Rector for GH Media School, Leslie Addo Listowell, has disclosed that he became a taxi driver after he was regrettably sacked from NET 2 TV.
This termination of contract at the TV station was as a result of his failure to meet a quota assigned to him.
Mr. Addo Listowell made this revelation last Saturday on Joy Learning TV’s career development and entrepreneurship-based program, ‘The Career Trail’.
He averred that, it was series of events that culminated in his zest to follow his passion and to establish a school.
“So I completed Central University and then I went to NET 2 for my national service. At the time, I had a café at Abossey-Okai which I sold to buy a taxi to give to someone to work with so that I can go to work. However, when I was laid off, I was depending on the taxi.
“But the taxi driver kept giving me stories, so I started driving the taxi myself. I drove the taxi for 8 months. Me, a university graduate who was even the school prefect in secondary school and the representative of my class in the students’ congress in the university, now a taxi driver? It was indeed a very hard blow,” he confessed.
The Rector further asserted that a lot of his colleagues and former classmates from high school and the university could not come to terms with his farcical situation and kept wondering how he arrived at such a situation. To rub salt in the wounds, his wife, Mrs. Belomina Addo Listowell, was made subject to constant ridicule at work for being the wife of a taxi driver.
Not only did this doleful situation come with its own challenges, it also made the two most important people in his life very disillusioned with him.
“When I was sacked from NET 2 and I had to drive a taxi in order to earn some income, my mother was very broken and pained because I was the only one among her children who had gone to the university, and yet I had now ended up a taxi driver”, he shared.
The prominent Ghanaian businessman now felt the compelling urge to prove a point to his mother and to rise up above the challenge, and this was the catalyst he needed to try making a name for himself.
When he had established his media business, it was this same motivation that fostered his desire to keep pushing and striving to find solutions in the face of many challenges.
Again, Mr Listowell describe his wife as another great source of inspiration that kept him hard-driving in the quest to keep his business afloat. He referenced her financial succor at the incipience of his business as very poignant.
“Sometimes, I have to go to my wife for money to reimburse and to pay people and so on, and then I have to go with sweet words. So when I go, I need to greatly assure and convince her that this is going to work, and that I will refund her at a later time. I push and push and try my best to let it work”, he divulged.
Today, Leslie Addo Listowell runs a very successful school with prospects of making it the first-ever private technical university in Ghana.
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