Festac! A place created & designed in 1977 to have state-of-the-art amenities that could service over 40,000 visitors from more than 50 countries for The Festival Of Arts & Culture Event showcasing black arts and other talents from around the continent. With the allocation of housing and landed properties to eventual winners who participated in ballots and Sales to higher income class earners after the festivities, Festac has become an environment filled with big and promising businesses thriving alongside its booming real estate projects.
With this Entrepreneurial environment, small, medium and large-scale businesses can create goods and services required to be met at scale, especially within the food sectors, cause again, everyone eats. Seeing this opportunity, came Mr Ugo. With a heart ready to serve, Mr Ugo saw a gap in the food service business in the area and decided it was time to give birth to Chicken Square.
Started in 2019 with a current staff of 5, Chicken Square has been providing frozen and non-frozen food items services for both personal & business use within the F Close Area of Festac. But like any business within the Nigerian space, challenges are very much alive, with theirs being Epileptic power supply. According to Mr Ugo, poor power supply has become the No. 1 enemy in keeping the business going due to increased fuel prices and high generator maintenance costs. Quoting him,
Before now, we’d normally get up to 18 hours of light, but now, we hardly see 6 hours of light a day. And because we can’t be dependent on Nepa, we used to spend about ₦17,500 on our Fuel Generator and ₦36,000 on our Deisel Generator every two days. But now that prices have jumped and Fuel is almost at the same price with that of Deisel, my brother, sometimes, i don’t even know which one to buy. Also the maintenance cost of the machines and generators is another headache.
But regardless of his woes, he remains positive-minded with expansion plans in motion. Looking to conquer new & unfamiliar territories, Chicken Square, in the last two years, has branched out with a bakery called “Bread Masters”, located two buildings away from their Festac branch and operating 24 hours a day since opening in 2021. There are also plans to expand Chicken Square operations to Ago Palace Road sometime in 2024.
