Insights from Emeka Odibeli on Business Growth and Development

In the dynamic landscape of entrepreneurship, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) play a pivotal role in driving economic growth and innovation. At Entrepreneurng, we had the privilege of interviewing Mr. Emeka Odibeli, a seasoned expert in SME consulting, strategy management, business development services, and digital transformation training.

In this insightful interview, Mr. Odibeli shares his inspiring journey into the world of SME consulting, the unique challenges faced by small businesses, and his practical approach to fostering their growth and sustainability.

With a career spanning impactful collaborations and over 3,000 SMEs served, his story is one of resilience, vision, and transformation.

1. Can you share a bit about your journey into SME consulting and what inspired you to pursue this career path?

“I didn’t always want to be an SME or business consultant. I finished school and I didn’t have a job so I did a lot of volunteering. I volunteered with cybercafes, and photo studios, and assisted trainers in carrying their bags and all that. However, amid everything, I always wanted to add value in a unique way. When I met people who had similar issues and challenges with their business and because I had done them and gained experience willingly in the past, I was doing them naturally.

“Along the line, I got engaged with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) South-East Entrepreneurship Development Centre, which was been powered by the International Centre for Development Affairs (ICDA). Based on my experience and track record, I was able to fit in as a Business Development Specialist for the training platform and upscaled myself in the field by learning a lot of things around innovation, customer service, human resources, ideation, product development and management, market entry, business plan writing, business model canvas, marketing edge and branding.

“It opened me up to so much and I decided to build a career around it and went on to get my certification as a Management Consultant. I got other certifications while I was working with the Grow with Google Training Programme to digitalise businesses. This is how I evolved to where I am now. Over time, I have been able to train SMEs and develop them. I have become a certified BSB, Digital Transformation Trainer and Consultant. I have worked with over 3000 SMEs across different states and platforms.”

2. SMEs are often considered the backbone of many economies. What unique challenges do SMEs face, and how do you help them navigate these?

“Basically, the general complaint from SME industries in Nigeria is usually the lack of funds. However, over the years of watching SMEs evolve, funds don’t seem to be the base of their creation, ideation, or evolution.

“Funds could help them upscale but it’s not really a condition for their business existence or survival. So for me, one of the key things every business needs is the necessary knowledge and capacity building.

“Some of these capacity building are not particularly things you need to pay for. Precisely, I always tell people that YouTube is a university where people can learn so much for free. So the basic challenge is the knowledge and information gap.

“Information is the tools you have and can use. For example, someone tells me, I need money, I need to rent a shop, and I need to begin to get some stuff, but let’s look at the Onitsha markets or our usual area markets. You see where a guy sells you a battery from your shop, but when you get to his shop, all you see are empty cartons of batteries.

“You meet him, he goes, he gets you a battery, he sells the battery for the price the person is selling, makes his little profit, and pushes it there, and over time, he now has those empty cartons in the shop become active shops.

“So this tells you something, which is the ability to sell is not particularly a skill that money can buy but a skill that you need to focus your energy and time to learn. You can observe entrepreneurs that have to come up with innovations. I have a lot of products I’m selling but I don’t have a way to get a shop. They create a WhatsApp business account, a Facebook shop, or an Instagram business account. Those are things that in Nigeria we don’t pay for.

“So at the end of the day, it’s not about money. It’s about taking advantage of the resources around you, knowing what to do with them to be able to convert them to money, knowing how to be able to harness them to be able to get the best results from them, and knowing how to leverage them.

“Going back to what I said before, internship and volunteering is a level that does a lot for you that money cannot equate. So, we need access to information, experience and learning.

“At some point, you may need to pay to learn, but at the same time start from the free. I always tell people that if you are not addicted to learning from the free, it will be difficult to pay and complete the process.”

3. What are the most common mistakes businesses make in their growth strategies, and how can they avoid them?

“The first mistake they make is the assumption. For instance, I am selling a hundred products today and begin to calculate selling a hundred products for the rest of my life. It is a big assumption because the fact that people like my product today doesn’t mean they will like it tomorrow. So the question is, when they don’t like it tomorrow, what is the plan?

Another thing is team building. Team building is key because a lot of people don’t take it seriously. Many people just go ahead to employ just anybody and that is not what a business needs. You need somebody who is willing to grow your business with you, buy into your passion, loyal to you and be open to learning. Also, be able to bring in someone that you are not scared of the person outgrowing you based on their speed of learning but at the same time, be able to buy into the person’s commitment to your growth. These are things that are considered for team building.

“Furthermore, we also need to look at the fact that a lot of people do not care about their customers. The term “the customer is always right” is something you don’t get tired of hearing in the business world but at the same time, some people do not care about customer feedback or bother themselves to be able to meet up with customer feedback. Why? It’s going to be able to help you know how to evolve your product and pattern your product to be able to meet needs more than just sell because the fact that you have a product does not mean that people want it.

“We live in a world that has become very selfish and because of this, one of the things people need to wake up to is the fact that you don’t do things because you have them. For example, I won’t sell palm oil because I have gallons of palm oil lying in my house but I need to be able to make that palm oil something that customers will need. This means you’re not going to be able to cook if you don’t have my palm oil or you’re not going to be able to do more or make salivating delicacies if you don’t have my palm oil. You will not be able to get your unique output if you don’t have my product. So some things like these are key to making that happen.”

4. Networking and partnerships are essential in business development. How do you recommend SMEs build and maintain valuable connections?

“The best way to be able to work networks is to ask yourself, what do you want? I have learnt that if you build networks around people who are less than you are and do not need what you want, you become their need and very soon you become obsolete when they are done juicing you out. So I always suggest that you network with people who have better knowledge than you, know more than you and have more expanded reach so that you can be able to leverage and gain access to things that you might not qualify to get.

“Building such networks involves intentionally creating them by deciding to look for people that look like that and create a cycle that works. Another thing you can also do is join associations, clusters, and cooperatives. This will give you access to money leverage, capacity building leverage, and individual leverage and also seek to be able to upskill yourself to become a professional in that field. It is not only people who are in careers that become professionals Even you that is making hair relaxers can become a professional and join the association of people that make hair cosmetics or something. Just enter that cycle or network and see what it’s going to do for you. So to be able to do that, I suggest that you always walk around such networks, and attend programs and meetings. When a bank organises programmes for SMEs, make sure to attend as it is an opportunity to meet new people and find people who share the same goal as you or even better.

“Places as little as your church and local community usually organise similar programmes for entrepreneurs and people in the marketplaces, please be a part of them and try not to be shy about it. There is no secret because there is nothing you are doing today that nobody has done before. Come out and open yourself to people’s influence to become better. These little ideas are things that can help you a whole lot.”

5. How do you measure success in business development efforts, and what KPIs do you consider most critical?

“Revenue growth and increase in sales and profits are some of the key things to look out for to ensure that your business is healthy and doing well. Sometimes revenue growth can start negatively. For example, you could have a startup that in the first year you have more spending to do because you are setting up infrastructure, learning things, and learning tools and you are not making so much of a profit. But once the system has been set in from the second year or the beginning of the third year, your profit becomes exponential because you’ve been able to do the things you ought to do with the resources in hand and the resources that kept coming.

“Customer acquisition rate: You need to be able to guarantee that you’re getting more customers next year and the coming seasons like every subsequent season either the next quarter, next month, the next six months or the next year. This means that if you did 200 customers this year, you should be looking at doing 500 next year. And the question is, how do you do that? How do you want to reach more? You have to advertise more and you don’t advertise out of the little you made but from your profit. So you need to be able to grow your profit to be able to expand your potential for advertising and spread to a wider market.

“Conversion rates: You create products and ads and you’re looking for leads and hope that they are being converted to customers. If 1000 people view your ads, only five come back. It’s not a bad one. However, you shouldn’t remain there. This means that you should be able to keep coining your copies, images, and videos to be able to grow from 1000 to five to possibly 1000 to 100 and 10,000 to 1000 etc. So that is key.

“How many returning customers do you have that came today? What can you do so that they will come for another product tomorrow? This means secondly, you are creating new products and you are attracting the old customers to patronise you again probably because of a pleasing experience that they previously had. It could be that they experienced joy working with you, peace, quality, excellence, good cost, customer interactions and satisfaction.

“Then in the space, in your industry, how much traction are you beginning to get? So these things are the, for me, they are key KPIs and they are also a matrix with which you can use to judge business developments and its key roles in business enhancements for individuals and for their businesses to be able to thrive.”

6. Digital transformation can be daunting for SMEs. What are the first steps you advise businesses to take in this journey?

“The primary thing everybody should do before they go into digital transformation is to understand digital and to God be the glory in Africa, we still can be able to lend that for free. The Google digital skills Grow With Google program is still free and it has a course called Introduction to Digital Marketing. The course is self-paced, you can learn it in one day or a week, but the beauty for me and the learning for me is that you mustn’t use the Google platform to learn. You can even use e-market institute to learn and many others, but the issue is not what platform you use to learn. The issue is to understand what is expected, the terms, the jargon, understand what each one is supposed to give you as possible how the best outcomes and what kind of results they give. Why? Because I could just come up to you and tell you, give me 100k, I’ll be able to give you a thousand customers. But the truth is what I want to do with 100k, I can do with 50k or 30k. The only thing is what strategies am I using and what audience am I giving you? Are they the kind of audience you need? What product am I selling? How am I selling it to the customers? Are they reaching the people who need it directly or indirectly? Are they enough to get their attention amid the traffic on the things that they do daily? So these things are the basic metrics that you need to look out for in the digital space.

“So for me, I would suggest that they do a lot of learning, and understand the environment. Why? One, so that they are not cheated. Two, so that they know what to expect as results and feedback for every input. Three, they know what environment works for them. Fourth, they understand the nature and peculiarities of each environment. Facebook is not the same as Instagram, WhatsApp, or Twitter, which means that every environment has its uniqueness and peculiarities, and you need to play into those things strongly to be able to get your market output. So playing into these things will be able to help a lot to get the best out of the digital environment and to be able to make that journey smooth and hitch-free for you.”

7. Training is a significant aspect of business growth. What training modules or approaches have you found most effective for SME teams?

“Strategy management and implementation is one. Revamping team culture and goal setting is another. Strategy above all else has been key because I noticed that strategy is not static strategy evolves so what you knew in January may not be useful to you in July because the market space may have just switched. Precisely, I’ll give you an instance: in 2023, I was marketing a bleached product and we didn’t know that we were entering the bleached markets when the concept of plastic containers was shifting. People were looking for buying or were looking for ways to buy convenience and for cheaper and we were coming in for “quality.” So at the end of the day, it cost us a lot because the market didn’t pull through. You need to be able to reconsider strategy and make strategy become something that happens once every three months or every six months. You can just pick your team and go for a retreat and in that way, you can either get a professional that will steer you guys up in the right direction or you can connect yourself to online resources that will be able to open you up to new stuff.

“Another thing you can also do is look for ways you can carry your team to environments where people are nudging themselves to greater heights. You need strategy sessions where people are talking in realms way beyond you because until you think of bigger, your mind remains small and your team remains small so you need to be able to challenge your team to more sometimes. It is good for you to see yourself as the local champion in your team but sometimes it’s also good to carry your team to a place where they now understand that where they are now is a child’s play compared to where they ought to be. The strategy sessions and goalsetting sessions are key, so it’s able to help you guys expand your frontiers, and opportunities and expand to new zones.

“Another thing you also need to be able to do is sales classes. Every business must know how to sell whether it’s a service or product so go for sales master classes and attend sales classes online. I always refer to doing sales master classes because you see people that have similar challenges with you and you’re able to use them as accountability partners for your goods and at the same time you’re able to get people that give you real-time solutions to the challenges you’re facing.”

8. How do you ensure that training leads to tangible outcomes and isn’t just theoretical?

“What I do is, I don’t train a crowd. I train in little clusters so that the team can keep following up with themselves and they keep challenging themselves. So I have classes of 20 or 50, and from 50, I still bring them into groups of maybe 10 clusters of 5, and we keep driving it that way. Every week, there’s a call that we call an accountability call, like a check-in. We ask questions based on the template that was shared. What are the things you’re supposed to have done? What are the things you’re doing? What are the things you’re supposed to do next? What are the results of the things you did? What are the results of the things that you’re going to do next? And successfully, we’ve really seen it work. It worked with people I mentored in the Orange Corners Program and the TNY MasterCard Program.

“So there’s this thing about that accountability system, periodic check-in and continuous learning because it’s not just about the class, the class is a trigger. And like they said, when you preach, even if it is just a lesson, people gain surface knowledge. But when you break it down and begin to practice it, people gain understanding. So that’s how we’re able to take it further and are able to still check on ourselves to know, okay, what are you doing differently, what are you doing next? And it helps that cluster grow.”

9. What trends in strategy management and business development should SMEs be paying attention to in the next 5-10 years?

“Artificial Intelligence (AI) has come to take over the space. As we are evolving, one of the things we need to understand is that those strategies with tech infusions are going to gain a lot of traction. Not even a lot of traction. Why? Because people are beginning to solve their problems on their own. So being able to create platforms that help them solve these problems helps to collect their money. It keeps you in the space to be able to hold control. And with AI, big data, internet of things, we’re able to even interpret people’s future cravings, adaptations, and adjustments in real-time. So artificial intelligence is going to play a very big role. But artificial intelligence is only going to take jobs from people who do not know how to improve it, manipulate it, and be able to harness it for the greater good. So to a good extent, that is key.

“Something else that’s going to be happening is that people are not gaining more access to learning platforms. Learning is shifting from the classroom. It has gone hybrid. Very soon, it is going to be 100 per cent remote, and when it does, we’re going to see people that they’re going to be able to, on their own, from a very early stage, grapple a lot of knowledge and take over a lot of industries.

“However, the most important thing I will keep saying is let’s begin to create solutions to local problems, create solutions to things around us, create solutions to immediate needs, and create solutions in such a way that when it solves it for one person, a million, 10 million, a hundred million because we have a population in Africa, will be able to use and access it easily.

“So such products are going to still be useful. Why? Because we are in a community that irrespective of global change and global technology advancement will still require local solutions and input to be able to convert local challenges then we can kill them up to the globe.

“Basically for strategy and evolution, one of the things people are going to play with a lot is data analysis, internet of things, artificial intelligence, tech infusions to be able to help them gain speed and gather large data and be able to interpret those data in real-time to solve issues. Being able to do that helps you step into a big corridor as an early tangent and with great impact for everybody because as small as children of five years of age would be affected by the input that would be created.”

10. Finally, what legacy do you hope to leave in the field of SME consulting and digital transformation?

“My prayer and heart desire is that someday in life, some of the biggest harvests of change in the SME, digital transformation and business development sector, would be able to point their tangents of change to meeting me, hearing from me and even giving thanks to God that I existed and I decided to make a move to be available to them and their stories. Because one of the most beautiful things I’ve been able to see over the years is see people with nothing push themselves.

“I have about three students that created products in Nigeria and they were exported out of the country as creatives that were doing big things and they started with just a needle and thread and a pair of scissors. I have seen those that started with just a gas cooker and a pot, seen those that started with just a laptop and they have all evolved. So being able to tell those stories of change, significant change, seeing them become employers of people and grow businesses from just an idea to a start-up that is even beginning to attract funding and gain traction is bliss for me and I want to be able to see that the number of people that get those benefits can tell the story of change.

“One way or the other, they should be able to connect themselves to either information they got from me, from my YouTube TEDX video or they were in my class or they just were able to connect to a platform where they were able to pick my brain and at the end of the day, we evolved together to become a story for a generation to benefit from. That’s just what it is for me.

“Two things I’m looking forward to doing strongly are to be able to see that my online institute is a one-stop shop for anybody who is interested in evolution of their minds, upskilling themselves and pushing themselves overboard. So Pistis Life and Leadership Institutes, www.plli.org is a place I would advise people to just come, pick up something that will work for you and watch your life get transformed. And secondly, I want to be able to create a school that is able to change the tangent of secondary education so that kids can be able to learn entrepreneurship early, life skills early and loan begins using university to sort out what they want to do with their lives or have clarity on time. and do more because there’s a lot more energy when they know what to do on time and do it well. Thank you very much, Oma. I think that’s a summary of what I want to leave behind over time.”