Ayo Alonge, [email protected]

Anthony Ajulo, is the Chief Executive Officer of Colton Group, a startup that manufactures construction chemical products, among other services.

Amid the litany of challenges that importers like him face, Ajulo wants the automation of clearing processes which according to him, is key to the growth of startups in importation subsector.

While telling his success story in business, he also x-rays other issues bordering on competition, patronage and business growth.

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Background

I am a manufacturer and an entrepreneur. We run a number of companies and we are into import and export businesses as well as construction. Mostly, we manufacture building materials that we call chemicals for construction. We also manufacture adhesives and certain household cleaning products. We manufacture a couple of things along the different fields of manufacturing. We have a chemical factory in Sagamu which is the biggest in the whole of West Africa at the moment. We also run a construction firm for real estate. We have a laboratory for construction destructive and non-destructive testing. We run the lab for testing certain products for durability and quality tests for the products.

Starting up

I started the company with a friend called Balogun Cornelius. We started with Colton which was a mix of our name — Collins and Tony. We started in 2012. I had worked with an Indian company from 2006-2011. He had also worked in Unilever for almost 10 years before we met in 2011 and started working together. In 2012, we started importing from Germany and the US and we were selling to end users. It was a tough journey but we had a vision and we were starting with an end in mind. We started with a loan of N50,000 from a friend. I bet he doesn’t know it was the N50,000 that brought us here today. We needed the money for logistics so we could move out to market the products.  We had to market the products. We met people and built relationships and till today, the company is one of the biggest construction chemical companies in Nigeria. While we were growing the business, we realised that the products could be manufactured in Nigeria. So, in 2016, we started to build the first indigenous construction chemicals company. We grew it and realised that our product acceptability was huge. That led us to start a bigger factory in 2018 and we commissioned it in 2019. Today, it is the biggest in West Africa. If you join the capacity of our local competitors, our capacity is bigger than it. We also make some specialised coating for industries and spray for trucks owned by oil and gas firms. We have a construction company too.