THE STORY BEHIND HKA
HKA Group start
Henry Kofi Amankwah was a British entrepreneur with a different idea of how to build a company. Where others hired for experience, Henry hired for potential — what he always called “a young, inexperienced but ambitious and naturally talented team”.
His story with the team began in Cairo in 2009, when he founded Emerging Media, a marketing company built on that same belief. In 2012 he went further and started a software development & marketing company. The team shared his love of, and curiosity for, technology and internet products, and were inspired by start-ups like Airbnb and Uber that were changing what an application could deliver in the real world.
The vision was to dare to dream, and to turn “crazy ideas” into products and services that could stand among the successful online start-ups of the time.
Sadly, in early 2015, Henry Kofi Amankwah passed away after a sudden stroke. He left his team heartbroken, but with a vision to dream big.
Later in 2015 the team came together as HKA Group, carrying his initials. It started small: an email marketing project supported by a call centre of ten people, with Vodafone as its first client. Within three years the team had grown to more than 80 people and had worked with brands including Vodafone, O2, Avon, TalkTalk and FIAT — building its own email marketing platform and other SaaS and B2B tools along the way.
What he left us
HKA Group exists because of the opportunity Henry gave us. He believed in creating opportunities — in giving people with less experience the chance to hone their skills and become experts in their field. We followed in his footsteps and made it one of our core values: we look for talent and a hunger for success, and we teach the rest.
- 2009Henry founds Emerging Media in Cairo and hires a young, untested team.
- 2012He starts a software development & marketing company with the same team and the same approach.
- 2015Henry passes away in early 2015. Later that year his team forms HKA Group: ten people, one client, Vodafone.
- 2018More than 80 people, working with brands including Vodafone, O2, Avon, TalkTalk and FIAT.
- TodayA London consultancy in business, technology and marketing — built on long experience in digital marketing and business development.
In his own words
If you’re willing to take the time to search, to look and to invest in yourself, you can teach yourself a whole heap of things. And that investment — if you’re naturally intelligent, you have the drive and you’re willing to invest in yourself — what you can achieve is absolutely phenomenal. And then from that you can go on and do the thing that you dreamed of. If you wanted to run your own company, start up your own business, help people and start up a charity, you can do all of that — but all of that starts with self-belief.
— Henry Kofi Amankwah
This goes out to everybody out there that has been overlooked, people who’ve been forgotten about — the talented, the gifted out there that the school system has forgotten about and pushed to the wayside. We salute you, and we’re saying #you_are_not_nothing.
