Building in Ghana - Watch this so you don't get scammed

Times are hard nowadays and people are ready to do whatever is needed to supplement their income, whether fair or foul means. And it's not only in Ghana, it's everywhere. In the UK, a friend of mine who does a door-to-door business, and for those who don't know what door-to-door business is, he actually goes around and collects items that people want to send to Ghana. He will ship it together and distribute it to the owners in Ghana at a cost. Christmas is a peak season for door-to-door business owners because this is the time that a lot of people send a lot of items back home to their family members. So last Christmas, he went and collected loads of items from his clients. He put it at the back of a van and he parked this van in front of his house. He decided to go to sleep, wake up in the morning and go and park this item in an ISO container to be shipped. He woke up the next morning and the van and its contents had been stolen. So it's not only in Ghana and parts of Africa that people are stealing. Recently, I had a lot of iron rods stolen from my site. This is our employee of 14 years stealing our rubber produce. The scary thing is they still went on to sell the stolen goods and tried to bribe the supervisor who caught them with some of their money. So I'm used to people stealing from me but this one was a new one. I wasn't expecting this one that's why I'm making a video about it. Maybe you might learn a thing or two from this experience. So we are trying to put up something small for the family back home. I live in the UK but my wife and kids live in Ghana and my wife is the one who is managing the project. One thing that she does which is really good is she never leave the buying of construction material to the artisans. What she does is she go around collecting coats from different shops then buy the one that is value for money. So this time we wanted to buy some plumbing materials and she went out to go and get the coats. At this point we were in a hurry so she only gets coats from one of the shops. She comes and sit in the car, she picks her phone and she's dialing. I'm asking who are you calling and she says she wants to call the shop that she went to collect the coat from. She wants to call that shop and ask for the prices again. That was weird to me but she told me just watch me. So she called them and one by one asked for the unit price of the item she just collated the coat for. And guess what, the prices they gave on the phone was cheaper than what they wrote on the paper. That was weird. How come what they are giving us is cheaper on the phone? This is when she disclosed to me that what some of the workers in the shops, not the shop owners, the workers does is they put the prices up. So when you go and buy then they will take the difference. So because of this we made time to go to other shops to get prices and guess what, the price that we got was way cheaper. As you can see we were coated $3,468. The other shops were around $2,200 to $2,700. We did not go back to the original shop. We went to a different one to make sure that we got value for money. What did I learn from this experience? After our experience we went to different shops and we realised that you know what, majority of the shops did not try to cheat us. So even though you might be prone to getting cheated in Ghana, not all the shops would want to do that. Another lesson I learnt is I think it's actually better you manage your projects yourself or you find someone who is very interested in the project to manage it for you. I'm thinking if not the fact that my wife is at home managing all the projects for us, would the other person get the time to do all the research that she does before she gets the construction material? I'm not sure. So I will advise that if you are building, you either entrust it to someone who is really interested and has got time to make sure that they beat down the price for you or you make time, you go home, you build what you can build and then you come back. I'll take this opportunity to warn business owners to pay attention to whatever their workers do. There is a debate that workers are not being paid enough in Ghana, that's why they are stealing. The survival of your business is highly dependent on the integrity of your employees. Let's sit down and let's discuss with them the best way that we can get them on site for them to work with integrity. I will also tell workers to please protect the business that you are working in. If you think the pay is not enough for you, please sit down with your employers and find the best way you can resolve it rather than making the business go bust because if the business go bust, your income also go bust. I think it will be better to have a steady income coming from a steady job before you find your feet to set up your own business. I hope this video was helpful and you've learned one or two things from this. If so, please give it a like. Please subscribe to come on my journey of experience. Thank you very much for watching and see you in the next one. Bye.