Organization,an outfit that will help them maintain a strong hold on their businesses, will be berthed next
Thursday in Lagos. According to its Director of Communications and Learning, Mr Dele Agekameh, the coming of the
organization is set to change the dynamics of doing business in the country. In this interview, he explains how. Excerpts: Entrepreneurs’ Organization The organization is a global business network that is devoted for entrepreneurs only. It was founded in
1987 by a group of young entrepreneurs in the United States of America. EO enables entrepreneurs to
learn from one another. As a business owner, you are involved. Your vision, for instance, is to get to the
top of your business endeavour. If that is the case, you have some other people who are already at the
top, who want to remain there. Of course you know that it is very difficult to get to the top of what you are
doing. To get to the top, for instance, you have to put in extra energy; you have to go extra mile. They say it is very difficult to get to the top in business, even in personal life, it is quite difficult to get to the top but
easier to get down. It may take you 20 years to become a CEO of an organization, or to build your own
company but you find out that if you mismanage it; if you don’t put best practices in place, within two
months or even two days, you can be down if care is not taken. So, this organization enables you as an
entrepreneur to maintain a foothold, a strong hold on your businesses by teaching you the best practices;
they teach you how to sustain your business, they teach you about succession – because in case of Nigeria, you find out that many businesses die as soon as their owners die. Why? Because they don’t
have good succession plans or methods in place. Even some of them don’t go out of their way to employ
capable hands to manage their books. This is what EO is all about. It is a global business network of about
8,000 business owners spread across 121 chapters and 41 countries. The Nigerian chapter will be
inaugurated on October 4, 2012, which will make it 122 chapters in 42 countries. Vision The vision of the organization is to be the world’s most influential entrepreneurial community; which is also
the mission. They even deal with such techniques as ‘how do you mould an entrepreneur.’ As a business
owner, we help to transform the entrepreneurs who in turn transform the world. The organization educates,
it transforms, it inspires and it offers valuable resources in form of events, leadership development
programmes, online entrepreneurial forum and business owners’ education opportunities, among others.
We even organize competition, such as global student-entrepreneurial award which is the premier awards for undergraduate students. This is to show how to own businesses while attending college or university. This is to help students
develop business skills. With that, we are creating a community of entrepreneurs right from school. In
Nigeria, we call it ‘catch them young.’ Even in the world, it is entrepreneurs that are running the global
economy. The only problem we have in Nigeria is that we have only few entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are the people who create wealth and through that, people employed in the business can go
out and create their own. Imagine, you have somebody producing Coca-Cola for instance, and people
working with him go out to establish their own businesses to produce as many soft drinks as possible. By
that you are creating wealth. You are mopping up the unemployed graduates; the unemployed skilled
labour from the streets. So by that, you are increasing your country’s GDP; you are solving unemployment
problems, you are solving insecurity problems. Membership We are not targeting specific sector of the economy. What qualifies a person for membership is that you
must be an entrepreneur, you must be a founder or a co-founder of a business organization that is doing
well. Apart from that, there is a very important aspect: integrity. You must have integrity. That is why
membership of the organization is by invitation only. These two criteria are very important. Campaign We are going to have educational tours. We are going to have roadshows to sensitize people on how to
inculcate best practices into their businesses. We are going to organize a lot of fora where we will bring
people together and sensitize them on the best way to go about their businesses, and on how to get
optimum results from their businesses. It is not our business to set up these business organizations. What we will do is to provide leadership trainings from time to time in conjunction with state governments;
with local governments everywhere so that the unemployment problem we have in this country can be
lessened. We will go round, we will identify areas where we can advise government. We are going to act in
advisory capacity as well to various governments and organizations. By the time they see what we are
doing, they would know the benefits of our mission. Location of businesses It is not that businesses are just located in towns and cities, no. The fact is that you must first of all
identify your clients; your target audience; your target customers. If they are in the cities, you don’t have
business in the rural areas. But if you want to decongest the cities, make the rural areas viable, let them
have good roads and good communication network. With that, a person like me will go and live in my
village in Agenebode, Edo State. It means there wouldn’t be any need to stay in Lagos. If you go to Britain,
for instance, London is like a glorified showroom. You only have companies displaying their goods and wares in the city. Most of the goods are produced in
the rural areas outside London. That is why I said that London is a glorified showroom. The factories are
not located inside London, they are not there. So, we can achieve the same thing in Nigeria. All we need to
do is to create an enabling environment. And I believe, as time goes on, our government will wake up to
their responsibilities. You know the problem we have in Nigeria is corruption. Corruption has done an
incalculable damage to this country. If we have bad roads today, the reason for it is that somebody somewhere has embezzled the money meant for the rehabilitation or construction of that road. If PHCN is not functional today and you don’t have electricity to power your machinery, it is because
somebody has not done something right. Even when they do the right thing, the money would be diverted.
What has been pumped into the power sector in the last 10 years is enough to give us adequate light. The
megawatts of electricity we have achieved today-5,000 megawatts- that we are beating our chest about is
not up to 20 per cent of what is produced in a province in China; it is not up to 10 per cent of what they
have in South Africa that has a smaller population when compared with Nigeria. Foreign investors Each time we go outside the country, you see a lot of people swarming on us, trying to find out information
about Nigeria. Some of them have little or no information about Nigeria. We are talking about a network that
has more than 8,000 entrepreneurs all over the world, now going to 42 countries. About 122 chapters in all
the regions of the world. They all come together, they are even excited to see somebody from Lagos;
because in the 25-year history of the organization, out of the 120 chapters that were there before
September 19, 2012 when Istanbul, (Turkey) chapter came up as the 121st, the only two chapters that were in Africa were situated in Cape Town and Johannesburg. This is because when you talk about Nigeria, it was almost a write-off. That means we are starting from the
scratch, we are starting afresh, we are staking our means; we are staking our integrity; we are staking our
money because to arrive at this destination, it is quite compelling. It requires a lot of sacrifices, it requires
a lot of energy. What we are doing is for this country, we are doing it for generations yet unborn. Because when you go out
there, they come to you to ask questions. They want to do this; somebody wants to do that. So what we
are going to do in the long run is that we are going to act as a bridge between the foreign investors and the
Nigerian environment because when the investors want to come into this country-there are so many of
them-what they want to do is that they want to deal with somebody that they can trust. Now with EO coming on board, I think there would be free flow or inflow of investments in the next few
years. A lot of them are already making inquiries. The last meeting we went for in London, called EMEA. In Africa we are grouped under Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). We spent one week in London at
that conference where we tabled challenges and prospects, bringing different speakers from different
continents to talk about entrepreneurs. Those who have grown and run their businesses for over 40 years. How they are able to do it; what are the challenges they faced; how they were able to surmount the
obstacles before them. Five months later, we held another conference in Bahrain – that conference in
London was attended by about 60 or 70 delegates. The one in Bahrain called Global Leadership Conference, GLC, was attended by 300 delegates from 30
countries. Apart from the three of us from Nigeria another guy that came with a white guy from South
Africa to make only four black men among the 300 delegates – majority of whom are white men.
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