Table of contents
DawaDawa Restaurant and Bar .................................................................................................................... 2
Introduction ................................................................................................................................................... 2
1.1 Recognition of opportunity that fueled the creation of the business. .................................................. 3
1.2 Vision Statement of DawaDawa Restaurant and Bar ......................................................................... 3
2.0 Entrepreneur Flexibility .......................................................................................................................... 3
2.1 Customer Focus .................................................................................................................................. 4
2.2 Quality of Products and Services ........................................................................................................ 4
3.0 Leadership Style...................................................................................................................................... 4
3.1 Entrepreneurial Innovations ................................................................................................................ 5
3.2 Teamwork Strategy ............................................................................................................................. 5
3.3 Resilience in the Face of Adversity .................................................................................................... 5
4.0 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................................. 7
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A report on an interview granted by an entrepreneur in Winneba
This is an interview granted by Samira of Dawadawa Restaurant and Bar on the 12th of February,
2021 to Henrietta Pobie and Enoch Klevor from the University of Education, Winneba, as part of
their entrepreneurship and innovation management assessment to gain insight into
entrepreneurship.
DawaDawa Restaurant and Bar
Introduction
DawaDawa Restaurant and Bar was established in 2014 in Accra, Spintex. In 2017, it was
relocated to Winneba, thus Winneba roundabout on the Accra road. The entrepreneur in question
is a woman by the name of Samira.
She disclosed that in Tamale, her birthplace, in the Northern region of Ghana, and major parts of
the Northern Region, the name "Dawadawa” is a name for a popular seasoning (which is
obtained from a plant called the African Locust Bean Tree) used by the northerners in preparing
most of their local dishes. As a result, people’s attentions are drawn to food when the name
“dawadawa” is mentioned. These two reasons, hence, gave birth to the prestigious and infamous
brand name, “DawaDawa Restaurant and Bar”.
Leaving Tamale to pursue her education in Accra, she enrolled at Achimota School while
serving as a caterer in one of the restaurants in Spintex, where she had the first experience in
managing a restaurant. She is now a well-educated, talented young woman and entrepreneur with
MSc in Social Sciences.
DawaDawa Restaurant and Bar has employed approximately between 2 – 21 employees which
constitute, her as the General Manager, a Facility Manager, Beverage Manager in charge of
breweries, Head Chef, cooks, kitchen assistants, receptionist, waiters/waitresses and cleaners.
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1.1 Recognition of opportunity that fueled the creation of the business.
Despite her lack of any professional and academic catering background, her love for cooking,
coupled with home cooking skills she learnt from her mother, a Home Economics lecturer at the
University of Education, Winneba (UEW), fueled her with the passion to set-up this restaurant.
While in tertiary, she began making income, though meagre, by providing catering services of
preparing meals for friends when parties and dinners are organized among themselves. In her
words, this turned tables for her and shaped her future.
1.2 Vision Statement of DawaDawa Restaurant and Bar
According to her, though it sounded far-fetched at the beginning, she wanted to see her
restaurant as the leading and best restaurant in Ghana. The entrepreneur wants to achieve this by
providing freshly cooked meals from the kitchen to customers. The efforts she put into making
her vision a living dream paid off when she received a "Restaurant of the Year in Central
Region" award from the Ghana Tourism Authority in 2020. In light of this milestone, having
branches all in all regions of Ghana became a vital part of the vision statement of "DawaDawa
Restaurant and Bar”.
2.0 Entrepreneur Flexibility
She made us understand that things have changed over the past years and she too have to adjust
to meet current trends. Though she has no catering background and little experience, she
gathered cooking experience from her and the experience she harnessed while baking pastries
and selling them in basic school. "I have to develop and improve on my knowledge and
experience in catering services by reading myriads of books, articles and publications on food
and nutrition, hospitality and abreast myself with current trends in the restaurant industry," she
says. Besides, she does not only provide catering services but hosts programmes (parties,
weddings, funerals, launches…) for corporate bodies, religious bodies and individuals. She states
that she operates the "a la carte" system of the restaurant where she prepares meals to meet the
individual preference of the clients other than the normal chop bar services, where everybody
eats the same categories of food which makes the running of the restaurant more flexible and this
ensures a quick adjustment to any trends in the industry.
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2.1 Customer Focus
"Whenever you want to start a business, you should have a target market, a category of people
you want your products and services to reach," says the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur discloses
that at the beginning of the restaurant when it was relocated to Winneba, she had a discussion
with her mother on the market niche; her mother wanted her to go by the normal Chop Bar
services as practised by many in Winneba. But she disagreed and said DawaDawa was her idea
and she wanted something beyond chop bar and knowing its severe challenges such as high cost
of the meal, its time-consuming nature, she insistently and adamantly chose to operate the "a la
carte" system anyway, where apart from rice meals, any other meal with soup is prepared freshly
from the kitchen to meet customer specification. According to her, first-timers complaint, a lot
about the delay of meals but she instructed the waitresses to explain to customers about the
system and the duration it takes for meals to be prepared. She says she does not want to run a
restaurant like the way everybody runs it and feels that if she runs the restaurant on the chop bar
system, she would end up selling and serving meals that are prepared days ago and would not
meet the individual customer requirements. For this reason, she carved out her market and
decided that her market niche should be employees of the corporate community, commuters, and
people of medium to high-income earners.
2.2 Quality of Products and Services
The entrepreneur exhibited her profound knowledge and experience when she revealed that “The
way a product is handled and how services are rendered form an integral part of the business
success”. As an entrepreneur, she provides restaurant services to customers by delivering meals
and other services while maintaining a cordial rapport with her customers, which account for
value for money on the part of its customers. Whenever a function is hosted on the premises of
the restaurant, quality services are always assured to event organizers.
3.0 Leadership Style
She stated that in every proper functioning corporate organization, there is an organizational
structure, hierarchy of authority and a chain of command. With this same system in place in her
enterprise, she delegates responsibilities to each head of departments within the restaurants to
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carry out duties as expected of them. She also fuses the democratic style where she is involved in
the day to day administration of the restaurant and ensures that there is a proper flow of
communication and involving her staff in the decision-making process and solicits ideas from
them to help her improve the service conditions of DawaDawa Restaurant and Bar.
3.1 Entrepreneurial Innovations
According to her, using the "a la carte" in the restaurant service gives her an urge over other
competitors in the same industry—she can offer freshly cooked meals to meet customer
specification and also has a durbar ground within the facility to host functions of communities,
corporate institutions, schools, family gatherings and other events of socialization.
3.2 Teamwork Strategy
She encourages group thinking, where it is not only about herself but allows all members and
clients of the business to make valuable inputs into the administration of the restaurant.
Therefore, her suppliers, clients, staff and consumers could all make suggestions to help her run
the restaurant. However, she made it known that the ethnic, cultural and religious diversity
nature of her staff, sometimes poses difficulties in managing them but she tries to bring
everybody as a team together to work despite their individual differences.
3.3 Resilience in the Face of Adversity
She emphasized the point that the implementation of an entrepreneurial idea is very challenging
where you are a novice, ignorant of the requirements to set up a business. After she registered the
business, at the Registrar of Business, and registered as a VAT institution, she did not know the
regulatory and legal requirements of those institutions. Another challenge she faced had to do
with non-payment of taxes to the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA); she had no idea about filling
tax returns before the fifteenth of the following month, withholding taxes, VAT withholdings,
and other regulatory requirements. All these were difficult for her at the beginning and she had to
pay penalties for defaulting payments for more than four months into the business. Other
challenges included Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT), which requires she
enrols all her employees on SSNIT and did not make a monthly contribution towards employees'
retirement. In one instance, she was sued by SSNIT for not making monthly contributions for her
employees and protested that she does not know about the procedure even though she registered
her employees on SSNIT. All these made the administration of the business a herculean task for
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her. In the end, however, she had to learn on her own and employ personnel who can help in
filling returns to GRA and make SSNIT contributions and meet all regulatory and legal
requirements.
She admitted that human management is the most difficult part of business administration.
Because of our diverse upbringings, it is difficult to synchronize attitude to the aim of the
enterprise. But through training and development, she has been able to instil discipline and a
positive attitude towards work, good customer relationship, in the employees to improve the
service conditions of the restaurant. With this, she has been able to create an organizational
structure that will help groom new employees and shape behaviour.
She had challenges with marketing strategies. where at the initial stage; they do a lot of
marketing of products and allow people to have a feel of their products and services, which was
highly costly because left-over foods had to be disposed of. Also, the restaurant store initially
was open to staff and staff engaged in pilfering, making orders outside the restaurant and other
misconducts, and to remedy this, she decided to operate the stores on her own and ensuring that
all orders are made in consultation with her.
In the beginning, customers who did not understand the "a la carte" system complained of delay
and high cost of products, so she decided to explain to customers the condition of service at the
restaurant to give them an idea of how much time it would require for their orders to be served
and to give the clients the will to choose either to wait or leave. She is also concerned about
consistency and fair treatment in the delivery of her services. For instance, the restaurant opens
at 6 am and closes at 10 pm. The staff runs the shift system, the first batch comes at 6 am-2 pm
and the other from 2 pm-10 pm. These schedules are strictly adhered to, to serve breakfast, lunch
and supper consistently to clear doubt off the minds of customers.
At the onset of the business, she had a lot of employees and found it difficult to manage them all.
She did this out of inexperience, thinking a lot of hands could help her run the restaurant
efficiently. But after consultation, she lay off some of the employees and trained the handful left
to deliver services effectively and efficiently and as a result, cut down cost.
In respect to the Covid-19 condition, she responded that the dreadful Covid-19 has had its toll on
the restaurant. Before Covid-19 reared its ugly head, functions were held at the restaurant’s
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premises, but the band on social gatherings has affected the flow of income from such events and
making the maintenance of the facility difficult.
4.0 Conclusion
Overall, we think the interview was very successful. We learned more about a career path of an
entrepreneur and were able to explore the broader perspective in the field of entrepreneurship.
We found a great deal of knowledge, rich experience and insightful conversation from the
respondent that have helped shape our mindset of entrepreneurship.
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