Biodun shobanjo:My Insight Story (2)
By Mike Awoyinfa and DIMGBA IGWE
Sunday, August 20, 2006

•biodun shobanjo Pix: Sun News Publishing

Insight story

Insight is a child of circumstance, a child of frustration, frustration borne out of the fact that here was Grant Advertising, a company that had all the potentials to move forward, to put itself in forward gear but decided to put it on neutral. I am not that kind of person who will remain in a position of stagnancy and be contented. I strive for excellence, I strive for achievement. If you like, you might say I am an ambitious person.

I don’t see what is wrong in that, so far as the ambition is made of sterner stuff. Those were my frustrations. That we could go forward but we did not. We stagnated, the quality of work didn’t progress, I regret to say, and because of my exposure I was always monitoring happenings not just in Nigeria but overseas.

I kept saying: “If we are part of a multinational company, then let’ see that happen.” It is not enough to receive Coca-Cola materials and place them, it is not enough to receive Nestle materials and place them. Can’t we ourselves generate some of these things which in fact can be exported? And we had brilliant guys who could make things happen. But I think we were just complacent. We had very good clients, we were almost a spoilt agency in the sense that we benefited a lot from our affiliation in terms of the clients that came our way because we were affiliated to McCann Erickson.

At a point I wasn’t getting fulfillment any longer. It was not about how much I was being paid. I was very well looked after as a young man. The remuneration was good, but the motivation was no longer there for me. It was there I realized that it is not what your company offers you that is most important but what you derive as satisfaction performing a function.

So that in the main was it. That frustration was beginning to reflect in my enthusiasm for the job. Some days I would wake up and I would say to myself: “I am going to that office again?” It got that bad. And when I discussed my resignation with my chairman, the late Chief Lawson who was my mentor, he tried to talk me out of it. But the solutions that he proffered weren’t those that I would have considered because there was the likelihood of people misunderstanding my intentions if I had taken the offer. For example, he wanted me to take over the managing directorship.

Of course I had a colleague in the incumbent managing director whom I liked. He was my senior in the profession. So, to have accepted to take his job would have appeared like back-stabbing. I didn’t feel it was right in that circumstance. People would have thought, “So, this guy’s ambition all this while is to be managing director?” Whereas in fact I was overwhelmed being deputy managing director at my age. So I turned the offer down.

The more Chief Lawson would like to talk me into accepting it, the more I felt that I shouldn’t even consider the offer at all. I felt it was better for me instead to go out and do something that would give me satisfaction, not necessarily to prove a point.
Insight was set up just like the way you establish any company. You call a lawyer, brief the lawyer that you want an advertising company registered. I called this lawyer and told him that it is obvious that there is only one thing that I know how to do very well: advertising.

“Even if we have no client, can you please register a company?” This was at the end of 1979. And by January 2, 1980 we had opened our doors. No client. No money. No capital. Nothing. But we had a whole lot of enthusiasm and determination to succeed with God being on our side.
I was the arrowhead of the company. As I mentioned earlier, there were one or two people close to me, much junior to me at Grant, and I expressed my frustration to them, that I was going to leave. One of them is Jimi Awosika who had always been my right hand man since Day One. His feeling was: Whatever is it that you are going to do, I am going to come with you.

I also remember inviting some guys out to lunch and telling them I would be leaving the company. In all honesty I wasn’t sure they were going to respond in the manner they responded. They said whatever I was going to do, they would like to join me. They didn’t even know I was going to respond in the manner they responded. They said whatever I was going to do, they would like to join me. They didn’t even know I was going into advertising. They simply believe in me and were ready to come on board, regardless of what I was going to do. Among them were people like Sesan Ogunro who runs Eminent now, Richard Ibe, the late Johnson Adebayo and of course Jimi Awosika.

We didn’t start as partners. When you talk about partnership, then it means that all of you must have sat down at one point or the other to discuss something and you would have said: “How much are you going to bring?” In case of Insight it never happened that way. I was going to do my own thing and I told other people who said: “Oga, we would go with you.” These were far junior people whom I had employed at various times at Grant, so there was no basis for us to even operate on the basis of partnership or whatever. Among them, Awosika was the closest person to me who knew much more than every other person. He said to me, “I have this in-law, let’s go and talk to him, maybe he would be able to lend you money.”

Of course we spoke to the gentleman and he didn’t have money. He referred us to another person, his political associate who asked me to bring a position paper. He gave excuses such as “there is no money in advertising” and all that stuff. But I tried to convince him that the company would make profit. I even naively offered him 60 per cent of the company and wanted him to be chairman.

All I just wanted was to go and prove myself, to prove that we can do this thing, that it can happen. I didn’t look at the implication of giving 60 per cent to one person. As for the people following me they didn’t have money. If I didn’t have money then they were worse off because I was way, way their boss. I was deputy managing director while they consisted of an account executive, a copywriter, and a print production manager.

To cut a long story short, I rallied around, some people chipped in money, and that included my late cousin. Then I spoke to a friend called Goddy Amadi who was in employment somewhere. He didn’t have that much money but he believed so strongly in me. He said: “I don’t have money but I have a house in the East. We can use it as collateral. I also know somebody in an insurance company who is very close to me who can facilitate the release of the money quickly.”

He actually pledged his house with which we raised N60,000, because the house is situated in his village. As a mark of appreciation for what he did and for some favours he did me in the past, I invited him to be our chairman and he owns shares. Not that he as chairman would superintend over us but because we would benefit from his experience.

Our early clients
Our first business was a correspondent school. There used to be a correspondent school called International Correspondence School based in the U.K. They used to be a client of Grant. They sent me a cable saying they wanted to talk about their 1980s plan and all that. I was the person working on their account, so the cable was addressed to me.

I then replied saying, “I am sorry, I would advise that you re-send the cable to the managing director of Grant Advertising because I should be leaving by the end of November.” Surprisingly they sent the cable back saying, “Look, if what you are going to do is advertising then see us as your first client.” They became our first client. I think the budget than was about thirty thousand naira.

After leaving Grant, I wrote as a matter of courtesy to some of the clients whose account I had worked on, explaining that I had disengaged. One of the clients, Welcome Pharmaceuticals replied and said, “Well, you are the one person that we know very well and trust at Grant, if you are leaving and if what you are going to be doing is advertising, we will come with you.” So they became our second client.
The third client actually wrote on their own to say, “We hear that you have left Grant. Can you come and tell us what you can do?” The management of Grant had gone to them to say, ‘Look, we have this situation at hand.