Ideas

I recently went to review a Restaurant that one of my clients was planning to acquire. During the inspection, I decided to check the restroom facilities and what I saw shocked me. The faucet was broken. The toilet handle was no longer working. Several tiles were broken. The toilet door handle was missing. Instead of simply fixing the problem, they had moved a drum of water into the restroom and placed a bucket inside for people to fetch water manually. When I asked how long the toilet had been in that condition, one of the staff replied: “It has been like this since I joined the company.” Think about that.

Recently, I sat in a weekly management meeting of one of our FMCG clients in Ikeja. The National Sales Manager stood up confidently and announced: 

“We did over TEN BILLION naira in sales in the last 30 days.” The room lit up. He recommended bonuses for the sales team. But the MD asked one question that changed the entire atmosphere: 

I was at a sales event recently in Kano, and one of my clients had a stand all the way at the back of the exhibition hall — yet his team was making impressive sales while others, even those in front, were struggling. He had a unique sales manager leading his team, and I decided to study him closely to understand his secret.