Mindset is more important than ever

Mohamed El Moustapha the Co-founder of Agro-Industries of North LLC, a company that produces and processes rice in Senegal had ambitious plans for the year 2020. Then the Covid-pandemic led to the economic disruptions that no one could have expected. 

“Our revenue projection for 2020 was one million dollars but with COVID-19, everything changed,” said Mohamed speaking from Dakar.

Like many entrepreneurs in Mohammed’s position, he took part in one of our series of programmes focused on supporting ambitious businesses to survive the lockdowns and restrictions that disrupted their plans. In 2020 alone, AMI supported over 3,700 businesses across Africa through our MSME focused bootcamps and business growth programmes.

“ Survive to Thrive, came at the right time because when COVID-19 hit we barely had much going on with the business. Things were so complicated. We spent a lot of time running back and fo­rth to the bank to just make sure we were still on the same page with matters of finance. Being a pa­rt of the programme helped me re-centre all my goals. I loved it from the word go, the name out rightly spoke to me: Survive to Thrive!”

Mohammed says that being part of the programme taught him how to be resilient and that business is not just about the money but the hard work that you put into growing your business.

As he went through the online learning courses he began identifying some of the pitfalls in his business one of them being procrastination. For the past 3 years, he had not been staying up to date with his business financial statements. He had them prepared by his accountant, but as the business owner, he was not up to date.

“I took the courses for business financial management, compliance and governance and I’ve now learnt the importance of keeping track and staying up to date especially with the local authorities and banks whom I may need for financial support during times like this.”

Mohamed now says that he has a folder on his laptop with all AMI business tools that he downloaded since joining the programme in May 2020.

“Every week I usually go in, open the tool I want to use and work on it. The interesting thing is that they are editable files so every time I work on something, I can save it and get back to it where I left off without losing any data or information.”