Category: Small Business and Entreprenuership

Inspired by his love for caring for shoes, Abraham William has built a successful cobbling business, thereby creating employment opportunities for other youths, Daniel ESSIET reports.

Chief Executive,AB Leather Work, Abraham William,is particular about keeping his shoes in good shape. In his childhood days, he was reputed for  paying attention to footwears, branded clothes, well-set hair and clean socks.

But he is more concerned about the state of his shoes which he hates seeing dirty.

His love  for good, clean shoes now means much more to him as it has put food on his table, making fortune to shine on him over the last decade.

After his training that spanned over three years in Uyo, the Akwa Ibom State capital, Abraham is now the proprietor of a shoe cleaning and repair firm in Shomolu,Lagos. He started with less than N50, 000.

Today, he has grown his trade to become lucrative. For instance, he used proceeds from the trade to educate himself at the University of Lagos, where he obtained a degree in Business Administration in 2011.This feat, among others, makes Abraham to say that shoe repairing is a profitable business.

Long before he graduated, he was already his own boss. And while his contemporaries roamed the streets after graduating from various tertiary institutions in search of unavailable jobs, he became an employer.Today, not only  has proceeds from shoe repairs made him  a university graduate, given him a car but he has been living comfortably.

His services include:  shoe refurbishment, laundry and repair services,   leather accessories, putting sole protectors and heel protectors,re-heeling, re-soling ,sole pasting, and shoe dying. As a competitive edge over his competitors, Abraham boasts of a good turn-around time for delivery of jobs. However, the turn-around-time varies depending upon the complexity of the job to be done. Like every other industry, the shoe business has its own trend. He  has  witnessed a seasonal trend in the business. When he started it, people didn’t know him, so  he decided to go slowly without much investment till the masses accept his  service. So, he scaled up very slowly and the income from the service was sustaining the business.

Another positve factor for him is the desire to always go an extra mile to ensure customer satisfaction. According to him, a customer would try your service initially with one pair and if once made happy would give other pairs as well for refurbishment and repair work. Such customers, he further explained, tend to bring more

He does a lot of shoes a day and has employees at the workshop. Abraham also renders consultancy services on shoe maintenace. Overall, the future seems to be pretty good. His  shoe-repair services has now evolved to multiple services, from changing the sole to repairs of bags, luggage and baby strollers.

There are thousands of stores selling branded shoes, but there are  few  professional footwear care and maintenance services provider.

For him, that is a big opportunity for new entrants who are well trained to provide maintenance services to Nigerians who use branded and expensive shoes. The industry, he believes are in need of service providers to offer the level of expertise required to clean and repair those kind of  shoes.

As  Nigerians have become more brand and hygiene conscious, William is  doing all he can to prove that he is the  knowledge centre for footwear refurbishing. He has developed a standardised repairing technique through 10 years of practical experience and innovation.  What makes it more unique is that the results he achieved are appreciated by his consumers. It gets more unique by the kind of repairs he does. He has developed techniques to fix different problems in shoes. People who liked his service tell their friends and relatives.   When customers bring in shoes that are out of warranty or are too damaged for in-store repairs, they are directed to him to repair at a slightly discounted rate.

His focus is on repair that makes shoes last longer.The biggest  challenge in the industry  remains finding good workers. The bright, shiny side? With towering disposable incomes, upper middle class Nigerians who are ready to spend money on good shoes.

Chief Executive, Niji Group, Adeniji Kolawole, is up on the entreprenurship ladder, having set up a thriving business of fabricating durable machines for young entrepreneurs wishing to start their own businesses. DANIEL ESSIET reports.

Chief Executive, Niji Group, Adeniji Kolawole, is gradually building a flourishing business of machine fabricatoion. He is one of the inspiring success stories of budding entrepreneurs  who shunned paid  employments, venturing instead into self employment. His carreer choice paid-off instantly. Today,  he is a successful agripreneur, specialising in the fabrication of  machines.

In the last 10 years, Niji Group, founded in 1991, has  grown into a successful and award-winning supplier of metal fabricating machines and services.

Being gifted at learning how machines work and making them for his clients, mostly farmers,his  company now fabricates various types of agricultural or farm implements that process produce, such as cassava, maize and groundnuts.

These include shellers, water pumps, welding machines, ox-carts, produce driers, grain cleaners, cassava chipping machines and any other post-harvest handling equipment.

He has fabricated fish smokers, pastry ovens, bone crushers, cassava grater,garri fryers, flash dryers,hammer mills, yam and cassava peelers.

His list of food and agro processing plants that he can fabricate for  food entrepreneurs include cassava starch, gari processing,plantain chips,yam flour and fufu processing.

“Starting up a metal fabricating company is a noteworthy achievement. Sustaining it successfully over several years is a remarkable accomplishment,” he said.

Despite starting off with little capital, pouring  his life savings into his new business endeavour,    Kolawole already has over 300 workers in his employ. Success however, did not come overnight.  After leaving technical college, he worked with some companies where he larnt the business of machine fabrication before starting his own. Within a short time, he he rose to become a top player. He is now one of the most sought-after machine fabricators. Many  companies whose owners are no longer comfortable with the high cost of  importing spare parts from abroad throng his assembly plant.

Kalawole refused to be held down by the technical challenge of the business. He got involved  in a kind of business,  which seems to be for those who studied mechanical engineering, even though  he was a product of a technical school and an advance apprencticeship programme.

The apprencticeship programme through which Kolawole honed his skills, The Nation learnt, has taken him to big  companies and fabrication yards in Europe and Asia.

Despite his wealth of experience garnered through such overseas trainings, Kolawole attributes his success to the delligence and commitment of his staff. He said he owes his success to his workers whose dedication made room for efficiency and ability to  maximise fabricating technology to meet customers’ demands.

Kolawole has ploughed back his initial profit from the business into acquiring  key equipment to support production of newer and more complex fabrications. The company’s  solid financial balance sheet afforded it the opportunity of investing in fabrication technology that delivers production efficiencies.

The budding entreprenure says his company’s ability to take on complex fabricating jobs to produce parts at competitive rate and also offer value-added services that other shops may not be able to offer was because of a handful of large and long-standing customers who have kept him and his workers constantly on their toes. There are  smaller customers who also played important part in the fabricator’s future.

Having made a mark in machine fabrication, Kolawole established Niji Farms and Allied Services Limited,  which is spearheading green revolution with large farm land located at Ilero in Kajola Local Government of Oyo State.

The company’s  cultivated cassava farmland covers an expanse of over 3000 acres. Kolawole is  gradually building an enterprise that could  become the nation’s biggest producer of  cassava. He has acquired over 15,000 acres to establish a private farm estate with a farmers’ business school, an agri-clinic as well as an agri-business centre.

His aggressive expansion programme has also seen him partner Harvest Plus in the multiplication of 125 acres of Vitamin A Cassava. He said his concern is that Nigeria, despite being a large producer of agricultural produce, does not have agro-processing capability for value addition and   forward integration.

He is, therefore, determined to  support the government explore innovative ways to incentivise farmers to use technology more effociently to add value to the country’s vast agric produce.

On the whole, he  is working to turn around the fortunes of small farmers with local machines that can be used in farming.

He has made  various sizes of machines with various output. They are either automatic or manually operated. He has the rare technical skill of making any machine by just looking at the one manufactured in factories. Sometimes his customers just describe for him  what they want to do and he  makes a machine that will help them do that work for them.

Within the industry, he is regarded as a maverick who likes to try everything that challenges his skills and wits. He is determined to not only mechanise agriculture, but also take his skills andn know-how to the global arena.

Kolawole started off by meeting with farmers and  peeking at their  real problems. He always pondered  why farmers are always at a loss when  they are supposed to be the master of the farming business.

To solve the riddle, Kolawole created a private farm estate rich in value added facilities where people can come to see how profitable agriculture can be done. He believes that with the use of the farming estate, young people can learn and apply proven technologies in aquaculture, livestock and poultry raising, crops production and others .

Young farmers, according to him, to utilise everything into organic fertiliser. This could help them save costs from farm input, he added.

His dream is to see lives of young farmers completely transformed through active agro entrepreneurship. He set out to make his farm estate an agro-tourism spot- where people can enjoy and relax in nature’s comfort.

This is why he allows field trips to his farm from students and farmers so he could share his technologies applied on the farm.  In his spare time, he  also acts as resource person for cooperatives, integrated farming, entrepreneurship, and the like.

With his experience, he wants people  to know that there is really money in farming. For him, what Nigerians need is work ethic, determination and vision to turn their entrepreneurial dreams into  success stories.