In life and especially in business, it is always easier to execute a new, hard and great mission than a marginal one. Men and women easily sign up for things which are GREAT than things which are ephemeral. Yes, it would be easier to execute Tesla mission than another typical car company like Ford or Peugeot. While great people will line up for Tesla, many would be unresponsive for another Ford or Peugeot.
At different levels, a Call to Mission requires extremely committed people. Even in your business, you must have that capacity to find and recruit people that can help you execute a great mission. You must prepare them. Equip them. And push them to come and get glory.
As a founder, that is your challenge. When no one wants to work with you, it means you could be trying to solve a mundane problem. Sure, you are fixing a friction and you are solving a business problem in the market. Nonetheless, it is not challenging enough to inspire the best you need to help you execute. If you have that talent paralysis, you may need to go back to the drawing board. Yes, you need to distill the vision further. That is the only way you can get believers for the mission.
Why do we need a business? We need a business because market is not friction-less. If markets have been friction-less, buyers and sellers will not need firms in between them. In other words, if a saver can find a borrower without going through a bank to put that money, and then the bank will go ahead to lend to the borrower from that money, we will not have a need for a bank. In other words, the reason we have a bank is because there is a friction for a saver and a borrower to do business directly. The bank comes in as an intermediary to reduce that level of friction. For doing that, the bank is paid.
When Mark Zuckerberg says he wants to “bring the world closer together“, via Facebook, he has put a great vision. It is certainly new and it is worthwhile. The newness and hardness are not necessarily a function of technology, but rather the aspirational quality of the mission at hand. When Google says it wants to organize the world’s information, it has something many people, across generations, would commit to help it execute.
In our age, you can sign up a whole village if you say you are going to the moon. But if you say you want to dig the ground, many will not show up. Going to the moon is new and harder; men and women would be inspired by that possibility. Digging the ground is easier and stale; few people would want that. The best talent would congregate for the moon business while the digging ground one will struggle.
It is counterintuitive – founders who typically succeed are those who go out for new and hard challenges! They easily mobilize the world to execute what they want done. The other founders [who play safe] struggle to find believers, and they typically fail because the best do not want to work on marginal problems.
The deal is clear: find a way to communicate a greater purpose with passion so that people can join to help you. I want to “unite African payment” is far better than I want to have a “platform for people to pay”. I want to “help people live fuller and healthier lives” is better than “I want to build a clinic”. That distillation anchors many things, and you must get the right message for your startup. You need that, if you want the best to wear your company badge.
He was exiled after he survived boiling oil. It was a banishment, a common punishment during the imperial period, to the Island of Patmos (Greece), about a 5-hour ferry trip from Kos Island. In downtown Athens, you would see the signposts pointing to the island towns and cities like Thessaloniki.
John was sent to Patmos under the persecution of Roman emperor Domitian. There, John wrote one of the most important Books of the New Testament. As a Scripture Union kid in secondary school, it was the only Book of the Bible that I did all to avoid reading in the night. The Revelation is revealing and totally ecclesiastical: stars, horns, kingdoms, and more. I call it the Future Book because reading it tells me the possibilities of future science!
Domitian was troubled. When boiling oil could not touch John, every attendee in the Colosseum accepted John’s message. From Rome, they sent him to Patmos, about 33 hours on a modern ferry. The emperor did not want to risk another loss of subjects; he could not predict the next miracle.
It happens in some companies: the most brilliant staff members have strong visions. Many people are threatened. They could shine and the Boards would prefer them to lead. So, to stop them, the simpletons would conspire to send them to far away branches where they would be forgotten.
Interestingly, like John, those great workers, right in those branches would see great revelations of the companies. Yes, from the branches, they would understand the companies better through better perspectives and insights. John would not have written Revelation if he had remained in Rome. In Patmos, he had all the time for the angel to work with him. Indeed, without the banishment to the Isle of Patmos, a largely forgotten island, the revelation to John would not have happened. And without his experiences in Rome, his mindset would not have been prepared to understand some of the most fascinating descriptions in Revelation.
That is it – in the wilderness of those far away branches, we can see a future, unbounded by the noise of the headquarters. Like John who saw a big vision of the future more than anyone, we can do great things for where we work or in our sector. John who later served as Bishop of Edessa (Turkey) triumphed: the banishment promoted him to see a bigger world than Rome, and wrote the Revelation.
Going to “Patmos” is critical in a globalizing world [we hope you go on strength and peace]. When they send you to China, Brazil and Africa [out of New York], or to Kano, Owerri and Uyo [out of Lagos], they may be plotting your path to a greater mission in your call. In “Patmos”, men have been picked in Walmart, Caterpillar, and Coca Cola to lead. Yes, in Patmos, and many years ago, UBA picked a man from its Port Harcourt branch (not from the headquarters) to run its New York branch. That man is an Executive Director today.
Do not be frightened if Patmos comes: your great vision could be there. And that vision will bring glory through a successful career.
COMMENT FROM LINKEDIN
On the LinkedIn feed, the conversation is engaging. Here are selected ones.
A frightening and compelling piece, no doubt. As it happened with John in Patmos, same went for Joseph in Egypt, you cannot stop a destiny whose time has come.
There are many lessons here, depending on which side of the divide one sees things from. Two things are well pronounced: vision and conspiracy. The latter is employed to push the brightest and finest minds away from where they could shine the brightest. And in doing so, if there’s an element of the former (vision), those brilliant minds aren’t completely removed from the organisation, which would be a total catastrophe, but rather they are sent to less glamourous locations, with the idea of subduing them; only to discover later that it was actually a pathway to glory!
But there’s a challenge, especially in the public sector, where you may not even be allowed to be sent to the villages, rather your complete annihilation or destruction is sought, thereby denying the sector any chance of producing its own Johns and Josephs in the future.
For a determined individual, where you are sent is immaterial, a bright mind is always the same, irrespective of location. There will always be conspiracy, but we hope that vision will follow it closely, for survival of organisations.
In a piece yesterday, I wrote that Nigerian telcos should build contract- subscription-based billing system to overcome the challenges of WhatsApp and other OTT solutions. Simply, if the user had paid a fee, under a monthly plan, the telco would become ambivalent to whatever the user is doing with his or her phone. That way, the telco would preserve its ARPU (average revenue per user). This is the idea as noted, and I do think entrepreneurs can make it happen, not the telcos themselves.
Telcos should invest in business model research and find ways to move from PAYG to subscription-based billing. That way, they would care less on what people do with their phones on their networks as the subscription must have covered those expenses. Regulating technology would be extremely dangerous. If we allow Telcos to succeed, the newspapers can ask for the same consideration since Facebook and Google are decimating their business models also. When you are dealing with aggregators, you rarely win because aggregators operate with near-zero marginal cost. Yes, their products are extremely valuable to the users even when they pay absolutely nothing [sure, I get it – privacy of data]. If you hit them hard, you would lose the soul of your business.
… You need contract subscription billing so that you become ambivalent to whatever the customer is using. That way, you preserve ARPU. Yet, an entrepreneur can help build the subscription ecosystem for the telcos. That would be a huge business in the land.
Interestingly, that is a very big business opportunity and the grandfather of any deal any entrepreneur could strike with the telcos. You can build that system, and get telcos to use them in their pricing and business modeling. Building it would require integrating the customer biometric data from telcos, NIMC (National Identity Management Commission) database and possibly BVN (Bank Verification Number). The telcos will pay fees to use your system as they develop their products to serve customers under subscription billing. These products will be monthly plans differentiated by data usage carefully tied to monthly fees.
I do not expect the telcos to do this, as if they do it, it would be a disparate world of silos [exactly what we have for the biometrics capture with the SIM registration]. If an entrepreneur does it, great things would happen as adoption would skyrocket and the challenges of WhatsApp would be managed.
Yet, this would be a tough challenge. First, you would need the telcos in order to help them, and getting them to work together may be extremely challenging [MTN may not see any value helping 9Mobile by coming together]. Second, the government data has not evolved and no one knows for certain when that will be ready. Third, BVN is largely a private data for NIBSS which makes it nearly impossible for anyone to have access to the comprehensive database. Of course, the toughest things are usually the best opportunities. If you make them happen, glory awaits. So, if you can, go for it.
I hope this video is fake! Otherwise, Nigeria is in a big mess.
Inspector General of Police, Ibrahim Idris, was in Kano on Monday to commission the Nigeria Police Force Technical Intelligence Unit. While there, the IG gave a speech on…something that is not quite clear. Reading the speech out loud from a sheet of paper, the IG kept missing his words, correcting himself and rereading. He was eventually assisted by another official, but he still was unable to continue with the speech.(link)
The Guardian has a good piece on telcos and their revenue challenges, capturing everything with this line: “ARPU, which was around $22 in 2005, has dropped by 81 per cent to $4.14 as at April, 2018. ARPU is a measure used primarily by consumer communications, digital media, and networking companies, defined as the total revenue divided by the number of subscribers.” This explains the sector and why WhatsApp and other OTT services are real problems to the telco operators. In short, if you look at the financials of most African telcos, they do not look encouraging. The asset utilization efficiency is very poor and bigger investments are not necessarily growing revenue, at parity. They have to deal with those issues immediately even as the problems mutate: you do not know what would come after Skye and WhatsApp with blockchain on the horizon.
A study carried out by Tekedia, with focus on operators, showed that though competition has been much in the sector, the OTT services have seriously reduced operators’ revenue, not only in Nigeria, but across the globe. […]
Already, Ovum, an independent analyst and consultancy had revealed that the growing adoption of OTT services by customers instead of traditional telecoms services will occasion global revenue loss of $386 billion over a period of six years (2012 – 2018) for the traditional telecom operators, thus endangering network development. […]
“Telecom Operators (Telcos) incur the costs to invest a lot on network infrastructure in order to provide basic and innovative services to customers, yet OTT players make the money,” Association of Licensed Telecommunication Operators of Nigeria (ALTON) said.
The Most Important Job in Telecoms
To deal with these myriad of issues, the telcos need a game plan. That brings me to the most important job in telecommunication today. That job must drive a smart business model that will handle growth, not just in subscriber number but Naira and US dollars. I will call that job title – Chief Anti-Disintermediation Officer [CAO].
Disintermediation is the reduction in the use of intermediaries between producers and consumers, for example by investing directly in the securities market rather than through a bank.(Wikipedia)
A good example is the voice to data transition and the emergence of messaging platforms – like WhatsApp – that disintermediate SMS and voice calls.(link)
There are several trends that suggest that in the long run the OTTs will get major market equity, eventually taking over the market and pushing out regular telecom providers; just by simply constantly evolving their service, mostly in terms of accessibility, availability and quality. (link)
Nigeria has been using the subscriber base as a sign of progress in the industry; it is good for the government and the citizens but for the telecoms, the ARPU is where the pain points are right now. For the telcos, today, you need at least 5 people to make the same relative revenue in 2005 from one subscriber (ignoring inflation), in US dollars. So, you have to invest to support 5 people and at the end, the revenue is not even up to what one person contributed in 2005. There is no business that can survive under that framework. Let me expand that thought below…
In my analysis, the telcos have increased services they offer to those 5 users by 400% [data, video and OTT with the last two kids of data] even as the stress on telecom infrastructure has jumped in excess of 700%, compared with 2005 numbers. In other words, the telcos are supporting 5 users with 400% more services and those users are using more 700% resources when benchmarked with 2005 numbers. Yet, the revenues from the 2018 five users are not cumulatively up to what a single subscriber paid in 2005. Using MTN Nigeria numbers, in Q1 2018, they got only $4.14 from each subscriber for a total of $20.70 for five subscribers. In 2005, one subscriber generated $22 when the operator offered nothing but voice and SMS.
You inject more cash but the outcome is lesser revenue even as the subscriber base is growing. In Nigeria, specifically, the path today will lead to more erosion of value as it has been evident that telcos have been UNABLE to change the trajectory if you look at the ARPU of the leading brands since 2005: As noted, MTN’s ARPU has dropped from the high of $22 in 2005 to $4.14 today. I have also checked Airtel Africa (it does not report numbers for Airtel Nigeria), it is the same outcome. A course correction is urgently needed in the sector.
To help me understand the impact of WhatsApp and other OTT solutions, I pulled MTN Group financial report in 2006. In 2005 (yes 2005), MTN Nigeria was recording ARPU of $22. Today, it is $4.14. Sure, competition has a huge role there but I do think the OTT services are largely to be blamed. When the ARPU dropped to $18 in 2006, we already had Glo and Airtel (you take the name, Econet, Zain, Celtet etc). So, the reduction of ARPU is not just on direct industry competition, the OTT is having a real effect.
The Way Forward
As I have noted, there is a clear solution on how to fix this paralysis. I also provided clear roadmaps here.
Telcos should invest in business model research and find ways to move from PAYG to subscription-based billing. That way, they would care less on what people do with their phones on their networks as the subscription must have covered those expenses. Regulating technology would be extremely dangerous. If we allow Telcos to succeed, the newspapers can ask for the same consideration since Facebook and Google are decimating their business models also. When you are dealing with aggregators, you rarely win because aggregators operate with near-zero marginal cost. Yes, their products are extremely valuable to the users even when they pay absolutely nothing [sure, I get it – privacy of data]. If you hit them hard, you would lose the soul of your business.
They need someone with vision as a CAO with focus on fixing this paralysis. Otherwise, the night is near because the OTT services continue to evolve. You need contract subscription billing so that you become ambivalent to whatever the customer is using. That way, you preserve ARPU. Yet, an entrepreneur can help build the subscription ecosystem for the telcos. That would be a huge business in the land.
A good example is the voice to data transition and the emergence of messaging platforms – like WhatsApp – that disintermediate SMS and voice calls. To counter this threat the telcos move from a per minute / megabyte voice-based plan to a tiered data plan e.g., 5GB for $30, 10GB for $50 …where voice and SMS are free. The simplistic strategy is to preserve customer ARPU and then you are ambivalent about messenger applications because you have preserved the revenue.
