By Ajayi Joel

For every skill that you have or business that you venture into, chances are there are about seven people already in such. Now, the big question is: how do you scale or succeed in spite of these? I have discovered overtime that some people just delve into businesses without having a sense of the fact that you have a competitor or a plethora of competitors. This article will give you deep insight into how you can play a game of chess with your competitors. And if you are very familiar with the game of chess, this is a step by step approach of how you can take the queen of your competitors and win the game. Yes, you have a new seasoning business and want to take up Maggi seasoning and gain market share. This is what to do:

Carefully Define Your Niche

The inability to have a niche for your business or skill will make you stuck in the sea of options, and this definitely will make you do so many things that might not directly or even indirectly affect your business or skill positively. If you are a writer – are you a poet, story writer or business writer?  It’s not wrong to focus on so many niches at the same time if only you can manage them; however, it is advisable to begin with a niche.

Let’s also take an example of a fish seller: do you sell cat fishes or all type of fishes? Or if you are a hairstylist, do you make for women or just everyone? And if you make for women, what class of women – the rich or the poor?

Travel Down to Your Niche

First thing first, it is advisable to begin with the smallest niche possible which will be the most profitable to you. The game of chess is one game that you don’t play anyhow without having full thinking and consideration. If your target market happens to be high-class women to make awesome hair styles for them, ask yourself if it is possible and easy to reach these set of people easily based on what you have? You need to consider you access and network to reach these target markets. You need to break it down to have your niche.

Consider trying to clone Facebook. That will be a definitely dumb move! Why not break down the niche to a social media for aged people? And if you discover that the niche is still hard to break into, you can break it further down to building a social media for the aged people who are within a certain age range or within a certain set of character. That makes it easy to travel down to.

Study Your Competitors

At this stage, you really do not have so much stress because your competitors will not be as much as those when you do not have a targeted niche. A friend of mine reached out to me last year that she wanted to start a business and that she already had a targeted location in which she was moving to. She needed me to help her strategize how she can scale and if you are reading this, I help both businesses and start-ups strategize on how to penetrate markets, gain mastery and scale. I simply asked some basic questions down to the question of “who are your competitors?”

Now pay attention, this friend wants to make bags and sell and wasn’t aware of the competitors in the target location. What if everyone in that city bought from just one person? What if they have been purchasing from that person for five years? I gave someone a business strategy last year who wanted to start a hair salon in a street. What if there are two major hair salons in that street and the both of them have been in the street for over 7 years? You definitely will not just open expecting that the customers will begin to flock towards your salon. It doesn’t just happen that way. By the way, studying your competitors isn’t terribly hard. Besides sources from the web, you can achieve this research by making inquiries from people around.

Be Strategic

You want to win this chess game. Either you want to force yourself into the market space or kick out your competitor, whichever will help you scale. Remember it applies to skills as well; it’s not just restricted to business. What price does the other hair stylist charge and what is your price?  This is a game of chess and every move counts. What if you go to meet the chairman of the street and offer to get his daughters hair plaited for free? Then you make a very nice hair. Trust me, once the wife is impressed, she begins to broadcast that you are the one who plaited the hair.

Perhaps you could give a one week free hair styling for young girls on the same street. If the parents agree to send their daughters there and you make like 15 girls hair for free, then tell them to tell their moms to patronize you. Through that, you could strike a win in the street without having to combat with your competitors.

Knight Takes Queen

This is about blocking all the channels through which your competitors are getting access to the target customers. I told my friend that if she realizes that her competitor has gained mastery of Instagram and your target customers are on Instagram following your competitor, it’s either she relies on the power of collaboration or spends extra money to “steal” those customers. What do I mean? I must first say that it is not as easy as it is but it’s very possible. You can decide to offer better values than your competitor and direct ads at the same target audience. There are high chances that if they spot your higher value, they might deviate towards you.

Luckily enough, if you are the first entering into the market, there are a couple of things you can do to have an edge. However, you must first understand the channels through which your customers come to you and then defend to protect your flanks.

This is how to play the game of chess with competitors and if you are strategic enough, you can keep conquering niches as you progress. And you can use this model to introduce a new food seasoning competitor to Maggi in Nigeria. Of course, it can work for any other business venture.

That seasoning may focus on a niche – maybe seasoning that is wholly organic. You must have a clear niche in the market. Then you also have to examine how to introduce this seasoning to market. Is there an opportunity to create something that looks like Blue Apron and then put your seasoning as the exclusive one for people to use? My point is this: irrespective of the product, these principles are the game plans.

By Nnamdi Odumody

According to the World Health Organization, more than 2 billion people around the world do not have access to adequate and safe sanitation services. In developing countries, 800 children die every day due to diarrhea diseases mostly from poor sanitation.

In Morocco, 15 million residents in 32,000 villages suffer from environmental pollution caused by the direct rejection of wastewater without any treatment causing pollution and diseases from bad water.

Green Watech, a Moroccan startup, wants to fix this friction with an ecofriendly innovative solution called ‘’Multisoil layering technology’’ which is based on water filtration  using low cost and available materials such as soil, gravel and sawdust. Wastewater is collected from households and treated  with its  technology to produce high quality treated water that can be used in irrigation and other areas.

Its solution has a low investment cost, occupies a small area, is simple to operate by the local populace, and removes 90 percent of pollutants and pathogens. Also, it requires no energy for operation and has more than a 20-year lifespan.

Across the African continent, untreated wastewater is causing serious health risks for those who reside in slums and shanties. GreenWatech’s proprietary solution will help in transforming the untreated wastewater to usable cases.

By Kalu Ndukwe

We live in an era in which there is growing general feeling that things should not continue to be done the wrong way. This has led many to rise up and embrace the spirit of the time, by asking questions, speaking out and also writing to demand that whatever is worth doing, is worth doing well.

The level of mutual suspicion in Nigeria, growing day by day, is not helped, in any way, by how sensitive national issues are approached. Nigeria is a diverse society comprising of multicultural, multiethnic and multi-religious groups. Painfully, our ethnic, religious and political affiliations have done so much, in recent times, to make us see more of our differences. This awful reality is partly due to the practice of enforcing programs or policies that significantly affect people’s lives without consulting them to make their opinions, and partly because whenever a critical policy is initiated, one sees a situation in which the scrutiny being made on the policy raised, is to discover the insincerity of the originators and how they seek to use the policy to their best advantage, at the detriment of other groups in the country.

This leads to serious want of an unbiased examination of the advantages and disadvantages of national policies in this country. These two cases are interrelated in that it is the persistent exploitative tendencies of the former that lead to the biases expressed in the latter. The result is lingering dissenting voices and disunity.

This is the case with the RUGA initiative, which although it’s praised as a strategic move “that seeks to settle migrant pastoral families (in) rural settlement in which animal farmers, not just cattle herders, will be settled in an organized place with provision of necessary and adequate basic amenities such as schools, hospitals, road networks, vet clinics, markets and manufacturing entities that will process and add value to meats and animal products”, it has generated more controversy than is expected of a ‘supposed good’ policy initiated to address the critical national issue of “herders/farmers clashes that have claimed many lives and property worth several millions destroyed.”

The reason for the controversy is not far-fetched. In view of high level of mutual suspicion and how fragile peace has become in Nigeria, introducing a controversial policy without in-house consensus and wide consultations with critical stakeholders was always going to be a problem. The suddenness and haste with which the RUGA was brought into national limelight, by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, (even though approval had earlier been given for the comparatively better National Life stock transformation Plan (NLTP), spearheaded by the office of the Vice President), and the deceitful manner in which its (Ruga’s) implementation was being handled made it difficult to accept the argument that it was all good; that there was no sinister agenda behind it.

It is difficult to understand why no attempt was made to properly sell the idea to the stakeholders before contracts were being awarded for the construction of ‘Ruga Settlements’ by those promoting the initiative. There is also no evidence that the money being spent was appropriated by the National Assembly. This is aside the fact that the implementation was coming at a time the president is running the country with neither a cabinet in place nor officially announced aides.

“That we are faced with economic challenges that require modernization of old modes of production is not in doubt. But how we approach problems associated with the changing security and social integration challenges in our country is at the root of the current crisis. At a period when an atmosphere of ethno-religious suspicion has replaced the previous harmonious coexistence, somebody ought to have anticipated that whatever its merits, implementing a ‘Ruga Settlements’ scheme demands more than merely awarding contracts.”

The suspension of RUGA was highly predictable. Unlike the NLTP which promises that only willing States may join the scheme, the presidential spokesperson Garba Shehu, speaking of RUGA, had said “the federal government had “gazetted land” in all the states of the federation“. This didn’t go down well with the rest of Nigerians, that such a serious project which will significantly alter how things are done in their respective states, is being implemented without necessarily consultation.

The lesson here is very simple, every section of Nigeria wants to be responsible for what happens to them; are no more willing to, just, accept that things be imposed on them without letting them make necessary cross-check and give their views; and will appreciate that relevant stakeholders be consulted, to address critical concerns before policies that will impact on the lives of Nigerians are implemented. That the threat and ultimatum by a Northern Group has been met with strong condemnation by other stakeholders and even vehemently dismissed as empty, goes further to stress the growing unwillingness of majority of Nigerians to accept any policy short of a general consensus. It then makes sense to emphasize that joint effort should focus on promoting national cohesion through consensus approach in driving national policies.