Hello All,

I promised myself I would not reply, I am no stranger to controversy, funny enough, I enjoy it, better that than being a nobody no one finds interesting enough to talk about. I have also tried to calm my nerves, I do excite easily as Olumide and the many people who I have hired and fired can attest to. I simply am my name, a true rebel, but the foolishness would be in assuming it is without a cause. There is a method to my madness. The madness to this company of mine, this company I am building. This company that started in a 2 bedroom apartment with 3 starting staff members, 2 of whom remain today. A company bootstrapped on way less than you can imagine.

I would write with a wrong assumption that all people are equally intelligent and have understanding, this would not be true. I expect my writing to be a mirror, reflecting the hearts and intents of the readers. Do feel free to dissect and misinterpret. Nothing would give me more pleasure than to have my words rewritten in many ways.

Let me start with the firings. It is said that you do not know what/who you want until you get what you don’t want. I have hired a lot of wrong people, and my experience with hiring now is all the better because of that (In case there are any investors out there). I think the biggest problems we faced started after I left the company for close to 2 months in pursuant of interests I believed would further the cause of the small company I had started barely a year ago. I had hired the wrong person to manage the job against my better judgment. He was humble and brandished his many qualifications. You see I am an entrepreneur, and I become who I need to become to move my company forward. I had no prior experience managing so many people as all my previous projects were mostly investor relations and talking to people who are well experienced and do not need managing. So I got help in the Form of a Mr. A as I shall call him. I oversaw him for a few days and then traveled leaving an open line of communication.

In my travel a lot of things went wrong, I got to learn of his many incompetencies in handling my mostly female staff. I heard of his shyness and his inability to confront issues. All of this was learned after I let him go. We were above 20 persons then, and the whole office had turned into a mad house. The rules were not working, and each day of madness brought another day of more emboldened people who figured that since they could get away with all that noise and vernacular and lackadaisical attitude the day before they could surely continue in that fashion. The culture of discipline and conscientiousness I had striven to create was in a very short term replaced with anarchy fueled by a leadership structure that had no backbone in curbing the excesses of the people. I was told of this by Mr. A who I often told to handle it as the manager. The last straw was when he told me that he could not get across to the people as they have become cantankerous. I was expectedly annoyed that he had led the situation to that extent and then I informed him and another of my trusted staff that I would be coming to Lagos to rebuild the company and weed out the people who have now made it their business to concern themselves with how much the company was making and developing an entitlement mentality based on that. Before my arrival I heard that some of the staff were unionizing and would lead a protest that would see company property damaged. In response to this I had made arrangement with some police persons and there job was simple: make certain that they do not damage company property.

The happenings that led to this event I have not discussed, I should. In the new month we had created a new structure, one that would see the people coming to work on Saturdays. As an e commerce company Saturdays is a good day to make sales as people are more relaxed and at home. So I informed all of them of the new changes and there was no objection.
We did not however immediately begin due to a now former staff handling our social media channel holding us to ransom with new information every weekend on some burial or wedding that was imperative he attended. We soon got to find out that this was in cahoots with the other staff and we have since let him go. We got someone else to handle our social media engagement for that day and very few of the staff came. The other for no tangible reason other than daring the company believing in their self-importance refused to come.

The following Monday was when I was around, myself and the police were present in our office that day. Every person who was not available on that weekend was given a letter of temporary suspension, all they had to do to reinstate themselves was send the company a mail in which they would explain their reason for not coming on the Saturday. You need to understand that the Saturday for me as the head of the company was a litmus test into the many personalities that have metastasized within the establishment. And on that day I got my answer in the form of a protest. The people had refused to read the letter, some of them went as far as wiping off the contact details on the company phones which we gave them. This contacts were built up over several months of advertising as millions of naira was spent in getting them, and in a fit of unrighteous anger they cost the company millions.

The people who wiped out our contacts where not paid, in fact we should have sued them, this is something I am still seriously considering . The value of the damage done did not in any correspond with their salary, but being the forward thinking person I am, I let it go, but I am now having second thoughts.

The manager whose leadership led to the decline of the company culture was also not paid. You may have seen his comment here or there. The reason for this was his sudden change of behavior and insistence on getting paid for the time he has spent after seeing that my coming back to Lagos from Accra would bring questions that he would have a lot of difficulty answering. He began to threaten me over the phone and then I saw his threats as a last ditch effort from a deserter whose presence or lack of presence had caused much damage he would grab on to anything and run, I decided to withhold his salary (which was 2 weeks away from being due) until I saw what damage he was running from. Let us just say he was wise to have run.

Now, for the Op. He was formerly a communications person with us but his interest in inventory led me to put him there. His salary was always paid promptly, and he was let go because of his pride. He is a prideful man. He would not be told what to do, and would not respect any authority figure especially one who had rose above the ranks and became a manager that he had to answer to, my new manager, who still works with me and alerted me to this page. They started the same time, but as they say, the cream always rises to the top. This same OP was in charge of the company camera’s one of which is missing. I am not saying he stole it. All I am saying is that he was careless enough to allow something under his watch be stolen. This was only found that after we had let him go.

The process of building a company is very hard work, not for the faint of heart, or light skinned person (As in not thick, not complexion ). The only way I respond to this is to educate, I like to educate people, it is one thing I do that brings me joy, the imparting of knowledge to another the same way those I look up to impart knowledge to me.

Again I would mention our FORMER company structure for communications persons here.
In a bid not to hire free loaders giving the fact that very little monitoring is actually possible with the communications staff we give them targets. Result after all is the best way to judge a person’s effort at least that was my thinking in finding a minimalist way of managing the people we had. In this structure people where given targets and provided with many potential clients through our advertising to enable them be able to convert this potential clients into actual buying clients. This was the structure, this was agreed upon and everyone who was employed was well aware of this. This structure did scare away a lot of people I must agree, but it was our only way of ensuring that we had dedicated staff.

Now this structure was first of all such that you had to reach a target before you get paid, the aim of course was to motivate. Our findings is that it did little to motivate. To me it seems that the concept of putting the future earnings of a person in their hands is a very scary concept for most people. Most people get employment because the concept of starting a business and owning their future is a scary concept indeed. But some thrived in that environment, they are still with me now and they would be the people who lead this company in the future. Some people took as much as 3 months to meet their target, some we just had to let go because we did not see them being able to meet our target. We paid them for the target they have met and bade them goodbye.

The target was set based on what I and my partner where able to achieve by ourselves when we first started this company, it was a big mistake in thinking that this would translate to other people. So for them it was unrealistic.

On quality control:
The company when it started understood that the biggest problem to selling low priced jewelry items online would be quality. People want to buy something worth N100 at the value of something for N10,000. We simply are unrealistic on quality here and anything that falls below our expectation we shout the S word.
In a bid to moderate our quality we tried using different chemicals to coat our items. This did not work as advertised. We then tried buying more expensive items and cutting short our returns in the process, the complaint was still same. We then did some research into companies like tiffany amber and other jewelry companies that sell items within our price range and much higher; the people buying items there understand that except they are buying stainless steel or sterling silver or real gold, this items would fade and it is up to them to make sure they are properly maintained. The problem however is that Nigeria is a very humid environment, this is not good for jewelry. Except you are living in an air conditioned home and have an air conditioned car that sees you not sweating it would be impossible for the jewelry items to last that long.

We changed suppliers numerous times based on our initial ignorance, but we soon found that the problem was not with us, but in the environment in which we are selling these items.
Currently we sell less of jewelry items with much metal and more of items with less metal to reduce for the incidence of rest or blackening which is very common. A simple google search on Jumia and Konga would show you that this is a widespread problem, one that we have begun managing to the best of our ability.

Right Now At True Rebel.
Currently we have happy staffs who work diligently and are disciplined. Their salaries are not delayed and they do not get paid on commission because we trust them to put in their best effort as well as having a system of check and balances that makes certain of that. We are a small company that have had a few missteps along the way. We are still learning and we are most definitely growing.
The logistic department is another department that we are concerned about, but we are currently putting a structure in place that would ensure for fairness on the side of the company and the logistic person.
The company would grow thanks to all our mistake.
The first time I rode a bike I scratched my heel, then I won a local bike riding completion a few years later. This is how life works pretty much. Make mistakes and learn from them, and we are learning.

Thank you for reading. We (I) would NOT be making any comments on this again. Anyone with a real grudge should lawyer up. We are here at No 13 Munirat Aleje Street, Ikorodu.
For those who learned from this and need some kind of coaching in building a business I have decided to offer free advice on my twitter handle

@folorunso_m
Cheers!

Application is still open.

Hello,

The True Rebel Fashion Company is looking to hire a graphic artist at our Ikorodu office in Lagos.

Interested persons should please send in an email including previous work done or a link to previous work done to truerebelng@gmail.com


Thank you.

www.truerebel.com.ng

The job is still available.

Hello,

The True Rebel Fashion Company is looking to hire web designers/developers that are conversant with shopify themes.

Interested persons should be based in Lagos.

You can call or text us 08170987104

Thank you.

This happened at our office yesterday. The drink was fermented and had to be thrown away.

We are obviously not going to be buying chivita again.