Speaking at the Ghana SME CEO Summit 2017, Mr. Andrew K. Asamoah revealed that it took him more than a decade to furnish his privately owned 17,100 square metre retail centre; the A&C Mall which serves the needs of most Accra dwellers.
According to Mr. Asamoah, the idea of setting up a shopping centre cropped up when he retired from his work with the United Nations (UN) and finally settled in Ghana, however, the journey to establishing the flourishing A&C edifice as it is now was tough due to the lack of funds and resources available at the time.
He indicated that banks denied him of financial support on the basis that the idea he held was not feasible enough to rake the profits but that did not mar his dreams of achieving what he wanted for himself.
“I felt there was something missing in the city in the sense that you have a city of Accra, almost 5 million in population with no shopping mall. I felt that was something which was needed but to do it was very difficult. The banks were telling me, you’ve never worked before, you are a diplomat, you don’t know business and you just come and you want to do it. You come and you want to do a shopping mall, here our shopping mall is the market, we don’t do these things,” Mr. Asamoah lamented.
“I believed it will work and I put everything on, but what I saw was that funding and the type of interest was so high so I decided that I will go phase by phase, small small and put back what I’m getting in. So you can see that A&C has taken twelve years to reach where it is now because we didn’t have the funds to start big from the very beginning”, he added.
Mr. Asamoah urged young entrepreneurs who don’t have the necessary resources to take such little steps to challenge themselves and achieve their dreams.
“My advice is, go slow. The interest rate is too high, go slow and move gradually,” he said.
