Source: The Peswa
From law and entrepreneurship to hospitality and social impact, Femi Asante is building businesses that challenge expectations while creating opportunities to make a difference.
What does it take to build businesses that endure, challenge conventional thinking and create an impact beyond profit? For Femi Asante, lawyer, entrepreneur, philanthropist and founder and CEO of Groupe Sebastien, the answer lies in resilience, discipline, purpose and the courage to pursue a vision even when others doubt it.
Behind brands such as Red Chilli, Sandbox Beach Club and Makosa is a businesswoman whose entrepreneurial journey has involved much more than opening successful hospitality establishments. It is a story of starting small, learning through setbacks, building teams, establishing systems and remaining committed to a broader vision for African businesses.
In a candid conversation, Asante reflected on her journey, the lessons that have shaped her approach to business, the influence of family and faith, and her ambition to build an African hospitality brand capable of competing on the global stage.
From selling fabrics to building a business group
Asante’s entrepreneurial instincts emerged long before the establishment of her best-known brands. While working in banking, she sold fabrics and hair extensions to supplement her salary. Although she had always imagined becoming a lawyer, she also had a strong interest in business and creating things of her own.
Her first structured hospitality venture, Red Chilli, grew out of a personal appreciation for good food and the memories of meals shared in her grandmother’s kitchen. She saw an opportunity to provide convenient, quality local food through takeaway, delivery and catering services.
Her grandmother supported the early venture, providing kitchen equipment, a freezer and assistance with taking orders. Asante became the business’s first cook, procurement officer and finance person, handling several responsibilities herself.
The early experience gave her a practical understanding of what it takes to build a business from the ground up. It also established a pattern that would define her career: beginning with the resources available, identifying a need and finding a way to meet it.
Today, her work spans hospitality and other ventures, including children’s meals through Yummy Meals. The journey has not been without setbacks. One of her restaurant ventures, Madame Butterfly, struggled to survive the disruptions of the COVID-19 period, including difficulties with delivery and imported ingredients. Eventually, she made the difficult decision to close it rather than continue accumulating losses.
For Asante, knowing when to stop is also part of entrepreneurship. Persistence matters, but so does the ability to recognise when a business model is no longer sustainable.
Building an African hospitality brand for the world
Asante’s ambitions extend beyond operating individual restaurants and hospitality spaces. Her broader vision is to build a hospitality brand created by Africans for the world.
“I want to build a hospitality brand by Africans for the world,” she explained during the conversation.
Her goal is to create experiences that can stand alongside the quality of restaurants and hospitality establishments people encounter when travelling internationally. Through ventures such as Red Chilli, Sandbox Beach Club and Makosa, she wants to demonstrate that African businesses can deliver excellent food, service, music and atmosphere while presenting African identity with confidence.
When Sandbox was launched, she recalled, some people doubted whether it would succeed. Rather than allowing the scepticism to determine her direction, she concentrated on creating a product and experience that customers would find difficult to ignore.
Her approach was straightforward: prioritise good service, quality food, good music and an overall experience that gives people a reason to return.
The philosophy reflects a larger challenge for African entrepreneurs. Building globally competitive brands requires more than ambition or a compelling concept. It demands consistent execution, high standards and the determination to improve continuously.
Asante believes Africans must give themselves greater credit and be willing to aim higher in the businesses they build.
The business lesson: You cannot do everything yourself
One of the most important lessons Asante has learnt is that entrepreneurial growth requires a shift from doing everything personally to building teams and systems that can support expansion.
In the early days of Red Chilli, she managed almost every aspect of the operation. As the business grew, however, she recognised the need to bring in people with specialised skills, including finance and marketing professionals.
Her approach is to hire people who can do what she cannot do as effectively herself, then bring their contributions together around a shared vision.
She now oversees a workforce of more than 300 people across her different business units, according to the interview.
For Asante, effective delegation is not simply about reducing a founder’s workload. It is about creating an organisation in which responsibilities are clear, employees have the expertise to perform their roles and the business can function without every decision depending on its founder.
Structure and systems allow her to concentrate on business development, strategic oversight and the wider direction of her ventures.
Her experience offers a practical lesson for growing entrepreneurs: a business cannot scale sustainably if its founder remains the only person capable of making things happen.
Mindset, problem-solving and the importance of people
Asante identifies mindset as one of the major factors influencing entrepreneurship in Ghana. She believes business owners can become so focused on obstacles that they overlook opportunities to find solutions.
Her response to problems is to acknowledge the difficulty, allow herself a moment to process it and then ask what can be done next.
Rather than treating every setback as a reason to stop, she approaches challenges as issues that require practical solutions.
This philosophy also shapes how she thinks about customer service. In hospitality, she considers frontline employees among the most important people in the organisation because they directly influence how customers experience a brand.
From security personnel to waiters, waitresses and other customer-facing staff, employees represent the business to the public. Their interactions can determine whether customers feel welcomed, respected and motivated to return.
Asante therefore values their input in decision-making, recognising that employees who work directly with customers often have insights that management may not see from a distance.
Her perspective reinforces an important principle of business leadership: strong brands are built not only through marketing and attractive spaces, but also through the people responsible for delivering the experience every day.
Financing growth through discipline and patience
Access to finance remains a major concern for entrepreneurs, and Asante’s experience illustrates the importance of starting within one’s means while building a credible financial record.
Beginning Red Chilli from her grandmother’s kitchen helped keep early operating costs low. She did not initially have to pay commercial rent, allowing the business to establish itself before moving into a dedicated space.
She also continued working and building her financial portfolio, eventually putting herself in a better position to approach banks for financing.
Asante emphasised the importance of maintaining audited accounts and demonstrating financial discipline. Lenders need to understand whether a business is viable, how it manages its money and whether its owner treats the enterprise as a structured operation.
Her experience suggests that entrepreneurs should not focus exclusively on finding investors or securing loans. They must also build businesses whose records, processes and financial practices can withstand scrutiny.
Starting small does not mean thinking small. It can be a strategy for developing the foundations needed for larger opportunities.
When profit must serve a purpose
Beyond entrepreneurship, Asante has devoted considerable attention to public-interest law and social impact.
Her interest in law was driven partly by a desire to advocate for people who are marginalised or unable to navigate the justice system effectively. Inspired by the work of the Innocence Project in the United States, she pursued public-interest and criminal-defence work rather than following a conventional corporate-law path.
Through the Fair Justice Initiative, she has supported prison advocacy and legal representation, alongside work addressing inmates’ healthcare and mental-health needs and supporting their children’s education.
She described the fulfilment she derives from helping people who might otherwise struggle to access support, including children whose parents are incarcerated.
For Asante, this work is connected to a wider philosophy about entrepreneurship and responsibility.
“I don’t believe in making a profit without a purpose,” she said.
That principle also influences the businesses she chooses to pursue. She is most interested in ventures to which she feels a personal connection, whether through hospitality, food or social impact.
Her approach challenges the idea that commercial success and social contribution must be separate pursuits. Businesses can generate revenue while also creating employment, developing people and helping fund initiatives that address social needs.
Family, faith and the strength to keep going
Asante’s story also includes deeply personal challenges. During the interview, she spoke openly about her experience of miscarriage, ten unsuccessful IVF attempts and five unsuccessful surrogacy attempts before the birth of her daughter through surrogacy.
She also recounted how her husband suffered a stroke while she was travelling, abruptly changing her family’s circumstances and responsibilities.
She credits her faith with helping her navigate these difficult seasons, explaining that what others may interpret as personal strength is, for her, an experience of being carried through hardship by God.
She also spoke warmly about her grandmother, who provided emotional support, spiritual guidance and practical encouragement. Her grandmother’s influence extended beyond the kitchen where Red Chilli began: it shaped Asante’s understanding of compassion, generosity and service to others.
She later took over her grandmother’s school to preserve its four-decade legacy, reflecting the importance she places on honouring the people and institutions that shaped her life.
These experiences have informed her perspective on resilience. The journey behind a successful business or public achievement is rarely as effortless as it appears from the outside.
Asante believes entrepreneurs have a responsibility to tell more of the story behind their success: the long hours, unexpected problems, financial pressures and difficult decisions that rarely feature in polished photographs or public celebrations.
Looking beyond the finished product
Asante’s entrepreneurial journey is a reminder that success must be understood in context. What may appear to be an established business group today began with small-scale trading, a home kitchen, family support and a willingness to take on multiple responsibilities.
Her story also demonstrates that building a business involves learning when to expand, when to delegate, when to change direction and when to close a venture that is no longer viable.
For aspiring entrepreneurs, the lesson is not simply to dream big. It is to develop the discipline, systems, financial practices and teams required to turn those dreams into sustainable enterprises.
Asante’s ambition to build an African hospitality brand for the world speaks to a wider opportunity for African businesses: to create experiences and products that compete internationally without losing their connection to the people, culture and ideas from which they emerged.
For her, the work is not finished. It is a continuing process of building, improving and creating meaningful impact.
And perhaps that is the most important lesson from her journey: lasting success is not just about what an entrepreneur builds, but also about the people, purpose and principles that sustain it.
