Finding parallels between the challenges he faced and overcame growing up as a disadvantaged child and the challenges Nigeria currently faces and must have to overcome, Chinedu Okpareke, in an interview with Daily Sun Newspaper after the recently concluded conference dubbed ‘CEOs Agenda: Renewing Confidence’ organized by The Economist-, contended that to truly change a negative position a country needs a combination of: real feeling of frustration with the negative position, a sincere desire for the positive position, a well thought-through plan to get to the desired position (presupposing an ability to develop the plan), and acting on the plan to reach the desired position.

Enabling or limiting forces, no doubt, are expected to spur or slow down the process, but in the responses to such forces lie the execution ability of the entity or organization that is faced with the negative position. Knowing that change does not just happen, he argues that we need to continually ask ourselves to what scale and purpose we have used the ingredients of change.

He believes Nigeria inherited serious structural problems right from its founding as a country, problems which were worsened by its colonial master and subsequently by its leaders and masses.
Unlike Nigeria, his frustration led him to confront his challenges and in a short while, he turned around his poor academic performance to bag distinctions in secondary school and a first class degree in Electronics and Computer Engineering at the Federal University of Science and Technology Owerri, Imo State in 1992.
He also had an MBA from the prestigious Wharton School to emerge a model many Nigerian youths would wish to emulate.

Chinedu has since been actively involved in assisting youths reach the zenith of their potential through mentoring and scholarship programmes he initiated in 1999.
Presently the Chief Executive Officer of Avaizon Consulting Limited , an execution management firm based in Lagos, and subsidiary of Ocean and Oil Holdings Limited, the holding company for Oando Nigeria Plc, he told Daily Sun that his passion is to improve the execution culture in Nigeria, a passion that has found a platform in Avaizon Consulting, a company he started in early 2008 from the spin-off of the management and technical advisory group of Ocean & Oil Investments.
He also spoke on how parents can stimulate the latent potentials of their children to enable them be the best in their chosen career.
Excerpts

My name is Chinedu Okpareke, the Managing Director of Avaizon Consulting Limited, a subsidiary of Ocean and Oil Holding Limited. We are a strategy and execution management company, even though we are more into execution management considering that our strategy activities come only from the standpoint of helping companies to articulate or validate their strategy.

You know that businesses exist for various reasons which vary from one entrepreneur to another.
Some entrepreneurs establish business for profit motives while others do so for non- profit motives. For instance, someone can set up a business for objectives other than the profit the business can generate or the long-term sustenance of the business, but perhaps to popularize the promoter who may be setting up such a business as a launching pad for a political career or for other ulterior motives, such as money laundering.
So what we do in Avaizon is to uncover our client’s real objectives and device means for effectively achieving the objective.

The reason we do this is that we have discovered that a lot of businesses start thinking that they have got it right, but in fact they don’t have it all or require more thinking through.
So our objective is to guide you envision the desired outcome, think through how you can achieve the desired outcome and actively work with you to develop and implement the action plans. We have deviced a unique approach to doing this, and it is that approach and our talented people and work ethic that give us an edge. Moreover, we only measure our success by how much our client’s objectives are met and we tie our success to our client’s success so that we risk a significant portion of our fees to the tangible benefits our work brings to our clients.

It sounds simplistic but that is what we do.
Challenges of satisfying your customers…meet their needs as quickly as possible.
Every nation undergoes a developmental process before emerging as a strong or wealthy state and various nations are in various stages in this process.

However, technology has made the world a very small place whereby a nation now has the opportunity of knowing what other nations are doing and learning from them. But the real challenge is in seeking to know how you can avoid the mistakes other countries have made in their own development process.
Take the case of telecommunications and telephony in Nigeria, which though started with fixed lines but had to leap to mobile telephony because whilst we slowly rolled out fixed line infrastructure, the world moved to mobile telecoms and we either ignore this and continue rolling out fixed line, albeit at a faster rate or we focus instead on rolling out mobile networks and learned the lesson that speed is of the essence when it comes to development of infrastructure and services.

How Nigerian companies can survive without bank loans?
Companies that need funds and are unable to get such funds will not survive.
But the truth of the matter is that banking industry is just one option for financing your business because there are several other options for getting funds to run your business, but a lot of Nigerian entrepreneurs are not fully aware of the various options of financing.

In this wise I can say that a lot however depends on the stage the business is in its life cycle and the scale of your business. We have angel investors, venture capitalists and private equity providers of funds. These types of investors are more structured to be able to take risks, but require to have equity in the business. Many Nigerian entrepreneurs would rather not give up their equity, so where they cannot secure loans from banks, the businesses either grow slower than they actually can or stagnate or die. But I sincerely will not fault the banks as they carry a responsibility to ensure that loans they grant will be repaid. Once they cannot receive those assurance, they either deny the loan application or request for huge collaterals or charge a high interest premium.

For instance, it should realized from the onset that some businesses at their infancy really do not need bank loans, because banks give money to businesses they know have the capacity to pay back.
Bank don’t take risk with you, but they need to be assured that their risk in lending you money is taken care of and the only way they can get that assurance is by conducting due diligence on your business and confirming that it will be viable enough to pay back the loan that was given.

That is the responsibility that banks have to their shareholders and depositors, because the money they are loaning out belong to shareholders and depositors. You will agree with me that that was one reason we are facing the present crisis is because some of them criminally (or out of sheer irresponsibility) gave loans to businesses that don’t have the ability to pay back.

But in all my years interacting with banks and businesses either in Nigeria or elsewhere, I have not seen a bank that has not supported a company that is viable and has the ability to pay back. I have not seen a single case of such happening in Nigeria.

In the course of my work, I have seen a lot of proposals, some of which I cannot put my money into and these are the basis some people are using to judge the banks in the country. But I think it is important we advice the Nigerian entrepreneurs to do their home work very well before going to the banks for loan. They need to develop their businesses and package their proposals in a manner that will make them bankable, because bankers as custodian of depositors’ money will not be allowed to give money to businesses that cannot guarantee repayment.

Coping with unemployment
The role of government is to create right environment that can foster growth and socio economic wellbeing of the people. The other one is intervention through policies in case of an unexpected development like the global financial meltdown which though did not start here, but has affected our economy as a member of the international community.

When such a thing happens, government has an interventionist role to ensure that the impact is not too hard on the citizens. In the case of the banking industry, which is just one of the sectors that has been affected, what government should do is to create policies that can shore up the capital base of the banks, boost liquidity in the banking industry, so that while they are being restructured they extent of job cuts would not as extensive as it is now. However one may also wish to ask whether these banks were right -sized in the first place. Where they staffed in anticipation of a tremendous growth that never was, or were they sized to fight the ‘my bank is bigger than yours’ war that raged between 2005 and 2007.

The unfortunate thing is that most of them were caught in that race for size, a race for ego, a race for. And so if that was the case it means that the growth you had expressed all these years were no real growth. They were growth that was based on ego and shows that some staff may have been sacked on pure economic grounds, or in an effort to trim an over -bloated workforce that was not really contributing to the bottom-line.
For those laid off for economic reasons, it means that an economy that is deep will create opportunity for people with skill to move from one job to another, such that losing your job in the banking industry should not be seen as a life threatening event. You lose one job, and you have the right skills you get another in another industry.

But it is the role of government to create the right environment for entrepreneurial spirit to thrive and for people to pursue their aspirations and goals in life.

Attracting foreign investment to Nigeria
The foremost thing for government to do in times like this is to create an environment that makes investment to thrive. However in order to achieve this, government must do four fundamental things including tax reform, land reform, legal reforms and more focused investor-oriented information campaign.