Biodun Shobanjo, the octogenarian titan of the Nigerian advertising world, is being feted across the media. But beneath the accolades and the pomp and circumstance lie a true rebel, a maverick who defied convention at every turn to build an advertising empire. Like Steve Jobs, Shobanjo’s genius thrived on breaking the rules, on challenging the status quo, and pushing the boundaries of creativity. With Insight Communications as his world and oyster, he didn’t just disrupt the Nigerian advertising scene; he revolutionized it.
As one of the boardroom leaders featured in my bestselling book, 50 NIGERIA’S BOARDROOM LEADERS—Lessons On Corporate Governance and Strategy, I asked him ten years ago while interviewing him for my book: What has been the toughest decision of your life? His response forms today’s column.
Looking back these 70 years, the toughest decision of my life, was the decision to forfeit a well-paid job at Grant Advertising where I was Deputy Managing Direct:or and plunged headlong into an uncertain future to start Insight Communications. At the time, Chief Lawson, Grant’s chairman did everything to dissuade me. He even said to me: “Shobanjo, I want to remove the managing director, because I can see that you are actually the person who should be in the saddle. What if I did that?” I said: “No sir, if you remove him and make me MD, people would think it was because I wanted that job.”
For crying out loud, I was happy being Deputy Managing Director! But I had to take that decision for a simple reason. Grant Advertising was not optimizing its potentials. That was the reason I left. When I joined the company, it was No.3 in the league, queued behind Lintas and OBM. We had some of the best clients, because owned by Americans, Grant was a global company and we got all their clients on a platter of gold, including Coca-Cola and Nestle. Yet we didn’t challenge for the No.2 position, let alone push for the premier position. Each time I raised this concern, the managing director baulked: “Biodun, kini problem e? What’s your problem?” He was comfortable with our No.3 position. As for me, I didn’t want to be No.3. I wanted to be No.1. I thought we could challenge our better rivals. We could have challenged for No.2 and subsequently No.1. Where is Lintas today? OBM is practically dead. Being No.1, you have to fight for it. That was my mentality. It’s still is.
We started Insight with zero capital. We didn’t have any dime. No money. I contributed the largest amount of money at the time, about one hundred thousand naira. My friend Goddy Amadi came up with twenty-something thousand naira. Someone else we brought in put down fifty thousand naira. Somebody put in ten or five thousand naira. But then Goddy Amadi was so gracious to me. He said: “I have a house in my village in Egbu, Imo State. I can give you the papers to the house; I have a friend who is managing director of an insurance company. I can talk to him so they give us some money.” The insurance company valued the house and they gave us sixty thousand naira or thereabout. Those were the kinds of money we used in starting Insight. I was naïve at the time to know that you need money to start an enterprise.
One of my clients, Nasco Company gave us one hundred thousand naira cash. The people who owned Nasco are Ethiopians. The MD at the time was Saleh Nasreddin. He is really an Eritrean. When I told him I was going to start Insight, he said: “I will support you.” He gave us a whopping sum of one hundred thousand naira. The day Jimi Awosika went to collect the money, he missed the flight. Those days, Nigeria Airways was very difficult to board. He travelled by road from Jos to Kano. By the time he got to Kano, he missed his connecting flight. He had no money to rent a hotel room for a night to stay, so he had to sleep at the airport. He eventually boarded a Lagos-bound international flight from the Middle-East. That was how he came back to Lagos with one hundred thousand naira. That sum was like one hundred million naira. I am forever grateful to Saleh Nasreddin. Nasco still exists in the northern part of Nigeria. It is still one of the biggest manufacturing companies, still doing the Nasco biscuits and Britek detergents.
It was a tough decision to walk away from everything. Once I was a company executive living in a company house in a highbrow area, having the services of a cook and a driver, owning two cars and a standby generator. I woke up one morning and I didn’t have anything. I went to being a tenant in a rented backstreet house in an obscured neighbourhood. Without a car, I didn’t know how to get to work. I was starting all over. And it was made difficult raising a family. All the odds were stacked against me. My plans were scuttled by my previous employers. I had wanted to buy off my official car and they blocked me from buying it off. So I resorted to using my wife’s car to get to work. By the time I resigned, I still had one year tenancy left. I thought I could pay the company and continue living there. The company preferred to lock the house up for one year. When the rent expired, they handed the house to the owner. Two months after we started Insight, I asked myself: Did I have to go through this?
If you start a company, you go through certain pains. I cannot forget when I went to a bank to seek for a loan. We needed a working capital of ten thousand naira. The bank turned us down. That was two years into the life of Insight. The bank said to me, “your business is in the non-preferred sector of the economy.” That was government’s classification of advertising and public relations at the time. We wanted to use ten thousand naira as loan for staff who wanted to buy cars. They were going to buy Beetle cars that sold for three thousand naira. Twenty-eight years later, the same bank came to me and offered to open a credit line of two billion naira for our company. I did not ask. They came on their own saying: “We can see the way your company has grown…we’d like to open a two billion line for your company.” Good news. But it took a lot of sweat, blood and tears. We started with a staff strength of 18. Today, we are over 18,000 employees in the group.
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