The creator of Ghana’s premier online retail shop, Zoobashop.com, is definitely on to exciting things.
Zoobashop’s founder and CEO, Albert Biga, radiates that rare, balanced combination of thoughtfulness and affability. He reveals that “even in the midst of this entirely turbulent economic condition [in Ghana], we’re seeing inspiring growth and we indeed intend to expand into the rest of West Africa. We’re looking at going into Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Gambia in the third quarter of this year.
But if you think that’s overly audacious for a young man with a fledgling online retail business, in a region that is notorious as the backwaters of intra-regional trade, then fasten your seat-belt; “give or take a year, in the next five years I’m looking at being a major player in the ecommerce trade in West Africa, if not the leading player,” Biga pronounces.
That penchant for being the biggest and the best in business is what defines Biga and it is the driving force behind his newest venture.
Zoobashop, the 100% Ghanaian owned pioneering online retailer is the kind of new, intrepid, exploratory venture that people love to be inquisitive about. Established in December 2013, it is opportunely riding the wave of a new government initiative to integrate the country into the digital age (local entrepreneurs have rolled out 4G LTE technologies, since last year, after obtaining exclusive licenses to deploy the innovative technology for high-speed data for mobile phones and data terminals).
Having already established itself as one of the leaders in this nascent sector, the retailer now has its sights fixed farther afield.
But it has not been an easy ride, as it may seem. First, it’s obvious that Ghana’s almost bankrupt address system would be a major challenge to home and office deliveries. Of course it is, but Biga notes that if foreign courier services, such as DHL and FedEx have been able to get around it for years in the country, then a local company, which should know the terrain even better, cannot have an excuse.
“Indeed, that’s not our biggest challenge; we do the food-vendor-under-the-mango-tree kind of directions, as well as calling prospective customers all the way till we locate and deliver, just like people do to find their way to parties and interviews,” Biga explains .
Even bigger challenges exist with people simply not knowing how to shop online. Despite easy-to-follow instructions on how to search for, fill a purchasing form, and pay for items, people still call to be walked through the process. That’s Zoobashop’s single biggest challenge; perhaps a reflection of the uncertain toddling steps that the Ghanaian society at large is taking into the relatively new virtual world.
Another daunting challenge has to do with a most critical factor; human capital. “It’s impossible to get very reliable people who understand the service we’re trying to provide,” Biga says.
“We’re not seeking to provide just any kind of service; e-commerce is global and I’m not going to say because I’m a company in Ghana, I’m offering a Ghanaian-type service,” he adds, very much aware that it is one sure challenge he’ll be confronted with as he expands farther across the West African sub region.
But Biga is resolute in his focus; “the service should be the same as you get in Brussels, Paris, London and all across to the Americas or in Asia. And that’s the nature of the problem, because the team here is being asked to offer a unique service to people; the kind of service they themselves don’t receive anywhere in the country.”
For him, Ghana’s, and indeed the rest of Africa’s ability to compete depend on a steady supply of human capital and talent, but its inadequate supply is resulting in imbalances as well as creating serious threats not only to the continent’s economy but also to social and political stability and future development.
In Ghana’s case, coupled with this inadequate training is a major attitudinal issue that is rooted in culture, “from which, if we don’t step out, we’re going to have a big problem with our efforts at economic transformation,” Biga says. He thinks there’s a general cultural and attitudinal indiscipline that tends to have an impact on the way people work.
“You find that most people pretend to work when you’re around but, behind you, they don’t do anything. Workers’ output is not commensurate to their remunerations,” Biga laments.
It has taken Zoobashop the better part of two years, through a lot of training, turning around, replacing people and more consistent training, to get its team to where it is today.
“One of my proudest achievements is to have been able to assemble this team and to put this project together,” he says elatedly, unable to hide his admiration for a workforce he describes as simply fantastic. And that’s not an empty boast; Zoobashop is ranked among the 50 Best Companies to Work for in Ghana, which rankings reflect the country’s happiest and motivated workforce, according to Goodman AMC, the management consulting firm that worked out the rankings.
Ever the person that strives to improve upon his achievements, Biga says, “We’re not out of the woods yet. Most of us here do a lot of hours, almost 15 hours a day, 6 days a week. But I’m encouraged by the joy with which most people come to work every day, who are willing to grind to provide the services that we have committed to offer our clients, what we call the ‘awesome online shopping experience’”.
Biga and his Zoobashop may have come far, real fast, but he believes it’s no fluke. He attributes his enterprising prowess partly to an almost perfectly choreographed upbringing, and partly to his own intrinsic proclivity for business.
The master choreographer, his dad – an old-school type, extremely conservative, and not in the least given to experimenting – ensured that, for his secondary education, he went to the relatively average Bishop Herman College in his hometown region, the Volta Region, rather than to any of the Ivy League equivalents in Accra and Cape Coast, even though they were relatively comfortable.
Again, for Biga’s National Service, the old man insisted he do it in his deprived village, Ave Torkor, in the Volta Region. The uptown young man, at the time, saw it more as a punishment than a training course in the reality of his origins.
He, however, notes that if his dad’s uncompromising dictates created the path, it was his good fortune to have a loving, caring and understanding mother, who always encouraged him and helped him endure the strict discipline to traverse that difficult terrain of his upbringing. He surmises he could have ended up a rebel without his mum’s support.
In hindsight, he is grateful for the moves those two choreographers helped him master in the dance of his life. Now, with his head high up in the clouds of virtual reality, working hard to satisfy his innate proclivities for big business and the upscale urban life, his feet are well grounded in the realities of what makes for a truly balanced, fulfilling life.
“I always look forward to visits with my folks in the village, where life, though seemingly tough, has a natural pace that is unrushed and more enjoyable.” Biga reveals fondly.
Yet another strong influence of his father on his present success is the old man’s unflinching attitude of not sleeping over an unsettled issue.
“Whatever he does, he makes sure it’s fair to the people concerned. He ensures he does not do anything out of the ordinary that unfortunately would lead to trouble. But it also means, more importantly, that he speaks his mind freely.
“That, in a lot of ways, is me; more in respect of the latter. When I interact with people, especially in business and I’m uncomfortable about an aspect, I express the way I feel, candidly. It may not be right, it may not be wrong, but at least you are sure of one thing, it is my candid opinion. I will say it, and once it’s done, I go to bed with a light mind,” Biga says.
But, to a greater extent, Biga’s own predisposition towards enterprise largely accounts for what he’s doing today.
“I’ve always been generally very ambitious. I remember when I left secondary school, Form Five, I had almost a one year window to be at home, prior to Sixth Form, and I was bugging everyone I knew that I was looking for a job. For me, to idle at home was not good enough though my dad thought I was being overly ambitious and that I’m better off investing my time in books and other stuff like playing the piano, but I guess a streak in me kept pushing me to get into the business world quickly. I recollect in-between forms three and four, when I’d pick up small holiday jobs here and there. I had always wanted to know about business,” Biga explains about what drives him.
As fate would have it, a combination of his parent’s guidance and his personal ambitions pushed him into his current online business – a case of preparation meeting opportunity – even if in a circuitous fashion.
His narrative is that while on one of his regular weekend visits to the Volta Regional capital, Ho, as a way of experiencing some city life away from the village where he did his national service, he met an old school friend, who then was working with a software company, and he got to spend more time with him. Very shortly, he met the friend’s boss, who turned out to be Herman Chinnery-Hesse, before his software company, SOFTtribe, became a driving force in the industry and a household name in Ghana. So Biga got introduced to him and, somehow, was given some projects to be doing on the side for the then fledgling company.
“And so even before I finished my service, I had a job,” Biga narrates how, straight from his national service, he joined SOFTtribe and worked there for a long spell of about eight and a half years, doing everything from business development to project management, during which time he went through three years of university full time while also working full time.
“I would attend lectures till to 9:30AM, skip and go to work, because work actually began at 10AM till 7PM. It was very challenging,” he recollects with subdued pride, noting that when he joined SOFTtribe, it was a very small team, which grew to a very large team of almost 100 people by the time he left.
That was where he really cut his teeth, disclosing that one of his main achievements was setting up their Nigeria operations from nothing. He also was instrumental in raising venture capital money that was used to expand the operations of the company just before he left, besides helping to design many of the award-winning software packages that are on the market today.
Subsequent to leaving SOFTtribe, Biga did pro bono work for the Ministry of Communications; a stint with Microsoft on an idea about their Microsoft Business Solutions wing and, thereafter, joined the Intel Corporation. There, he was originally recruited to join the South Africa team but then relocated to Ghana to take care of all the English speaking West African countries – excluding Nigeria – and some of the French speaking countries.
But obviously a rebel against his father’s conservative work habit – the old man spent all of his 42 year working life with Unilever – Biga left Intel and subsequently set up his own firm.
“We do largely three things,” he discloses. “First, there’s a consulting wing for IT consulting and project management. Then I set up a computer assembly plant, still running, years before even RLG started any kind of PC assembling in Ghana. Here, we do a lot of public sector work; we work with the ministries of education, science and technology, and the UNDP among others.
“But today, my focus is on my new baby; Zoobashop.com, Ghana’s premier online retail store. And when I say that I get people say, ‘but there were a few other players before you came into the market?’ Yes, there were, but not in the online retail business,”
Biga draws a distinction; “there is the market place and there is the online retail trade. The marketplace is like eBay or Tonaton.com, where basically a technology company puts up a platform that allows people to do the business but are, themselves, not directly involved in it. The retail model, however, is just like a brick-and-mortar store; we transact directly with customers and suppliers directly like your Kingsway or A-Life of old. The difference is, we are online.”
Zoobashop actually has two massive warehouses within its purpose-built “Awesome HQ” building, where they hold stock of items, take online orders, and deliver their ‘awesome service’ from.
“So we’re a full blown store, we like to make that distinction and, in respect of online retail, we’re the first in the country,” Biga emphasises.
Always quick to acknowledge the support he’s had from others in his efforts to achieve his dreams, Biga says, with an obvious air of gratitude, “I’d consider it a mortal sin to speak of the Zoobashop story and accomplishments without mentioning its angel investors – a few well-heeled persons who thought highly of the Zoobashop.com prospect, even when it was only an idea in a few heads. While I remain exceedingly grateful for their cash contribution to the quest, I also recognize immensely, their intangible contributions – their pats on the back, wise counsel and support that egged me and the entire team on, especially on occasions when the situation looked rather glum.”
The visionary believes his business model is what will be at the cutting edge of ecommerce, and indeed retail business specifically, in Ghana and the rest of the continent. Of the two online models, the market place operations and the retail operations, the latter tends to be a lot more difficult and that explains why fewer people are in that space, but Biga thinks the prospects of growth are much bigger and easier to sustain with the retail end than with the marketplace model.
He is quick to add that both are complementary and will co-exist and, together, they will take lots of business away from the traditional brick-and-mortar stores as the trend has shown in the Americas, Europe and Asia.
To Biga, 4 factors account for this: price, convenience, delivery and internet penetration. Customers will always be attracted to better prices; Africa’s growing working middle class lack the luxury of time to hop from shop to shop comparing products, especially given the generally bad transport infrastructure; home deliveries with multiple modes of payment, including cash-and-carry, which Zoobashop provides, will definitely sit well with increasing numbers of customers; and finally, the rapid growth of the telecommunications infrastructure, which has resulted in an explosion in mobile telephony and data penetration, will ultimately be an important determinant in how people choose to shop. And Zoobashop has all that factored into its ‘awesome online shopping experience’.
Zoobashop looks set to transform the retail trade in a sub region that’s determinedly moving towards modernising its economy and integrating into the larger global advanced world.
Its experience in Ghana, so far, sits snugly with the Ghanaian proverb that says a typically productive market day is always gleaned from the early dawn activities.
Symbolically, (albeit unintentional) the location of its “Awesome HQ”, speaks volumes of the future prospects of Zoobashop’s pioneering and transformative influence in a nascent sector. Facing away from the main Trade Fair Labadi road, which sports the affluent corporate structures, and towards the seedier portion of the ancient town, its presence has brought some sparkle to a rather sombre environment; even the close, which obviously was more of a path before they came in, bears Zoobashop’s name.
But more obviously, it is the strong-minded streak in Biga’s nature, coupled with the spirited attitude of his painstakingly trained team that will, in all probability, spread Zoobashop’s brand of awesome online shopping experience across the sub region. It’s a miracle just about to happen; a thundering out of the darkened woods into the clear expansive sunlit space of e-commerce.