NolapTechnologies
Happy Birthday, Kojo.
You keep the books for this company. Today the whole team is closing them, picking up the pen, and writing about you for a change.
Kwadwo Acheampong Sarpong
Financial Secretary, Nolap Technologies
Kojo 01
to his arrival
KNUST
himself first
left in him
For once, the books are about you
We opened your account and it would not balance.
You are the one who checks every figure that leaves this company, so the fairest way to thank you felt like a language you already speak. We entered everything you have paid into Nolap on one side, and everything you have drawn out on the other. Then we totalled it three times and got the same answer each time.
In the books of Nolap Technologies
Cash Book
Account: Kwadwo Acheampong Sarpong, Financial Secretary
This column has stayed empty since the day the book was opened. That is the whole point of it.
Owed by Nolap Technologies to Kojo, and carried forward into every year we are lucky enough to work beside him.
Entered and agreed, without a single objection, by everyone at Nolap Technologies
We call at six. You are standing there at five past.
Nobody asked you to do that. There is no rule in this company that says the Financial Secretary picks up before the sun is properly out. You just do it, and you have done it so many times that we stopped being surprised and started being grateful instead.
That is the part people outside Nolap will never see on any balance sheet: a person who shows up early, stays late, and somehow still passes his papers.
A letter from the team
The most selfless person any of us has met.
That is a big sentence and we thought about it before writing it down. It is still the truest thing we can say about you. Selfless is not a word you earn once. You earn it in small moments, over and over, when nobody is keeping score. You have been earning it since the day you joined us.
You love money, and you have never pretended otherwise. We love that about you, because you love it the honest way. You want to build something real, grow it, and carry everybody with you when it grows. When we say you will be the next Elon Musk, half of us are teasing and half of us are serious, and every year that passes the serious half gets bigger.
We have tested this more times than you know. Somebody asks what Nolap Prep should do next, or floats a new product idea, and the room goes quiet the way rooms do. Then you start talking. You do not guess and you do not perform. You think out loud, carefully, and by the time you are finished the rest of us are writing it down.
And you are holding all of this while you are a Level 200 IT student at KNUST, with lectures and assignments and everything else that comes with the year. Most people would drop one of the two. You have not dropped either. We do not know how you do it, and we have stopped asking, because the answer is probably just that you decided to.
So here is the wish, and we mean every word of it. May this year give you back some of what you keep giving away. May the ideas keep coming and may you be standing there when they turn into something big. May the work stay honest and may the money follow it. And may you always have people around you who see what you do, the way we see it.
Today, do less. Let somebody else pick up the first call. Eat something good, laugh with the people who love you, and let it settle in that you are wanted here. Happy birthday, Kojo.
With everything we have got,
The Nolap Technologies team
One wish, and make it selfish.
You spend the whole year thinking about what this company needs. Take thirty seconds and think about what Kojo needs. We will wait.
Noted, entered, and kept off the books.