Freddie Achom does not look like the stereotypical investor or entrepreneur. Sporting dreadlocks that tumble to his shoulders, he is dapper, yet relaxed, in a blazer over a shirt and jeans. Achom is articulate and humorous as he recounts his journey to the pinnacle of global enterprise. He might not have got there if he wasn’t encouraged to take a chance while moving from studying medicine to business while at university.
“I started working for a stationery company and it was then that a more senior member of staff said to me, ‘you are really good at business development. How long have you been doing it?’ And I said, ‘this is my first job. I’m just here for the summer and when university starts again, I’m off.’ Then he said to me ‘you should consider it. Your bosses are not telling you that you are doing something really special.’”
“There was a commission sheet where you recorded what you brought into the company and for me it was never enough so I had to flip it over and fill it out all the way to the bottom of the next page. I did that week in, week out. He said ‘I’ve been here five years and I’ve never seen anyone do that, so you should consider it.’ He actually encouraged me which is strange because here’s a man getting all the accolades of training me and he’s telling me, ‘you need to get out of here.’”
Aware of his talent, Achom moved to work for a surveying firm. While there, he was headhunted to join a professional business development firm, an experience which he credits for developing his self-confidence.
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“The director was pretty quirky but he had a lot of faith in me. I think I got most of my conviction and belief there because he was self-made; an interesting guy from up north (of England)… He said I could do whatever I wanted. He said ‘you should set yourself a target where you can touch things.’ And he said to me ‘what watch are you wearing?’ I said ‘just some regular watch.’ So he said ‘buy yourself a Rolex watch. How long do you think it’s going to take you?’ I said ‘I don’t know.’ He said ‘just set yourself that target and do it.’”
Six weeks later, Achom saw the director sitting in his office and showed him his watch.
“He went ‘you’ve bought the watch already!’ I said ‘yes, I bought it a couple of weeks after I saw you.’ I set my target and I checked how much it was and I think I bought it about a fortnight after he told me. He was genuinely impressed.”
The next phase of the journey saw Achom establish his first company in partnership with a group of associates. They built a consultancy and strategic funding agency and sold it after three years. Cash in hand, Achom went on to explore other ventures that led to the establishment of his private fund and flagship company, Rosemont Group Capital Partners. Achom serves as the chairman of the group which holds a diverse portfolio of companies including Communication Power Engineering Company (CPEC), a renewable energy service company and one of the oldest listed companies on the Bombay Stock Exchange.
Other companies under the group include BWC Management, a wine brokerage company and Hershey Pascual Fashion, a high-street women’s fashion brand. Achom’s interests also reach into the restaurant and nightclub industry where he holds stakes in a number of leading spots, including Jalouse in Mayfair and the famous Scotch of St. James in Westminster.
Recently, Achom has diversified his interests by switching his focus to the technology industry. Never one to play small, he announced plans to invest in 20 start-ups by 2017, an excursion that will see him invest around $9.2 million. Considering the skyrocketing valuations in the industry, he is aware of the pitfalls that lurk beneath opportunities.
“The technology space is almost like back in the Wild West where everyone has got their tools out searching for gold. And we all know that though everyone went out, only few came back with lorries of it. Everybody wants to be the next Google and Facebook, but that is not going to happen. But, if you have the right kind of mechanisms in place, if you are looking at the market with your entrepreneurial brain fully on it, I think you’ll do ok,” he says.
“What I find is that the early technology entrepreneur success stories are stumbled upon. Those guys are always guilty of labeling themselves as entrepreneurs and they then embark on this continuous journey to replicate their success, disregarding the fact that the first one was an accident. It just doesn’t work. The people that are really replicating success within the tech space are those that are genuine entrepreneurs and have criteria that they follow and a philosophy that really works for them.”
Achom is also keen to have an impact in Africa where he believes there is significant opportunity.
“We specialize in is renewable energy, so we are looking at Ghana, Nigeria, because West Africa will be our focus. Secondly, technology. We look at what we are learning here in the tech space and at some point it will be our ambition to create an incubator where we nurture ideas at the early stage. The telecommunications infrastructure has laid the foundation. The fundamentals and the user base are there, so this will be hugely profitable.”
Achom was born in Nigeria in the 1970s and moved to Britain in 1982. His parents ran an insurance firm together and sent all four siblings to boarding school. Achom credits the love and support shown by his parents with imbibing a sense of responsibility. They often flew to visit the children at short notice. With two children of his own now, Achom is determined to raise kids with these strong values.
His sense of responsibility extends to society. Achom recently launched the Rosemont Group Foundation. His aim is to encourage young people to believe in their dreams and focus on their passion despite potential distractions.
“About six years ago, I was driving a Lamborghini and I was at the petrol station filling it up. These kids came past on their bicycles and they were like ‘wow!’ I thought to myself, ‘ok, kids love cars,’ but I didn’t think there was anything special about the guy driving the car until they asked me what I did. I said ‘I’m an investor.’ They went ‘wow! How did you get into that?’ And I said to them ‘study hard, stay in school.’”
“They asked me again, ‘you are not a footballer?’, and I said ‘no’. And I thought to myself, ‘is that the only way they think you can drive a car like that?’ That’s when it hit me and I started to think I could do something to change that perception.”
“I wanted people to learn from my experience doing business in the UK, where the cards are stacked against you, where the pitfalls are, how you maintain your focus, your dignity, your true God-given character, because I come from Africa and we don’t succumb easily.”
“I’ve experienced prejudices doing business, where people had preconceived ideas of me but spent a few minutes with me and those perceptions changed. The foundation was about letting people know that people exist that you can look up to and call up if you need to and draw from and learn from their experiences, and I hope I can contribute a little towards that.”

Buy A Rolex And The Lamborghini Will Follow

Edward Moshole was destined for a life as a cleaner in a factory; until inspiration came on a breath of fresh cherry-scented air in a storage room surrounded by detergents. Now the former cleaner sells 70,000 bottles of detergent a month to the largest retail shopping chains in South Africa, worth R12 million ($1 million) a year.
“A broomstick is what started my business. It was the only thing that I owned… Getting a job as a cleaner at Enterprise changed my life; them giving me the boots and overalls and saying ‘here, clean’. I could feel in my heart I wanted to be something more,” he says.
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With humble beginnings in the small township of Gapane, a place few have heard of in the Limpopo province of South Africa, Moshole’s story is uncommon. He grew up without parents from the age of 16 and failed the eighth grade five years in a row. Moshole says when he was young he never dreamed he could become a millionaire.
His life changed when he moved to Cape Town to live with his brother. He says the move woke him up. Moshole finished his schooling and became a cleaner in a factory run by food chain Enterprise. In this factory, in a two-square-meter storage room that smelled of cherries; among piles of detergent, bleach, cleaners and soaps, Moshole had an idea.
“Getting into that store room, I could see that the quality doesn’t measure the performance of the cleaners. I could improve things. I could see myself becoming a detergent manufacturing champion,” he says.
It began with $6 and a broom stick says Moshole. The then cleaner went directly to a manufacturer and bought a 5-liter bleach bottle. His first sales pitch was short and simple.
“I went to an ordinary person and said ‘look I’ve got detergent, I’ve got cleaner and they go for R15 ($1.30) a liter’,” he says.
Moshole’s part-time business took off. He targeted his co-workers who finished work too late to make it to the shops. A few months later, Moshole began selling door-to-door. He moved to spaza shops and sold to neighbors.
Moshole soon grew tired of the life of a middleman salesman and decided to create his own brand. With the money he earned, he bought a pile of 25-liter spice drums from Enterprise for around $1 each. He spent the following weekends churning detergent with a homemade metal mixer in his backyard.
“At the end of the day my hands were blistered,” he recalls.
For three years, Moshole toiled over his blue spice drums. His brand, Chem-Fresh, garnered the interests of supermarket giant Pick n Pay, owned by Raymond Ackerman, who is ranked 38th on FORBES’ list of richest Africans. It was the big break that Moshole needed.
The deal took seven years to sign. Along the way, Moshole learnt some hard lessons about mass-market production. One of them was to change from an informal backyard business to a formal one. He named his company ‘ebinter’ and started selling his Chem-Fresh products through it. Moshole also learnt he needed to become an accountant as well as a salesman. But it was the competition in the detergent business that was hardest to handle.
“Retail must retain a formal market. It’s tough. You negotiate with a buyer who takes 300 calls a day from others who supply the same product as you. Then there you are competing with the multinationals and then you are competing with the companies who own no-name brands. Your product needs to be cheap and needs to be of a consistent high quality,” says Moshole.
These days, Moshole’s factory in Wynberg, an industrial sector a few kilometers outside of Sandton, is a far cry from his backyard. Thousands of plastic bottles are piled to the ceiling. A $90,000 mixer churns bath soaps and hand wash. Another mixer prepares bleach for the day. Moshole says it takes half an hour to produce 500 liters of Chem-Fresh bleach.
His clientele has now spread across supermarket chains Spar, Pick n Pay, Massmart and Dischem. The last two were recently acquired in December.
Despite landing these promising contracts the detergent maker remains humble. He keeps the broom that he started with as a reminder of where his dreams began, minus the brush which fell off a few years ago.
With $6 and a broomstick, Moshole began selling detergent to his colleagues, bottle by bottle. Now, he sells them in the thousands. What’s more, Moshole proudly claims he has never missed a delivery.

The Unlikely Millionaire Cleans Up

Emilia de Sousa is small, but tough. She’s had to be. Founding “Old Fashioned” Fish And Chips, South Africa’s biggest fish &amp; chips franchise, has been a struggle every step of the way. It has been a long and painful road from a tiny corner shop in the east of Johannesburg to 350 stores in South Africa and millions of rands.
It all began when the South American-born de Sousa started helping her uncle in his corner shop as a teenager. De Sousa was from a family of immigrants who came to South Africa from Curaçao Island, on the coast of Venezuela.
The little fish and chips shop taught de Sousa the basics: discipline and hard work. She worked behind the till, mixed the batter, peeled the potatoes, fried the fish and fed her dreams.
“You know when I had this shop, every single day people used to ask me ‘Why don’t you franchise? Can I buy this one?’ and I had this thing in my mind, [that one day] I will franchise because there were so many people [asking for it]”.
She began franchising the business in 2005, after opening her first store 10 years earlier; shortly after the release of Nelson Mandela, when many people were packing up and leaving, fearing new leadership under a new government, de Sousa embraced the change and even attended Madiba’s first birthday in freedom, following his release from Robben Island.
“…When Nelson Mandela came out [of prison] I actually met [him]. I met him at Sacred Heart College… Now I think I should have taken a photo,” she laughs.
At the time when many were skeptical about the incoming government and scared for their safety, she stuck to her adopted country.
“I was never frightened. I have got this thing that ‘when it’s your time, it’s your time. It doesn’t matter where you are’. And this is such a beautiful country we’ve got, I’ve travelled a lot and this country is still the most beautiful country to me,” says de Sousa.
It is a beautiful country, but it was also harsh on young de Sousa. To complicate matters she was a mother at 16.
“As a single mom for 27 years, I [have] also started my life tough. I had to bring up three kids on my own. I never got a cent from maintenance or anything like that. I’m the type of person [who says] ‘Don’t just sit down and cry about it. Do something’.
“I’ll never forget I went to court for maintenance and the [female] prosecutor turned around and told me, ‘You must pay your husband maintenance, he says he is not working’. I turned around and said ‘What a lie… Cheers my friend. Never see me again’. The tears were running down my face I couldn’t believe what she had said to me,” says de Sousa.
Following her divorce, the young mother had begun selling second-hand clothes to make ends meet and it worked out well. Soon she was back to the original plan, opening up her own fish and chips shop like she had once done with her uncle, selling quality food at low prices.
“I don’t believe in ripping people off, if you look around [in a mall], say they are selling their handbags for three or 2,000 [but] nobody is in the shop. But if they had cheaper bags, that are still good [quality], there would be more people in the shop… It’s the same with food, but some people just want to make money.”
One of her problems in the early days was making money.
“I did have very hard times [starting] the business and I used to work hard [trying] to put money together… I remember I went and borrowed money and these people charged me about five times more and I paid them back… I paid them all that money,” says de Sousa.
As the money problems were solved, grim, violent, reality visited her business. A gang of robbers sneaked into her shop and attacked her.
“When I got to work the door was closed, they were waiting inside for me because I had the money. There were three of them, the first one pulled out the gun, the second one ran with the money and the third one stabbed me in the back and just missed my heart,” says De Sousa.
De Sousa almost bled to death, but somehow survived. Through it all, she vowed that there was no time for tears.
When it comes to business, she claims she has the magic touch. A food lover, she says she has never failed in any business that she has started.
Her son Nicholas, Operations and Marketing Director, agrees.
“She might not have our degrees and all that but she can do everything that we do and she does it much better than we do. And I’ve met the likes of the Gordon Ramseys and Richard Bransons, but still, when I look at men like that, and I look at my mom I swear they’ve got nothing on her,” he says.
The next step is to make her business a world-wide brand. Surely, a woman who survived poverty, cheated death, negotiated loan sharks and loneliness would be odds on favorite to do anything.

Tag: Enterprise

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

Buy A Rolex And The Lamborghini Will Follow

The Unlikely Millionaire Cleans Up

No Time For Tears When You’re Fishing For Dreams