My years at Lintas –
Kelvin Amaechi
By Evelyn Oragwuncha
Monday,
July 16, 2007
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Kelvin Amaechi
Photo: Sun News Publishing |
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Who is Kelvin Amaechi? Kelvin Amaechi is essentially a self-made
man, with a long life story in the arts and media practice
for the better part of nearly 30 years, now engaged in business,
marketing communications and management development.
I equally train, lecture and recruit management staffers.
I think Amaechi is as far as he can speak for himself is a
simple man, very little gets to his head, though sometimes
he is misunderstood as a shy person, otherwise he is a man
of live and let live. He likes intellectual discourse, he
likes to work hard, indeed, he likes to work hard, indeed,
he likes the company of people who can motivate.
He dreams, he is positive in outlook and quietly celebrates
triumph over challenges.
As the former M.D of Lintas, what were the highlights
of your years there?
I became the MD of Lintas in 1998 and the appointment was
to take effect from the 1st of May but the handover, introduction
to our international office and all the formalities of change
of guard did not permit my moving in and occupying the seat
of the MD until the first week of June 1998. As I sat there,
I looked ahead and saw an enormous challenge to start my tenure
with which was the organization and celebration of Lintas’
70th anniversary.
The company having been established and opened for business
in October 1928. So, I had just about three months to prepare
for a major landmark anniversary of Nigeria’s University
of Advertising, Nigeria’s foremost institution of marketing
communications. So, that was one big highlight of my career.
Once I settled down, it was the dawn of a new era and the
turn of the century into the 21st century which was less than
18 months to the year 2000. Lintas had come a long way, the
profile of the clients had changed, globalisation was on the
lips of everybody in the corporate world, there is the ever
shifting behaviour and characteristics of the customers in
the marketplace who keep us all in business.
The customer is the king, he can fire anybody from the gateman
to the MD, if you don’t treat him right… So, all
these business variables were there staring me in the face.
It was a time of great change and as the new lingo goes, you
change or die. And I didn’t want Lintas to die on my
hands, so I thought to myself that this is a time to make
a difference. The CEO in the classical business world is an
agent of change. He must initiate change, he must sell the
concept of change to his lieutenants, subordinates, and in
all the human elements which resist change like hell (Shakespare
says that man cheapest enemy is change).
So, if I was to drive the change concept through Lintas at
that time, it was time to re-engineer the company, our processes
had to change and be modernized, computerization had to be
taken to a new sophisticated level and as for the personnel,
I wanted a flat organization, I wanted to shift the paradigm
of the traditional hierarchical structure. No, that was not
for me, I wanted to empower my staff, so that even important
and sensitive decisions could be taken at a lower level. The
MD and the top directors did not have to see to everything
or approve all things.
If you trained your staff well, if you educated them well,
if you encouraged them, corrected them, coached them, guided
them, that’s empowerment. And, of course, the Maslow
law on things about the needs of man, so you take care of
that aspect too, so that they have a sense of belonging, a
sense of reward, a sense of appreciation. Because you cannot
separate corporate’s objectives from individual’s
objectives otherwise you will be on your own.
The two must converge at a point where the response level
of your staff must be seen to actually be in tune with the
entire spirit of the company to forge ahead. I had the unpleasant
task of restructuring which meant that people were asked to
separate their services from the company. That was quite challenging.
Sometimes, people feared for your safety because of the possible
negative reaction of those that might be affected. We weathered
the storm and came out of it, in my humble belief, the company
was the better for it. There was the new effort to re-align
more closely, more strongly Lintas Lagos with the worldwide
Lintas.
In my time, I can say without any fear of contradiction that
I helped to midwife this new relationship that today exist
between the former Lintas Lagos and the new Lintas worldwide.
At a time when I was leaving in 2002, we had essentially concluded
the technical arrangement, technical relationship whereby
we could get technical support for a fixed fee where we could
exchange staffers either on coaching visits or training courses
as the case may be. That is where I left off. I don’t
know if it’s been deepened now, but that was a major
challenge.
There was also the issue of clientele, the clients, the numbers
had gone down for some reasons. Just before I became the MD,
I was heading a task force as the deputy managing director,
media director also in charge of new business. So, I had a
small team with me that looked out for new opportunities in
the marketplace. We would do all the necessary things, do
the intelligence work, find out who is what, the oganisation,
what do they do? Because the principles of looking for new
business suggests that there could be a potential client who
already has a service agency but because his product portfolio
has grown and his agency can no longer cope, there is what
we call diversification of creative sources.
So, for that reason, you look for a second agency to cope
with the volume of work, to vary the creative outlook of your
agencies and, therefore, bring a fresh interest in the presentation
of the packaging, advertising, promotion, public relations
of your brands. So, that is one alternative. Another scenario
is where the client is not satisfied with the quality of service
he is getting from his present agency and somehow, he can’t
quite help himself getting another agency. So, you could be
the man of the moment arriving at the time of need and you
could be signed on just like that. Then you also pitched for
accounts. Sometimes, we got the big numbers, the big pitches.
You went there to prove your mettle where you either win or
lose the account.
So, getting new clients was a very big challenge. Because
if you have a compressed clientele, what you have is compressed
business portfolio. What you have is limited revenue. You
are standing on one leg. If anything goes wrong, you are down.
So, you must diversify the sources of the company’s
revenue through the diversification of your client profile
and the brands and products that you handle. Otherwise, if
you had a situation where there were just three major clients,
one of which accounts for 70% of your revenue for the year,
you are in trouble if anything goes wrong.
Especially, if you are in the international league. There
could be some realignment issues somewhere in New York of
London or wherever. The parent agency is no longer handling
this brand in so-so market and, therefore, here in the Nigerian
market, the agency has to change. It’s a domino effect.
So, those were the kinds of challenges we faced.
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