Managing Director of Slot systems, Mr Nnamdi Ezeigbo said that most young graduates are unemployable in the digital age because of dearth in work ethics and value creation.
He speaks on this and other things.
How did the Franchise came to be?
I think that we created something that is adaptable, something that has to do with culture and the people. You dont design an experience but it is necessary to look at the people and past experience. One thing that is working for us is the fact that we give piece of mind and trust. In fact, as I speak with you, our franchise is very competitive, in the sense that we have 10 to 15 people applying every year but we pick two or three. We allow them to make money, we are transparent and that is why we have people applying for our franchise. It is tailored towards helping Nigerians to make money.
You have an academy for engineering student, what propelled this?
I think the pressure of running a fast growing company, if you are the MD of a company that has just 10 personnel or 10 members of staff, when that company becomes a bigger company where you have 100 member of staffs, I expect the MD/ CEO to improve, to develop in strength. Pressure of the work, ones business and pressure of trying to be unconventional, trying to be creative, more innovative, taking advantage of the Environment, the People, culture, doing something that is creating value, you have to develop yourself to the Point where you can actually affect life. If everybody is on the same page, obviously you wont be able to create value, so I needed to upgrade and develop myself, I needed to do something different. One thing I did was to go to Lagos Business School, because by my training I am an engineer, so I needed that business training. You cant function well as a Medical Doctor if you didnt attend a medical school; and I believe that you cant function well as an Accountant if you didnt attend a school where you were taught the Principles of Accounting. I got my MBA at the Lagos Business School, with all these training, I felt I cant keep it to myself; just like a Pastor who is anointed, he needs to solve problems with his anointing, and he does not get boxed up with his anointing. I felt there is so much to give to my society, I want my society to actually some of these things that I know. One of the things I have been doing is to speak at seminars where we have young entrepreneurs, I speak at Churches where you have business owners or people who want to know little secrets about entrepreneurship, which is one of the things that have actually prepared me. I dont think I am doing anything different from what I am expected to do. If you have something that you think people around you need to know, in order to make their lives better, you would definitely want to do it.
How did the slot brand evolve?
Slots brand is not just to create value for myself but create jobs and wealth in the economy. Aside the fact that we have over 700 people working with us, looking at this figure in a typical setting, every figure represents three households. And the aggregate figure of that 2,100, we are impacting 2, 100 Nigerians. We also helped to bring Tecno to Nigeria because Nigerians were carrying more than two phones and I felt that it wasnt necessary and that it would be nice to solve that problem. Now, Tecno is a big brand. And this brand has also affected over 3,000 lives through employment. Some of the staffs who worked with us or may be resigned and joined other companies have also helped to create values. In the area of job creation, I think we have so well, considering the fact that there are few companies that are able to employ people in Nigeria. Entrepreneurs are expected to create wealth and jobs for the society. We have done pretty well in that regard.
What propelled Slot?
I think the pressure of running a fast growing company should tally with an improvement with the business owner. It was pressure of work and the need to be unconventional, trying to be imaginative and innovative as well as leverage on the culture and people through adding value. If you cannot just create value if you do the regular thing. One of the first thing that I did was to attend the Lagos Business School because I am a trained engineer and I needed that business knowledge. You cannot be a medical doctor, if you didnt attend a medical school.
How have you been able to impact the society through CSR?
For our Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), we have a number of students in different orphanages being sponsored by Slot. We also have scholarships programme for undergraduate. I think that there is much more for us to do. We will continue to do our best. We also help to train people through our Engineering academy, where we train the youth on mobile phone and computer engineering. We teach them to acquire competence through real practical training. We have partnership with the Lagos state government to train its teachers on yearly basis. We are ready to spend more time to do this. The training comes with certificates. It is a six month course and we are giving back to the society. Some of these youths would become independent engineers, while 30 to 40 per cent would be absolved by Slot.
Broadband
Broadband has to do with my business in the content of internet access. For me, Broadband is more of a narrow band. I hope we would actually enjoy unhindered broadband in 2018. As far as we are concerned, it is more like trying to get smart phones, trying to position ourselves properly for proper launch and I think we are going to enjoy internet in this country when the network carriers truly gives us 4G network. Currently, we are not enjoying fast internet because of the slow speed. We cant talk about broadband when the speed is not really good enough. It is more about what speed is the signal, at what speed is your video downloading, at what speed are your features or at what speed are you having access to the internet? Broadband, for us we may not really do much, because we are just in the business selling devices, rather we make sure that we have those 4G phones that are good enough to provide that kind of service. If we look at the internet competition in Nigeria, about 70 percent of that is actually coming from smart phones, which means the telecoms industry can actually provide internet or access to the internet through the use of smart phone. I think, it is good news for us that broadband is going to be very active and affordable by 2018, looking at the policy our past President initiated. I believe that by 2018 we would enjoy broadband in Nigeria.
Challenges
If you plot a graph of risk against reward, Nigeria is attractive, because risk element is about 80 percent and the world is about. If you look at Ghana for instance, risk element is 60 percent and the world is 30 percent, in Cameroon risk element is 20 percent and the world is 10 percent, so where would you rather do business. I think Nigeria is a better place to do business because most of the sectors are unstructured, even though they are volunteered, you can actually take advantage of this unstructured environment to make money. For instance you need to get a generator set, you need to spend money to buy diesel in order to run a retail store. It would cost you more and at the end of the day you would still need to make profit because you are going to add up on the cost. Our challenges are not necessary operating cost and setup cost, our challenges are more of getting the right people, middle managers, to get middle managers in Nigeria, getting people who are employable. What we do is get these people, spend time and money to train them. The strategy of medium managers, maybe it has to do with our devotional system which is also traditional where nobody is taught anything that has to do with entrepreneurship, because basically we study Chemistry, Physics, Accounting, Biology, nobody is talking about entrepreneurship, because the middleman is expected to know about entrepreneurship not just managers, Accountants, and all that are expected to know about entrepreneurship. That is our challenge; getting the right people. That has cost us so much money. We don’t believe in hiring experienced people or professionals. We believe in employing smart people, smart minds, train them and make them employable.
It is not necessary quality, I think it is the style, as I said from our traditional education system, people just go to school to study Accounting, nobody talks about entrepreneurship, you studied mathematics and nobody taught you how to actually behave in a working environment, you just graduate with a knowledge of accounting or mathematics and you end up not having any idea about work ethics, how to help the company create value and all that; we still need to get those people to go through a management training to actually make them employable. You see fresh graduates who come into the system and is just blank, I think the Educational System is just not usually the quality but the style, or maybe the government should introduce entrepreneurship in our educational system where whatever you study in school, you must study entrepreneurship; just like you must pass English Language for you to get admission into the University, they can as well make entrepreneurship a compulsory course. By so doing young graduate would be employable.
•Culled from Our Nigerian Story