By: Liz Sgro
For this week’s blog post, I am sharing a piece I wrote for my internship. My boss handed me the final task of writing a PR feature article about the company. For someone who has only been here for 4 weeks, it was a daunting task. But over the last few days, I have been able to interview management higher-ups and work collaboratively with my peers on the media team as they gave me feedback and other information to fill in the gaps. This piece, along with other shortened versions, will be shared on the official company website as well as presented to media houses when partnering with agencies for future campaigns. Enjoy this lengthy, yet fascinating origin story behind the wonderful team of XpressGas!
XpressGas: The Journey to “Gas For All Wherever You Are”
The idea that there is a greater opportunity somewhere outside of your hometown is a frequent underlying mindset we are gradually taught as individuals growing up — that there’s a greater opportunity to achieve higher education or to make it into a successful career. In a greater sense, we are told to follow our dreams wherever they may take us and make a change in the world. In a developing country such as Ghana in West Africa, this mindset is heightened as many people are starting their life journeys from more
impoverished communities. The reward for success becomes greater as there are more obstacles to overcome. The purpose of such a goal-oriented mindset and steadfast perseverance is all to achieve the privilege of coming back to support the family and community. It is an unspoken honor to be able to accomplish such a task.
This sense of luck and opportunity eventually presented itself to a young man in the Central Region, Ghana. After years of tirelessly working, Kofi Nketsia-Tabiri became a prominent business consultant for 16 African countries for a company headquartered in America. He had it all: international travel, stable finances at a young age, and the ability to care for his family. He was a lucky one — or so he thought.
In his busy career of mentoring small or developing companies all over the globe, Nketsia-Tabiri would always come back to his roots. Upon these periodic visits home, he would be reminded of the economic differences, situational struggles, and inconveniences some of his loved ones had to go through due to a more underdeveloped national infrastructure. He didn’t feel lucky but rather saddened, guilty, and helpless by the societal differences he had been witnessing firsthand. He decided to create opportunities and luck to make a change in his community. The answer to how this drastic shift in Nketsia-Tabiri’s life affected an entire industrial sector is found in the stories from the early 2000s.
As an entrepreneurial consultant, Nketsia-Tabiri would only visit home a few times a year in between his international travels but the routine of these visits never changed. When his mother needed to cook, he would run out to replace her cooking gas but convenience and ease are things that the process lacked. The overall task could take up hours as you would load an empty cylinder in the car, drive to a refilling station, wait in the queue, get the tank refilled, and then drive back. And that’s if you had access to a car. For an impatient, solution-oriented, and independent man like Kofi, he grew tired of this process quickly. An additional obstacle occurred from 2006 to 2009 when it was exceptionally difficult to even find a station with gas to refill the cylinder — a shortage. It was a hassle of a process for a product that wasn’t even clean or healthy to make food with properly. This was issue number one.
As his family grew older, he began visiting and providing more for the household. Hometown friends and loved ones would look at him and see a well-traveled mechanical engineer with an entrepreneurial spirit. He would have the connections to get someone a job. This was a common assumption that unfortunately was not true. The lack of accessible jobs and resources for his loved ones back home was issue number two.
With Nketsia-Tabiri’s business-consulting job that dealt primarily with creative problem-solving business and financial issues for other people, he found that he learned some things along the way too. He became well-versed in the inner workings of business establishments and helped many people enhance their financial standings through fast thinking, planning, creativity, and taking action. Issue number three originated when he began to ask why he wasn’t doing this for himself.
Nketsia-Tabiri saw the holes that these three problems caused him, his loved ones, and his community and began thinking of a way to fill these holes. After years of solving business plan inconsistencies, stretched financial planning, and unstable operations, XpressGas was formally born in 2010 under the ideology of “gas for all, wherever you are.”
To begin tackling the three original issues, Nketsia-Tabiri sought out solutions to make cooking gas clean, reliable, affordable, and accessible. To help limit the further expansion of Household Air Pollution fumes (HAP), XpressGas became a company solely based on Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG). HAP fumes develop from using coal, oil, gas, and wood to cook indoors and therefore accumulate over time and lead to about four million deaths per year around the globe. LPG is a cleaner, healthier, and more sustainable form of gas that can be used for indoor cooking without causing health defects for those cooking or consuming the food. After figuring out a system for this clean gas alternative, next was figuring out how to get it to people and convince people to use it — to make the switch.
To achieve this, two models were created: Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Customer (B2C). B2B is the branch centered around supplying LPG to the 52 refilling stations around Ghana for bulk consumers such as schools, hospitals, restaurants, and factories. B2C is the other branch that focuses more on smaller clients and provides individual LPG cylinders directly to households for smaller-scaled cooking.
For B2C, the common issue of finding stations and refilling the gas yourself was resolved when the Swap N Go system was created. Swap N Go offers consumers a range of LPG options varying from 6kg, 15kg, and 50kg sized cylinders. It also provides stove solutions on a 6-12 month “Pay and Own” basis for users of traditional gas, thus promoting a cleaner environment. For commercial kitchens and households who already own a gas stove or cooker, Swap N Go operates a pre-order delivery system, where a customer can call, text, or make online orders for LPG. This system allows you to notify the company that you are out of gas and express your need for more. A delivery service will arrive at your doorstep with a new cylinder within one hour, swap it with the old one to refill it at the station, and go. This option has positioned XpressGas not only as a business that offers a clean and safe product, but also as a reliable, consistent, convenient, and personalized service. It shows that the company cares about every client, big and small.
Even though Swap N Go has given XpressGas a competitive edge in the industry against local competitors, the size of the company posed an issue for funding and stability during the first few years of operation.
In the early stages, the company quickly became dependent on the pockets of Nketsia-Tabiri. He was managing the business with friend and current B2B Operations Manager Esther Parden out of hotel rooms, had no investors, and only one set of cylinders, all while still working and traveling as a business consultant. Esther would primarily manage the (very few) accounts they had while “Kofi was on the field trying to locate people who needed gas,” recalls Parden. “As our services began to spread, we were sought out. People were trying to join because we were reliable, consistent, and quick when it came to providing our service so we needed to expand.” Parden then goes on to describe the small office they had in the back of a building in Tema as they briefly showed a few new employees the systems they had begun putting in place to structure the B2B and B2C models. “It was not easy but as we progressed in the industry and we were firm while still showing respect to our clients — we got along. We were accepted and trusted to provide them with our services,” states Parden. The gas and oil sector started to shift with the innovative change XpressGas was causing but it then became a challenge to keep up with the supply and demand within the community.
Nketsia Tabiri frequently questioned himself if everything he was doing with XpressGas was even worth it — if he should keep going with something that was draining his bank accounts faster than he could fill them. In these self-reflections, he recalled little moments and conversations with clients who had instilled their trust in him. He realized that his answer to why he willingly chose to sit in ten-hour meetings and run all over town with minimal resources for this company was simply because “he loved doing it” says Parden.
With the passion and drive he had, he was able to manage a system that would best work for himself and the company to improve financial stability without investors, Thus using his prior consulting experience to solve one of three holes: make his own business his way. “I jumped in with an assumption that I had a strong business plan and a network of close investor friends, but it did not turn out that way. I still prevailed despite these challenges as I became creative with new strategies to fund the company” says Nketsia-Tabiri.
Similarly, having the ability to push yourself creatively was one of the main qualities Nketsia-Tabiri looked for when hiring new employees during the company’s big expansion in Accra. “Kofi gives opportunity to everyone. He allows everyone to work creatively to promote keeping an adaptable and open mind in an ever-evolving company and industry” states Business to Customer (B2C) accountant and Administrative Manager Winifred Appea. “In one word, I would describe XpressGas as ‘innovative.’ Our Swap N Go service option shows that we are a creative, unique, and dynamic company dedicated to safety, reliability, and convenience,” adds Health Safety Security and Environment Adviser Jessica Esenam Foli. “XpressGas is an environment where you’re allowed to grow — a place where you’re allowed to own what you’re doing and take pride in your successes” Esenam Foli describes.
Women like Appea and Esenam Foli were hired as a part of the foundational group of employees who single-handily built varying branches of the company from the ground up as they gained more experience and showcased productivity and creative resourcefulness. “One of the best parts about being a woman in my role is when you meet people who are pleasantly surprised to meet a woman in a male-dominated work sector,” says Esenam Foli. Appea also adds “I work with passion as a female in this company. I am proud that I have been able to get things done and done properly all while representing the diversity and inclusivity of the company.” To date, Nketsia-Tabiri proudly states that there are more than 300 employees on the payroll and 45% of employees are women, with the majority of them being a part of the administrative team, such as Appea and Esenam Foli. This, therefore, highlights how XpressGas has successfully filled the last of the three holes: providing jobs for more people in his community.
Ten years into managing a diverse group of employees and adjusting to an innovative business plan structuring and financial strategies, the company finally received investments from two large, credible, and trusted companies. “It was an indication that we had done something good for the community within our last ten years of existence… It was a relief and validation of everything we had set out to do in the first place” stated Nketsia-Tabiri. “I am proud to be a part of a business that has been able to bring a sense of excitement and growth to a sector that you don’t typically see.” With this, Nketsia-Tabiri reflects on his growth as a business owner, boss, partner, and friend through his experiences with XpressGas: “I think going into business has enabled me to learn how to be a more dynamic person. I am more patient, I have learned how to better work and communicate with people, and I also am confident in my understanding that you need a diverse group of minds and voices with a collective of ideas to execute a vision.”
This is the mindset that will continue to help Nketsia-Tabiri curate a team of like-minded individuals to grow the company to be the lead distributor of gas in Ghana, Africa, and eventually on a global scale. In other words, XpressGas has become the true definition of “gas for all, wherever you are.”