BLACK #FABS :::: Ibukun Awosika, A wish come true for Nigerians especially 'The Women'.

Mrs. Ibukun Awosika holds a B.sc in Chemistry from University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University), an MBA from IESE Business School, Barcelona, Spain and is an alumnae of the Lagos Business School Chief Executive Programme. She is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Chair Centre, Sokoa Chair Centre Limited and TCC Security Systems which are manufacturers and marketers of office furniture, office seating and Banking Security Systems in Nigeria and the West African market.

Mrs. Awosika has founded and supports many non-profit institutions. She is a board member of Women in Management and Business (WIMBIZ) and Convention on Business Integrity. She also serves as a Pastor at the Fountain of Life Church and Hosts a popular TV programme, Business His Way. She is the Chairperson and promoter of After School Graduate Development Centre (AGDC), a social enterprise set up to address Employability and Enterprise development amongst young Nigerians.

And the best part is that she has been appointed as the first female Chairman of Board at First Bank of Nigeria Limited. That is big!

Down the line she has been a big inspiration to us. Get energized with her quotes.

You don’t need to have a factory or cash to start your business but you have to be ready to learn the ins and outs of the business  “Do I have capital? No. The three and a half months were critical to my life story. Within those months, I saw the inside out of furniture making. I understood what is involved. Did I ever think I could go into furniture making before then? No. I never did. Not for a second did I think of doing that. But from the onset, I made up my mind that any customer who is interested in my product should pay 70 per cent upfront. So what do I need a start-up capital for? The customers provided the capital.”

“Did I have a factory? No. Did I have workers? I could only afford to hire carpenters, but I didn’t have to pay them for one month. They operated from their workshop. Their service was in advance but their payment was in arrears. I also had labour in advance. Did I have the machines? No. But all the machines and machinists were available. I paid per unit of what they produced for me. I didn’t need a generator because they would provide their own generator. I was paying them for what they did. For spraying, I discovered that I could rent a spray gum on a day-to-day basis.”

Your starting point is irrelevant. If you insist on doing the right things and doing it well There is nothing like “this is Nigeria” and ” things are done in certain ways”:  “That is not a sustainable theory. No, Nigerians have value and it’s not right that Nigerians are corrupt people. There may be some corrupt people in Nigeria. Nigerians have integrity and value it. There could be some people without integrity, but such people also exist in other countries of the world – It’s not peculiar to Nigeria. Who you are is who you choose to be. Tell me a Yoruba or an Igbo or a Hausa man who knows where a thief is celebrated? Where is it honourable to do what is wrong in Nigeria? We need to change the image of the country from the bad image that the corrupt minority do. Every one of us should know that we need to seek knowledge to whatever extent possible. 

Who you are is who you choose to be.   “Tell me a Yoruba or an Igbo or a Hausa man who knows where a thief is celebrated? Where is it honourable to do what is wrong in Nigeria? We need to change the image of the country from the bad image that the corrupt minority do. Every one of us should know that we need to seek knowledge to whatever extent possible.”

Take a personal decision to be excellent in whatever you do “Seek knowledge to whatever extent possible. Take a personal decision to be excellent in whatever you do. Take whatever knowledge you have learnt here seriously. Seek knowledge to whatever extent possible. Take a personal decision to be excellent in whatever you do. My commitment is to deliver international standard and topmost quality business within Nigeria with pride without saying this is Nigeria. A time would come when the guy who knows the right thing would come up and when he does, he would judge by what he sees. It doesn’t matter if you can do better, he will judge you by what you have presented to him.”

Find your niche and challenge yourself to be the best in your field “My challenge to you is that whether you produce one product or a thousand; make the best of the best from number one so that if you get to the last, it would still represent the best that you are capable of doing. When you deal with one customer, do the right thing. You don’t know the “small” customer who buys a small thing today. You might think you know him because he’s a small man – tell me who knows the future of any man? The man you deal with today may turn up in 5 or 10 years time, based on your service he could come to order 5,000 or 10,000 units of what he bought from you.”

Invest in people “Your investment in people matters. The people I dealt with many years ago- doing their babies’ chairs and beds, are still around. Even when I said I was not doing any house furniture again, people thought I was crazy. In Nigeria, everybody does everything. They think you increase your chances of making more money than limiting yourself to office furniture. But I stood my ground. Sometimes you have to take a hard decision and when you take such decision, you have to stand by it. It’s not everybody who sees what you are seeing.”

The real world is full of challenges “There are challenges everywhere.You must have tenacity; you must have strength of character not to cheat. Don’t run at the sight of the first problem. He who confronts challenges wins, you must learn every day-you must seek in order to find.”

Do not despise the days of humble beginnings    “No amount of money can keep you away from your dream if you stay focused. If you start big, your problems too would be big. The best of your business plan is full of assumptions. You’ve assumed your market; you assumed your customers, you’ve assumed taste and level of reactions. You might think they would not want to buy. It’s better to test your assumptions small. There could be hiccups, but you can adjust. If you go out big, the cost is also very great and huge. Going to get huge machines, large place and if it turns out that your assumptions are not right, what happens? You can grow a business from within the business.”

Keep going, even when they call you names  “People called me all manners of names – you this Ijebu woman. I said to them, I was doing a business that was capital intensive when I had no capital. I allowed the business to grow itself. I was going out in taxis. If the car breaks down on the way, it not my business, I simply would go down and wave bye to the driver. What I always tell people is that if you have sand and you play with it, you have sand. If you increase the sand, you still have sand. If you add more sand, you still have sand. But if you make the sand into a block, you have a block. So never you talk about your sand until you have moulded your block. Sand in this sense is your disposable income. I could buy a car every two months if I wanted to. But a car was not my priority. The business was my priority. When I decided to buy myself a car, I bought a used car. My friends were harassing me. I simply ignored them. I knew what I was doing- I kept building.”

Invest Invest Invest        “I advise you not to eat up your profit. The day you go out for money, they look at the papers. Open an account for every penny that comes through your business. Don’t think about the COT. It will cost you more if you don’t keep your money in a financial institution.”

Nigeria is your biggest market    “I never wished to be a Beninoise, Togolese or Ghanaian or South African. Tell me how many countries have a population of 150 million? That’s what they call market. It’s not only the 150 million Nigerians; you are looking at the whole of West Africa. That gives you like 280 million. These smaller countries have less than the size of Nigeria; just add them to what you have. They don’t have your production capacity either. Go out there and conquer the world.”

Mrs Awosika has mentored and helped sevaral entrepreneurs start their own venture including Tara Durotoye, Founder, House of Tara.

All the quotes were culled from Mrs. Ibukun Awosika’s address as Guest Lecturer at the Second Convocation Ceremony of the EDC, Lagos on November 20, 2009.