Firm Targets Innovation, Collaboration To Boost Small Scale Entrepreneurs

The Adrenalina, a new co-working space in Lagos, is set to take-off with focus on facilitating innovation, collaboration and training for entrepreneurs, creatives and freelancers.

The Adrenalina provides working spaces and collaborative opportunities for entrepreneurs, creatives, and freelancers on a subscription basis, amongst other services.

According to the head of Business Excellence,  Tejumade Salami, The Adrenalina delivers enterprise-centric services to emerging businesses in Africa.

These, he said, include both physical and virtual spaces as office and hosting venue, infrastructure support, trainings, business intelligence and business support services.

“The idea is to enable creatives, entrepreneurs and freelancers to have more enhancing environments to work, innovate and collaborate. Beyond the services we provide, we are looking to build an ecosystem by integrating a lot of value-driving initiatives to enhance the growth and success of our subscribers,” he pointed out.

Salami added that the company will host events such as book readings and seminars, and publish a periodic newsletter and podcast to educate and entertain.

With a growing youthful population and increased connectivity to the global community via digitalisation, Africa continues to experience the emergence and growth of Small and Medium Scale Enterprises (SMEs).

In Nigeria, service-based industries like technology, media and consulting agencies continue to experience rapid growth. Co-working communities like The Adrenalina provide the vital support and infrastructure needed for these emerging enterprises.

“We believe that Africa is rising and we want to be a significant part of this transformation by creating a community where people can work, think and collaborate for success,” said CEO, Chukwuerika Achum.

According to Achum, the government’s role as the principal employer of labour is reducing and the highly innovative start-ups of today will play a significant role in Africa’s future.

“We want to encourage this shift by supporting small and micro businesses in Africa through access to vital facilities, collaborations and trainings. In the future, we hope to help businesses get structured and connected to funding,” Achum added.

The Adrenalina is set to open for business in March 2023.To him, pain points ranges from issues of reliability of channels to specific issues of trust, explaining that some people however still won’t use their cards for online payments because of the fear of fraud, etc, while some are concerned about the cost of using payment channels.

This, he said, could be partly responsible for the low rate of adoption despite all the awareness, products, services, government policies and investment in this sector. According to him, in spite of the number of service providers in the financial technology and digital payments space, more than 85 per cent of transactions are still done via cash.

“All these concerns and many others are what we have termed as pain points and RoutePay is all out to fix them in very innovative ways. We are deploying an intelligent customer experience survey system to capture feedback from users from time to time so as to constantly adjust our services, processes and products to meet the users’ expectations.

“We are making digital payment products and services available to all and sundry regardless of their exposure, technology awareness, location, age, affluence, and education. RoutePay products and services are omnichannel – available across all channels of payments including Web, Mobile, POS, ATM and USSD, etc. It also has an array of products and services targeting different market segments, demography, inclinations, and leanings,” he explained.

He said Routepay will provide access to all its products and services bearing in mind various factors including differences in literacy level, geographical locations, age and the financial capacity of its users among others.