reinvention is most visible — self-taught, he has written, directed and produced numerous short films and five feature films, founding Are We Dead Yet Ltd and Nwaka Studios to produce film and TV content. His last film, Jafaican, starring Peter Andre, Sizzla Kalonji, Wil Johnson and Oliver Samuels, became the most talked-about comedy of 2025 and has gone on to receive five nominations in this year's 2026 Caribbean Film Awards, taking place this October, including Best Director and Best Caribbean Film.

He is also the CEO and founder of H.E.A.L Daily CIC, an organisation which works closely with young people who may be at risk of youth violence or suffering from mental health difficulties. He is the founder of the Power Of A Man Awards and the Power Of A Woman Awards, which celebrate inspirational men and women of colour.

Nwaka is also a published author. His bestselling book BOY is a bestseller in three categories on Amazon, and he has gone on to produce a podcast of the same name, interviewing men about their childhood experiences. His story — road man to recording artist to filmmaker to founder — is exactly the kind of reinvention BEI Magazine exists to put on record.

fredinwaka.com · Power Of A Man Awards · Power Of A Woman Awards
IMDb · LinkedIn · Instagram @therealfredinwaka

Sphere Hospitality Events began in 2008 with an idea born somewhere its founder never expected to find one: in church, listening to a sermon by Bishop Malcolm titled "Sphere." Paula Powell took the name, and the concept, and built a hospitality business around it that would go on to serve some of the most high-profile guests to ever visit the UK.

The company's first major project set the tone for everything that followed — providing hospitality services for American church leader Pastor Connie Brooks, who brought a delegation of 100 women to the UK. Word travelled fast. Paula quickly became the go-to name for hospitality services supporting pastors and their wives, and gospel artists appearing at events across Britain.

From there, Sphere Hospitality's client list grew to include Juanita Bynum, Tasha Cobbs, Dare 2 Dream, and the Destined to Soar Women's Ministry Breakfast — alongside major mainstream events including BBC Weekender Screen Nation, the NTA Awards, the MOBO Awards, the BRIT Awards, and hospitality operations at the London 2012 Olympics and Jamaica House 2012.

From a single sermon to hosting a former First Lady of the United States, Paula Powell's journey is a reminder that the biggest opportunities often arrive disguised as the smallest ones — and that showing up with excellence, every single time, is what turns a first booking into a seventeen-year career.

It began at a birthday party. In 2017, Shirley White gathered with family to celebrate her father's 80th birthday. Surrounded by familiar faces, traditional food and homemade Caribbean drinks, she found herself thinking about something more profound than the occasion itself: the generation that had brought these flavours and traditions to Britain was getting older. What would happen when they were gone?

For Shirley, whose father came from Montserrat and whose mother was Jamaican, the answer was clear: those traditions deserved to survive. OTC Beverages was born.

After years working in banking and finance, Shirley entered an entirely unfamiliar world — manufacturing, packaging and selling premium non-alcoholic drinks. She started with flavours close to her heart, traditional ginger beer and sorrel, before introducing butterfly pea flower and lime. Her ambition was straightforward: take the drinks Caribbean families had enjoyed for generations and present them with the quality, confidence and visual appeal they deserved.

Starting a drinks company is challenging enough. Shirley's journey became even harder when the pandemic disrupted hospitality businesses and closed important routes to market. But OTC survived — continuing to develop its products, attracting independent retailers, and earning industry recognition, including being named Traditional Caribbean Drink Company of the Year, London, in 2023.

For Shirley, the achievement extends beyond awards or attractive packaging. It represents the preservation of flavours, stories and memories that might otherwise disappear. Her message to other founders: you do not always need to invent something new to build a meaningful business. Sometimes the opportunity lies in recognising the value of what your family and community have already created — and finding a way to share it with the world.

Every issue, BEI Magazine hands the page over to Curtis Goring — Managing Director of The Aftersales Network Limited, a UK-based commercial finance brokerage and business advisory firm, and a finance broker who's spent his career on the front line of SME lending.

The Aftersales Network structures business loans, property finance and cashflow solutions for small and medium-sized enterprises, and Curtis has built a reputation for sharing what most brokers keep to themselves: what lenders are actually looking for, how to structure debt sensibly, and how to manage risk before it becomes a crisis. Each issue, The Nugget hands readers one practical, shareable piece of finance wisdom straight from him — backed by video.

From Employee to Entrepreneur: Building Wealth Beyond Your Salary

A regular salary provides security — but does it provide financial freedom? For BEI member Bebe Clement, that question became personal following the loss of her mother, an entrepreneur whose passing left the family facing financial difficulties despite her father's professional career.

The experience shaped Bebe's belief that depending entirely on one income can leave even hardworking families vulnerable. Today, as an employment lawyer, entrepreneur, business mentor and author of How to Go From Employee to Entrepreneur, she encourages others to take greater ownership of their financial futures. Here are five principles aspiring entrepreneurs should consider.

You do not need a revolutionary idea. Your professional and personal experience, practical skills and natural giftings or talents could form the foundation of a viable business.

Employment can provide stability while you test your idea, attract your first customers and understand your market. Most new businesses generally do not turn a profit for at least the first couple of years, so make sure you have a transition plan — not just around money, but family commitments too, which if not catered for can become a hindrance to the business.

A business succeeds because people are willing to pay for the solution it provides to a problem they have. Focus on customer needs rather than simply creating something you personally find interesting.

Multiple income streams can strengthen financial security, but only if they are sustainable. Concentrate on building one dependable venture before spreading yourself too thinly, and invest in industries that you understand.

Invest in knowledge, and build a solid network of purpose-driven, quality people. Seek guidance, find mentors and learn from people who have already made the journey. The right advice can prevent expensive mistakes — and a rising tide lifts all boats. Just being around successful people can stimulate you and accelerate your progress.

Bebe Clement is a BEI member, entrepreneur, business mentor and author. All Bebe Clement books and products, and upcoming speaking engagements, are available on her website.
bebeclement.com · Instagram @bebeclement · X @bebe_clement · LinkedIn Bebe Clement

You can have a brilliant idea, an impressive website and complete belief in your product — and still struggle to build a successful business. Why? Because business is not won by enthusiasm alone. It is a game of numbers, positioning, relationships, consistency and informed decisions. The entrepreneurs who progress are not necessarily the most talented. They are usually the ones who understand what matters, protect their resources and keep making intelligent moves.

Here is the roadmap nobody gives you at the beginning.

A business can appear successful and still run out of money. Sales recorded on an invoice are not cash in the bank. A £10,000 contract means little if payment takes 90 days while salaries, suppliers and rent are due now.

Know these numbers at all times: cash currently available, monthly operating costs, money owed to you, payments due within 30 days, minimum sales needed to break even, and how long the business can survive without another sale.

Customers do not buy products simply because they are impressive. They buy outcomes. Your offer must do at least one of the following: make money, save money, save time, reduce risk, remove frustration, or improve status, comfort or confidence. If your potential customer cannot quickly understand the benefit, the problem is rarely their attention span. The offer probably needs greater clarity.

Many new businesses calculate a price and then reduce it because they fear hearing "no." But being the cheapest is not a strategy unless you have the scale and systems to remain profitable at that price. Low prices can attract demanding customers, create cash-flow pressure and leave no room to improve your service. Constant discounting also teaches customers to question your real value.

Entrepreneurs can spend months adjusting logos, websites, presentations and product details while avoiding the most important test: will anybody pay? A real customer provides more useful information than a room full of opinions.

Excitement encourages speed. Business requires clarity. Friendships, family relationships and verbal promises are not substitutes for written agreements. In fact, the closer the relationship, the more important clarity becomes.

Put the following in writing: who owns what, who is responsible for what, how money will be divided, what happens when somebody leaves, who owns the intellectual property, when and how payment must be made, and what happens if expectations are not met.

A practical plan for turning activity into progress.

Define your most valuable customer — "everyone" is not a target market. Identify your flagship offer — one that is easy to explain, profitable to deliver and capable of producing a meaningful result. Know your numbers: break-even point, profit margin, monthly overheads, average customer value and available cash runway. Review where your time goes, and remove work that can be automated, delegated or stopped.

Random marketing creates random results. Choose one primary audience, one core message, one main route to reach them, and one clear next action. Track five numbers: new prospects approached, conversations started, proposals issued, sales completed, and average sale value.

Growth should not mean that the owner becomes more exhausted every month. Turn repeated work into a system: document how important tasks are completed, create templates for common communications, automate reminders and routine follow-ups, delegate outcomes rather than isolated chores, and review which products, services and customers generate the strongest margins.

Never depend on one customer for the survival of your business. Never confuse a busy diary with a healthy company. Never enter an important partnership without agreeing how it can end. Never allow unpaid invoices to become an unofficial loan. Never hire permanently to solve a temporary problem. Never spend to impress people who are not buying. Never scale something that is not yet profitable or repeatable. Never ignore the customers you already have while chasing strangers. Never make a major decision using numbers you have not checked. Never allow pride to keep an unsuccessful idea alive indefinitely.

Set aside one uninterrupted hour every week to work on the business rather than inside it. Ask: What generated revenue this week? What consumed time without producing value? Which payment or decision requires immediate attention? Where is the greatest risk in the business today? What is the single most important move for next week? Write down the answers. Assign actions and deadlines. This simple habit can prevent months of drift.

Business is not a straight road, and nobody plays it perfectly. Stay close to your customers. Know your numbers. Protect your cash. Build genuine relationships. Put important agreements in writing. Make decisions from evidence rather than ego. A business does not grow because its owner is constantly busy. It grows because the right things are done — consistently, deliberately and well.

The Purpose Economy → by Aaron Hurst — a sharp case for building businesses around meaning rather than margin alone, popular reading among BEI members scaling past their first hire.

Black Fortunes → by Shomari Wills — the true stories of America's first Black millionaires, essential context for anyone building wealth against historical headwinds.

Measure What Matters → by John Doerr — the OKR framework used by Google and countless growth-stage founders to keep ambitious teams aligned.

Black Tech Green Money → — hosted by Will Lucas, spotlighting Black entrepreneurs building in tech and beyond.

How I Built This → with Guy Raz — founder origin stories, including several featured entrepreneurs with journeys not unlike this issue's cover story.

My First Million → — sharp, occasionally irreverent business-idea breakdowns, useful for spotting where the next opportunity might sit.

Notion → — for founders juggling too many spinning plates; one workspace for planning, docs and light CRM.

Wise → — for anyone trading across currencies or paying international suppliers without punishing FX fees.

Canva → — still the fastest route from idea to presentable graphic when you don't have a design team on call.

Black Entrepreneurs International (BEI) is joining and exhibiting at the UK Black Business Show at Excel London this October — a landmark gathering bringing together Black-owned businesses, buyers and industry leaders under one roof for a full day of networking opportunities and business workshops.

Whether you're an established business owner or just starting out, this is a chance to showcase what you're building to thousands of attendees in person. BEI members are encouraged to get in touch to secure their place on the exhibition floor.

Mark is also the Co-Founder of Black Entrepreneurs International CIC, alongside Caroline Fagbemi. Together, they are building an organisation focused on empowering and supporting Black entrepreneurs across the UK, Africa and the wider diaspora — creating opportunities for networking, collaboration, visibility, growth and success.

BEI Magazine reaches a community of over 700 engaged Black entrepreneurs and business owners across the UK, Africa, the Caribbean and North America — founders actively building, hiring, investing and looking for the tools, services and partners to help them scale.

If your brand serves entrepreneurs — finance, technology, professional services, education, lifestyle — this is a direct line to a readership that trusts this platform's recommendations.

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