Mrs. Ibukun Awosika is a multiple award winning entrepreneur and the
founder and CEO of the Chair Centre Group. She is the first female and
youngest chairman of First bank Nigeria. She also chairs the House of
Tara board and serves on several boards including Cadbury Nigeria and
The Nigerian Sovereign Investment Authority.
The first time I met Mrs. Awosika was at a board meeting. I was 27
years old and I had just been nominated to serve on the Board of House
of Tara. Although I was confident about the skills I brought to the
table, I had zero board experience at the time and was intimidated by
the combined experience of the people in that boardroom, especially Mrs.
Awosika. In fact I was convinced they were all thinking ‘who is this small rat?’
LOL. So when we were asked to introduce ourselves and say a few words
about our vision for the company and what we hoped to achieve, I ended
my little speech by saying, I know I’m the youngest but I’m looking
forward to learning from the wealth of experience in this room. Mrs.
Awosika turned to me and said something that has stuck with me she told
me that I needed to leave my age at the door and own my position, to
stop underestimating myself because I’ve earned my place at the table
and would bring a perspective that others could learn from. Working with
her on the board of House of Tara has been an amazing experience. Every
board meeting with her feels like an extended MBA because she’s a
fountain of knowledge and I’m in awe of the way her mind works. It’s no
wonder she has added value to so many companies.
Here are some life and money lessons she had to share
There is a lot of excitement around your nomination as
Chairperson of First bank Nigeria. It is one of the oldest banks and has never
had a female chairperson and certainly no one as young as you. How did you
react to the news?
I was in England at the time, it was my son’s 21st
birthday and we were having a party in our country home in Canterbury. We were
setting up and I was walking from the marquee to the main house when I got the
call. It was a surprise but I was very calm. I walked back to the Marquee to
tell my husband and sons the good news. They were so ‘tripped’ but I immediately walked back to the house,
went to the dining area and lay on the ground and started praying because I had
to give it to God. It was exciting news but it was important to me not to get
carried away.
It’s evident that a support system is important to you.
You have managed to build a successful business, sit on several boards while
being a wife and mother to 3 boys. What advice do you have for young women who
are inspired by your career but are finding it difficult to balance it all?
My husband is my gift. He is my support
system and takes absolute pride in everything I do. So the life partner you
choose is extremely important. I think these days’ young women get carried away
by how handsome or rich a man is and money shouldn’t be a measurement when
choosing a husband. I think that before picking a husband, you have to
know yourself first. Women need to realize that they come first and should
spend more time nurturing their vision and ambitions. Every life has an
assignment and you are accountable to God to carry out that assignment and when
choosing a life partner you want look for someone that has been assigned to
help you fulfil your purpose.
Many people have great business ideas and are often great
when it comes to marketing and sales but they often run away from
understanding the financials of the business because they do not like
numbers. What advice do you have for entrepreneurs with a non-finance
background?
As you go along in business, it would be foolish if you don’t have an
understanding of the numbers that underpin your business. You don’t
have to become an accountant you can hire someone to put the numbers
together for you. However, your accountant keeps your books and stores
the information but YOU have to know how to interpret those figures
because numbers speak and you cant make any concrete decisions without
knowing what the numbers are saying. Entrepreneurs need to learn not to be scared of what they don’t know.
Just by virtue of how our university degrees are designed, you can be
skilled in one area but there’s still so much you don’t know. So it’s
important to keep an open mind to receive knowledge. When I was going
to Lagos Business School for the CEO’s program they offered ‘Accounting
for non-accountants’ but you had to come a few weeks ahead to take the
course because it was optional but because I knew it was something that
would help me in my business, I took the time out.You don’t have to get an MBA, you can get your friend who is an
accountant to help you, take one or two day training courses at LBS, get
an audit trainee to explain it to you or use university of Google to
find pricing models or valuation models. Don’t be afraid of what you
don’t know just ask. Its ok not to know just make it your business to
learn what you don’t know.
Women are often accused of having kitchen table ideas and not
dreaming big enough and in order for them to build businesses that have
any significant impact they have to build scalable businesses. However
in this environment scaling a business is difficult. What would you say
are the most important factors that contribute to scaling a business?
I believe in starting small and testing your idea using a focus group
that is made up of your target audience because there is a difference
between what you think the market wants and what the market really
needs. For example, we saw a gap in the market for affordable furniture
for middle class people. So we created a focus group made up of my 24
year old son and his friends who had just moved back to Nigeria, had
just started working and couldn’t possibly afford furniture in the
millions of naira. You may not really get all the answers from the focus
group, so you have to keep checking that information, establish trends
and keep challenging your processes.
"Any business is scalable but proof of concept is
required. You must evaluate the market potential for the business you
are going into. If there is market potential then you have scalability."
To be scalable you also have to have the patience to move in stages.
For example, Sweet Kiwi the yoghurt place has two branches but the first
store would have given her learnings that she would use for the second
store. You could also consider having two business models within the
same business. Hans and Rene has one location that sells out on the
weekend but also have carts that are moveable so you have a new income
stream being mobile on the days that are slow.
You are a founding member of WIMBIZ
(Women in Business Management and Public service) and a past
chairperson of the organizations Board of Trustees. One of the major
goals for WIMBIZ is to get more women on boards and in leadership
positions. What advice do you have for young female entrepreneurs on how
to position themselves for board nominations? When they do get
nominated what skills do they need to acquire to stay relevant and make
an impact?
There’s no real way to position yourself for board nominations. You
just have to focus on being competent at what you do, your value system
is major and to be quite honest your character will be placed above your
competence. It is people that recommend other people for board
positions, so just focus on working hard and doing your very best
because you never know who is watching and people are always watching.
Focus on mastering your skills, becoming a master in that area and
leaving a positive mark wherever you work. Also you have to focus on
building your profile and invest in programs that develop you because
the first thing they ask for when you are being nominated for a board
seat is your cv. When I was going back to school to get my MBA all my friends thought I
was crazy because the money I spent was what people used to buy houses
about 130,000 euros in 18 months. With regards to skills in the boardroom, it’s really about learning
to listen and relate with people because you must all work together.
In order for a business to build
capacity it needs to be able to develop a team. However, hiring in
Nigeria is probably one of the top 3 problems sited by entrepreneurs.
How have you been able to navigate that and what advice do you have for
entrepreneurs on the issue of hiring?
Hiring can be really challenging because the quality of graduates
that our universities churn out these days can be sub optimal. Which is
why we set up AGDC (Afterschool Graduate Centre) a facility that helps
to address youth employability and enterprise issues in Nigeria.
However, you have to learn to develop people because you didn’t learn
everything in one day, so you have to invest in building people, give
them time and opportunity to learn. I have had some serious challenges with hiring in the past in fact I
have even fired an entire factory before. We had given our word to a
client that their office furniture would be ready by the weekend for an
event they were having then we discovered that there was a Muslim
holiday, so there wouldn’t be enough time to complete the work unless we
worked through the weekend. It is extremely important for me to keep my
word to my customers and not give excuses, so I went to the factory to
plead with my workers and offered to pay them extra if we could work
through the weekend to complete the job. They planned amongst
themselves that they all weren’t going to show up because they figured
she can’t possibly fire the whole factory. So I did! I fired them all
and spent the next couple of days getting carpenters from wherever I
could to get the work done. So when they came to work on Monday I had
termination letters waiting for each of them. They got upset and locked
me in the factory. At the time I was in my 20s and pregnant with my
first child but I stood my ground. We eventually rehired some of them
but they had to reapply for their positions.
"In order to develop your staff effectively you also have
to be able to measure performance. Set KPIs (Key performance indicators)
and review their performance based on the set KPIs every month, so when
they are not performing and you fire them they know why."
There will always be challenges but you can’t give up on developing
and training your staff. Nigerians are more trainable than you know. For
example, when we were setting up the SOKOA chair center business in
2005 which is owned by myself, the SOKOA SA of France, Gtbank and some
local investors we had to send 5 of our staff to France for training.
The French guys who were training said it would take at least 3 months
to cover the basic curriculum and about 9 months to learn the full
curriculum. It took our guys 6-7 weeks to learn the entire 9-month
curriculum. We need to create jobs in this country and the only way to do that is
to create businesses. My major drive is to empower people how will
create a million new businesses that can scale and create at least 2
million new jobs.
What has been your biggest failure and how did you overcome it?
I don’t like to use the word failure. Failure is an attitude and it
doesn’t exist in my world because failure shuts you down and makes you
think you should give up and I don’t believe in giving up. I prefer to
use the word challenges because challenges say I am at war and I’m not
going to give up plus it doesn’t give room for any situation to
crystalize. In fact every time my business has experienced major growth
it has been on the back of trouble because when you are facing
challenges it forces you to be creative.
For example, in 1994 when we only made Furniture, Tayo Aderiokun, the
former MD of Gtbank told me they needed security doors for the bank and
asked me to make enquiries on their behalf. I went to Italy to get the
information they required but the Italian manufacturers said they did
not have a policy of selling directly to end users. Then it hit me that I
should do it! So I bought the rights to distribute in West Africa.
This was in 94 when the power situation was even more abysmal than it
is now so many people told me I was making a mistake because the
intermittent power supply would not allow the security doors to work the
way they do abroad and at first they were right because the doors
became problematic. I remember a period when I would wake up to pray
every morning and say “God please let the doors in Aba be working
today’. Although we were the first to bring the security doors to
Nigeria, more people entered the market and were supplying the security
doors. I realized that the people who would stay in business would be
those who could keep those doors working, so I decided to invest in
flying a maintenance crew of engineers from Italy. Eventually a lot of
the other companies went out of business because they were not able to
deal with maintenance. It was hard but we persevered and people even
started saying’ if its not the chair center one, I don’t want it’.
Years later, even the factory in Italy was going out of business and
Chair center bought the rights and the factory in Italy and started
manufacturing in Italy (with a Nigerian Flag) not just for the Nigerian
market but began producing for other countries as well.
"There is no one that is at the top legally and has any
substance that can say they haven’t faced any challenges. The challenges
of your life are your business and the things that help build your
character. You will face challenges but don’t let them overcome you."
What tips do you have for young entrepreneurs to achieve financial success?
You have to be able to prioritize investing in yourself and your
business. When you are starting out you can afford to delay some
purchases, bags, cars etc. The first few years of my business my
friends would call me ‘Ijebu’ because I refused to buy a car
for a long time, I would take taxis everywhere. This was because I knew I
had to put my business first. I had committed to a capital-intensive
business so a new machine was more important to me at that point than a
new car.
"Also, its important to identify your knowledge gaps, what
you know and what you don’t know. Then invest in programs that help you
close those gaps. Instead of one designer bag, invest in a designer
program."
Even if everybody else deceives you don’t deceive yourself because
the knowledge you have s your power and nobody can take it away from
you.
Surround yourself with people who are also on a quest. I see myself
as someone who is made up of Assets and liabilities. My Assets are my
strengths and my liabilities are my weaknesses. So I generally don’t do
things I can’t do well. I’ll find people who have more skill in that
area so I can focus on the things that I am good at and can do well. I
find people who have assets in my liabilities that can contribute to my
success. Everybody in your life has a value they bring. You can never
pay anyone enough for them to give you what you want; they can only give
you what they want to give. The way you manage those relationships is
important because the things they do I cannot do for myself.
This woman is just awesome…this is what it looks like when you are
living for a purpose that is bigger than you…from all the boards she
serves on, to her missionary work, the ignite program and her passion
for entrepreneurship, it’s clear that she lives to drive impact!
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Today's article taken from Smart Money Africa and was written by Arese Ugwu, WIMBIZ Associate and founder of a personal finance blog
(www.smartmoneyafrica.org). A platform that provides high quality
content and action tools tailored to Africans. Her main objective is to
help change the African narrative of poverty by educating her generation
and the next via financial literacy content that breaks down the very
complex issue of money. Arese’s articles have also been published in
several media outlets and she often speaks about financial literacy and
entrepreneurship at various conferences, workshops, universities and
radio.
Instagram: @smartmoneyarese
Twitter: @smartmoneyarese
Website: www.smartmoneyafrica.org
Christine
Lagarde shared her thoughts on the world’s glacial progress towards gender
parity in a Davos session on disrupting
the status quo of gender roles. 
