By Lawrence Enyoghasu and Jennifer Ezeokoli
Olugbenga Omojola, the Chief Executive Officer of First Excelsia, is a Fellow of the Institute of Strategic Management of Nigeria. That is not only what he prides himself and the company on, but also on the capability of the company to meet expectations. The challenges of finding square pegs for square holes for his clients has never bothered him, because, there is always a way out, he believes. He told Inspire how he started business from the corner of his room, the role his wife played at the early stage and how his business is to find the right people for other people’s businesses.
How did you come up with your company name?
I would say it was inspirational; really, we had a little brainstorming session, on what we were coming out to do, so I’d just say this before I tell you why we arrived at the name. We’re not set up like a typical business that is out there in the capitalist economy to make money, yes, we want to make some money, but we’re primarily set up to help indigenous organisations to build structures in the systems. That’s the primary notion and we believe that since these indigenous organisations are supposed to build systems they don’t come across as those that can pay for consultants, so I’d tell you that it’s almost like giving back of some sort, while we achieve our career objectives. When we were brainstorming, the name ‘Excelsia’ which means to excel came; I mean excellent. The ‘SIA’ means a ‘large place’ like we have in Asia or Australia. This implies that we intend to cover a large space beyond Nigeria, actually looking at West Africa for starters.
Where exactly did you start from?
I like that question, well I started from my library. While setting the house, we made a space for the library. When I left paid employment and commenced my PhD programme, I was doing a few consulting projects to make some money, so I started from a corner, not even the entire library because I still left my wider corner in the library, it was just my own corner that we started from. We moved to a paid workstation and then from there we came to a serviced office and from there we’ve moved to different offices across Nigeria, beyond Lagos.
Did you consider the risk of leaving paid employment?
Well, it’s linked to what I mentioned earlier about my PhD. I’m about to get my PhD. If you’ve noticed, I’m reading Harvard Business Review, Emotional intelligence, Business Secrets from the Bible, Armstrong’s Handbook of Human Resources, these are here because I use them for solutions for clients, all these are written by foreigners, if you go to the outer office, tons of books, in my home, tons of books all written by foreigners and these books and research works are all based on research work done abroad; Europe and America. Most would say they covered Africa, but they would be speaking of Kenya and South Africa, primarily South Africa, but then it’s this solution that they’ve arrived at from their so-called research that we now implement as consultants or practitioners in the industry and it’s an anomaly. It’s wrong! We Nigerians and Africans should be able to carry out our own research and then generate our own results that would be useful, not that we’d be copying others.
Did your background prepare you for who you are today?
I would say yes. I recollect sometime between my 5th birthday and my 6th, the only TV box we had in the house got spoilt because it was on overnight and our parents were furious but left us to our predicament. They said they were not getting another TV till when we think it’s time and that was three years after. By then, it was around my 8th or 9th birthday, there was no TV and what my mum did was whenever she travelled, because she travelled a lot, she came back home with loads and tons of books, so it was either you read or you sleep; you had no other thing to do, so we got into the world of reading, my brother and myself. We would be done with all the books and we were ahead of her, so I think that opened the entire world before me even before the age of 10, I noticed that the way I think wasn’t the way most of my mates think, because I had read all the Enid Blyton, as at junior secondary school I think I was done with all the pacesetters and then understanding also that it’s knowledge that drives success. The genuine success, that formed the bedrock for me because you can’t be a consultant without reading and knowing more than your clients and with parents that encourage you to become whoever and whatever you want to be.
You started your business with how much?
Apart from the cost of registration and printing call cards and the website, I don’t think I spent up to 100k and more so as the rent of the library was also taken care of because I own the building.
Your friends who were with you before you left paid employment, what do they say when they see you now?
I can tell you that a lot of my colleagues are still watching, because I had a colleague who was surprised that I would just be on my own like that. Well, maybe some of us are probably meant to take the bull by the horn. There was a time when I had to take from my savings to pay salary and I won’t earn any amount for that month, but then I knew that it was a process that we had to pass through.
When did you start employing people?
It must have been a month after I started out, but it wasn’t on a permanent basis. A counsel to entrepreneurs is this, there’s no point putting people on your payroll if you would not need them 100% of the time, even for those people, it’s not good for them, just like you employ a person and you pay him 30-50 thousand naira and you make him sit at the desk all day, when as consultants we work on projects. So, when we have a project we have people that we invite and we execute the project together, at that point they’re employees, but not full time. When time started moving on and project started meeting project then we can afford to hire one or two persons who can sit in an office so those ones irrespective of project they’re earning a salary.
So what’s the greatest lesson entrepreneurship has taught you?
It’s that you must be knowledgeable in any enterprise you’re going into, if you want to start something as little as cleaning business, you have to go get knowledge first, because the concept of sharpening the saw, Yoruba’s say it that if two people want to go to the bush to fell trees and someone stays two hours from 5am to 7am sharpening his cutlass and the other says that let him go and come back quickly, that 5am he sets out he gets to the bush with a blunt cutlass and is trying to cut, he’d spend 3 hours there while the person who spent 2 hours filing and leaves at 7am, gets to the bush at 7:30am, cuts the tree in 15 minutes and is back home by 8:30, the fellow with the blunt cutlass would be there till 12noon sweating in the sun. The lesson is to get the required knowledge first, you have to know better than your customers, your clients, and it requires investments, so you have to take lessons, go to school, get certifications, all relevant.