Earlier this year Mr. Franklin Ibemessie was the keynote speaker at Recipes for Success II, a business networking event for professionals in Sierra Leone. The video above the full presentation and Q&A segment.
Here are the 10 things we learned from Franklin Ibemessie
- Life is not determined by how good you can stride but how well you can huddle.
- You will fall but you have to rise and you have to dig deep to move. If you start digging deep, after a while, it becomes a habit in your brain and it becomes muscle memory for your body.
- There is the past, the present, and the future, but the most important thing is the present. The past is a reference point for you to focus on the future. If you focus on the past you will never move from the present. The future is non existent in itself because the future starts in the present.
- You create the future, don’t wait for luck. Luck is a factor of intent and your luck is improved depending on how hard you can work towards something.
- How smart you think you are is the foundation, how resolute you are is the rest of the building. It is like love, love is only the foundation.
- No matter where you find yourself there will always be people who don’t like you. However, your job should be to focus on the prize, to get to where you want to go. If you focus on fighting the people in your way, then you become exactly who you do not like, you become them. So focus on you!
- Find your points of Reference – who is near you that can speak to you in the way you feel you need to be spoken to, who are the people who make you better?
- You don’t need to strive to be innovative to be successful, you just have to commit to continuous improvement; putting one foot ahead of the other every day, take baby steps and move forward.
- You are not known by the company you keep, you are known by the company you avoid.
- You are not defined by the things that stand in your way, you are define by how you deal with them.
About Franklin Ibemessie
FRANKLIN IBEMESSIE, MCIPS, MBA, MSc
Procurement Consultant, Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC)
Franklin is a procurement and project management specialist with 15 years of international experience assisting agencies with the translation of global best practices into applicable procurement guidelines. He started his career as a procurement officer with the United Nations Assistance Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) in the year 2000, working first as a procurement assistant before graduating to the rank of an officer. It was at UNAMSIL that Franklin discovered his love for the procurement process that has turned him into a seasoned professional. In 2004 he joined the World Bank’s Institutional Reform and Capacity Building Project (IRCBP) as lead procurement specialist and there he led and managed a buying budget of $60 million including the implementation of decentralized procurement capacity across the 19 local councils of Sierra Leone.
After his tenure with the IRCBP he worked in Southern Sudan as the Goods and Services Procurement Specialist with Crown Agents UK. Before he left the South Sudan he was promoted to the Head of Procurement leading a $600 million donor funded procurement budget. Later he joined the Anti-Corruption Commission of Sierra Leone as a consultant enabling the staff there with the knowledge and skills necessary to be pro-active, and re-active in their fraud investigations into cases involving procurement. He has served as procurement lead, and specialist for large-scale development projects in Namibia, Liberia, Nigeria, Italy, Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique, and Sierra Leone on multiple occasions.
In May of 2011 Franklin joined the MCC-funded $434 million Millennium Challenge Account-Philippines as lead procurement specialist with the International Business and Technical Consultants (USA). There he managed all strategic procurement processes and procedures for goods, works and services and designed bespoke bidding documents and manuals. As of November 2015 Franklin joined the Millennium Challenge Corporation, in Washington D.C. as a procurement advisor and procurement agent consultant where he participates in the MCC’s $10 billion fight against global poverty.
Franklin holds an MSc in Procurement Management from Strathclyde Business School (Glasgow), an MBA from the University of Liverpool, and a BA in English from the University of Sierra Leone, Fourah Bay College. He is a Member of the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply (CIPS) UK. He is an alumnus of St Edwards Secondary School, Class of ’91. Franklin is an avid tennis player who also holds a blue belt in Shotokan Karate, and likes to consider himself a martial artist; an achievement he feels is only surpassed by his personal best 100m sprinting time of 10,75secs.
