DE-ESCALATE YOUR BUSINESS.

When Nigeria went into recession twice in the last decade, I encouraged businesses to invest in more training and people skills. I encouraged businesses to increase their customer rapport and community bias. I also said it was time to do more product and service re-engineering.

Today, as Nigeria’s economy has shrunk drastically from false positives we were sold over the past decade, the strategy has to defer.

I have been thinking seriously about what businesses can do to weather this storm and breakthrough. One of my answers is DE-ESCALATION.

De-Escalation for your business in this season will imply that you do the following:

1. Revise your pricing model and payment model. In Cerca Africa, we signed a retainership with brands we trust so that we can deliver projects for them and get paid monthly because they cannot afford to pay us once. We broke down our usual 5-10M fees into smaller chunks of monthly payments but we limited it to only brands that we have worked with for many years that have a good financial reputation with us and a healthy character. Do this too. Identify people who have strong reputation and help them structure payment-for-service in tranches.
2. Enforce a very firm savings culture now than ever before. With every payment you get now, YOU MUST SAVE O. Why? Rent will increase when your current rent expires. Staff salaries must go up. Utility bills have gone up. And many more expenses will come. So, save now, no matter how little. You will need this.
3. Review your expense items. By all means, anything that does not need spending on should be removed from your expense list. In fact, this is when to downsize your team into a lean functional size, WHERE APPLICABLE. Any method that can lessen your cost without eroding your quality, that is what you should do now.

There are more ideas I am getting. We will discuss that on Friday night. Cerca Africa is hosting a webinar titled WHAT IS THE WAY FORWARD NOW? We meet this Friday from 7:30pm to 10pm on Zoom.

If you belong to OSP, MST or any Cerca Group, pay N2,500 only.

If you don’t belong to any of these group, pay N5,000 only.

Pay to:
CERCA AFRICA ENTERPRISE SOLUTIONS LIMITED
Providus Bank
5403914592

Or pay through https://selar.co/wayforward

LET US REASON TOGETHER FOR OUR BUSINESSES.

Cerca Africa … always close to you.

Sam Obafemi
Founder/CEO, Cerca Africa