QUESTIONS & ANSWERS WITH FEMI AWOYEMI, CEO, PROSHARE NIGERIA

Welcome to our interview with Mr. Olufemi Awoyemi, FCA

PROFILE:

• Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Proshare Nigeria Limited
• Chairman of the Board, Value Fronteira Limited
• Bsc (Accounting), Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago Iwoye
• Fellow, Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria (ICAN)
• Fellow, Investment Advisers and Portfolio Managers
• Associate, Institute of Chartered Taxation of Nigeria (CITN)
• Associate, Institute of Management Consultants
• Associate, Nigerian Institute of Management
• Associate, Institute of Directors
• Former Member, Membership, Publicity & Publication Committees of the NBCC
• Former Chairman, Strategy Committee , West African Bankers Association
• Former Independent Board Member, Northwards Housing, Manchester City Council ALMO, UK
• Former Member, Editorial board, Banking Journal of the CIBN
• Former Member, Editorial Board, Financial Standard Newspaper
• Former Member, Editorial Board, LBS Alumni Magazine
• Founding Editorial Board Chairman,  Brandfaces
• Former Advisor/Consultant to the House of Rep Committee on Capital Markets and Other Institutions
• Regular economic & financial markets analyst on TV

Thank you for accepting our interview request, Femi.

1. You graduated from the university in 1988 and by 2006, you had worked in different companies, rising to become Ag. Commercial Director at a top conglomerate. As a speaker at the JarusHub Career Conference that held in September 2013, you mentioned being burned out already – having achieved virtually every goal you set in your career – as early as in your early thirties. Could you shed more light on this?

The reality of the times then was such that I had placed upon myself an incredible burden to fight my way out of the sealed fate that dawned on me very early in life; as seen manifest by broken dreams and realities that littered my community. I was lucky to have visionary parents who recognized this and took steps to help me and my siblings out by investing in a well rounded education backed by vocational engagements. I indeed started formal work at age 14 with a vacation job during summer breaks, when I was not actively involved in sports or helping out with accounting and audit work my father always brought home to complete. I was always working and that does not include domestic work which was a lot.

I got into university early, and all through my NYSC days till my first employment at Coopers&Lybrand, hard work was just it for me but the more I delved into finance, I wanted to know more about the functions that delivered the figures – marketing, operations, human resources, administration, legal, strategy, budgeting, reputation management and ICT. I took every opportunity to work in different teams, committees, task force and any opportunity to gain an insight into the body of knowledge that delivered the outcomes, we as finance managers had to draw meaning out of and it gave me a helicopter view of how to turn the tables around i.e. rather than report on outcomes, we could develop models that delivered the outcomes we wanted and so I dabbled into research a lot which meant I had to go outside the system to learn new skills and acquire requisite knowledge. Increasingly I began to see how I could become more than just another member of the family that went to school, got a job and continued the cycle of the normal. I wanted more and I simply threw myself into the work which opened up new opportunities for career advancements (and a few missteps) along the way. By my mid-thirties, I knew I was burnt out and needed a break – today, it turned out well but I believe there was a better way I could have approached matters. I was just driven by the memory of a street I never wanted to live in again.

2. You started an internet company, Proshare Nigeria Limited, Nigeria’s premier niche financial information and market intelligence portal, in 2006. Internet culture was not popular in Nigeria then and that must have been some risk. What drove this?

Way back in the late 1990s, I was privileged to read books by Tom Peters, Alvin Toffler, Peter Senge and a host of other leading management gurus and futurists and for some strange reason, I bought into the idea of a more interconnected society. My love affair with the Excel software at an earlier stage also showed me what could be done with data and my work experience at Phillips Consulting had made it clearer that ‘providing solutions’ was at the core of entrepreneurship. I was also lucky to have been mentored by Segun Aina, my former CEO at Fountain Trust Bank who encouraged me to deploy strategic thinking to problem solving using IT; including exposure to the media where I honed my skills in writing by penning a weekly column for five years for Financial Standard newspapers. The combination of all these meant that the risk quotient was easily discounted by my desire to create a space and chart a course where the opportunity to set the pace could be achieved. By the way, I come from a humble background where stepping into the future was a far lesser risk than staying in the present comfort zone….how worse could it get?

Before 2006 however, myself and Ayo Arowolo had set up a business called Moneywise which pioneered personal finance education and news reporting in print. This was a huge experiment that pulled its weight, enduring many obstacles to survive a harsh printing business model that placed undue pressure on executive management. By 2005, I had started experimenting with an online version to save cost and sustain the growing subscriber base we had built up but it was difficult selling the idea. A lot happened in between and by 2006, with barely enough to pay my internet bill, I launched Proshare from the UK where I could access better technology and received guidance, counseling and knowledge support from a few friends notably my wife, Tokie Cardoso, Jide Iyaniwura and Christian Udechukwu who dimensioned the need for such a critical bridge. I ran with it on a low cost budget focusing on the value proposition and still do. We continually adapt and have launched about seven upgrades of the proshare site to date, and released two versions of the spin off websites – webtvng.com and theanalystng.com

3. Your company is to Nigeria, what Bloomberg is to America – go-to portal for informed market information and research. Will you say Proshare has achieved its vision?

That is quite flattering, but no we have not. We have however been able to clarify the mission, built a track record of credibility, timeliness, relevance, reliability and consistency – essential elements to running a data-backed information service. We are still a work-in-progress but have invested in processes that if sustained (people, strategy and structure); we stand a good chance of delivering a bespoke financial information portal that will serve the needs of users and compliment the emerging Nigeria and its financial markets. There is a whole lot of work to be done. To do this, we are learning how not to be an 8am – 5pm company; with our technology group now in India and the development unit in another continent….it’s like we are starting all over again, developing new insights to serve today and tomorrows market.

4. We are aware Proshare Group has an internet TV channel, Web-TV, is the company thinking of starting a terrestrial TV channel dedicated to business information?

The trademark WebTV and DigitalTV reflects our vision for a business, economic and financial digital service that should offer, in the main, a cost-effective, means tested and common sense approach to meeting the changing needs of today’s business community and financial market by providing a social community based ‘instant TV experience’ that allows us aggregate the new devices now available to educate, enlighten and empower the public. Before now, and at least while I was growing up, TVs were too expensive to be personal and the technology was just not there and the funding model did not make it attractive for specialization until recently. Also, the programming needed to be funded through an advertising model that demanded such programme(s) to be popular, with mass appeal and heavily censored.

Today, the immediacy and social aspects of TV are being integrated into better experiences and short videos are now part of daily conversations. While we may not be able to recreate the social communities of the living room in an age where social mobility engenders the dislocation of the traditional means of socializing, we hope to reinvent them by leveraging ubiquitous connectivity offered us by our platform suite i.e. proshareng.com, the analystng.com and engagements with partners to evolve into three distinct areas where we believe we can help create a community of people, of devices, and of stories.  This goal is to provide an instant audio-visual experience that aligns with our overall vision for the Nigerian market space. This is a challenging area for which best practice models are at an evolution stage in Nigeria, nay Africa.

5. You schooled in Nigeria in the eighties, we are sure you have interviewed and worked with many graduates in the course of your career, and as an employer now, do you agree with assertion that the quality of graduates has declined in recent time?

It sounds like a cliché and often time, I guess our measurement scale is based on the needs of the today’s organisation as compared with what is offered by the schools. Let me attempt a response thus – is there any school in Nigeria that offers any course relevant to today’s business needs or one that is easily upgradeable to meet the shifting shelf life of yesterdays approach or solutions? NO! The curriculum is not only way behind the curve, the conditions of learning is non-supportive for high-end achievement i.e equipment, tools, classroom and library, the contact time with the study materials is barely non-existent i.e textbooks, journals, etc; the human capital available to the schools itself is under strain as the rate of lecturers and professors are stretched apart from the teaching quality now available; which when situated within societal expectations and value alignment does not promote an attitude driven by the desire to pursue excellence and hence the vicious cycle of un-productivity is sustained.

This starts at the feeder level – where the quality of secondary schools graduates entering our universities are already competence-challenged to cope with the demands of an emerging economy – indeed the disconnect between the expectations and potentials of Nigeria can be easily explained away with the level and quality of education available (not forgetting the means and cost of deploying / providing such).

We had some of these issues in my time but it has gone southwards, far southwards now and you only need to grab a copy of the curriculum for the colleges and universities in UK and USA and compare same to ours to understand the gap between the needs of businesses seeking to compete in a global market as against those seeking to survive in a local market. Those who would rise to the top will have to self-will themselves to upgrade and supplement what our local institutions provide as part of the overall response to addressing the malaise and firms have to invest in high quality training and not tokenism. At Proshare we send our people to high-end trainings at significant cost for skills, competence and attitude development programs as a sine qua non.

6. You read business books a lot, and we know this through your Facebook posts and the session you had with the participants at our career mentorship conference last year, which books will you recommend for our readers?

This is my happy moment. I would simply recommend to you the entry level reading list at Proshare, viz:

1)    Liberation Management – Tom Peters

2)    Re-Imagine – Tom Peters

3)    Crazy Times Call for Crazy Organisations – Tom Peters

4)    The Pursuit of WOW – Tom Peters

5)    Reckoning with Risk – Gerd Gigerenzer

6)    Managing Uncertainty – Pat Utomi

7)    Maverick  – Ricardo Semler

8)    The Future of Finance  – Adjiedj Bakas & Roger Peverelli

9)    Choosing and Using a Consultant – Herman Holtz

10)Competitive Strategy – Michael Porter

11)The New paradigm for Financial Markets – George Soros

7. From your knowledge, experience and career, if asked to list three skills or qualities that every graduate must possess, what will these be?  What do you look for in a potential employee?

Integrity, Creativity (or innovation) and passion for service….everything else can be acquired, taught or developed.

Thank you for your time sir.

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