Game” – Temple Obike

Passion is 80% of the Success Game – Temple Obike

Temple Obike’s journey is full of detours, and interestingly, the different turns, albeit unconnected, turned out to be a guiding light to the advertising career path he had always wanted. He is the founder of Brand Envoy Africa, an integrated marketing communications company based in Lagos, Nigeria.

In this interview with Business Elites Africa, Temple talks about his struggles, growth, and how to build a successful business in Africa or elsewhere, among other issues.

How did you become a Brand Strategist? Please share your story with us.

I want to believe my passion for branding and Public Relations started in my adolescent years because I had always had a keen interest in people. I had always wanted to know what motivated people to behave the way they do. This was also because I come from a family of six siblings, where I’m the last child. So, I started from a place of keen observation with my siblings, which naturally spread out. It got me to a point where I started getting interested in what makes an individual or a group behave the way they do, which is what we call psychology.

Along the way, I noticed that certain things make people react in certain ways. People react to words, and things they see. It dawned on me that a good story was one of the major things required to get people to react. So, I will say this was where my passion began. I set out knowing I was going to get into advertising. I knew I just had to get into the communication line.

Did that inform your course of study in school?

Considering where I come from, parents want their children to be something else. Of course, my parents would have been happy if I turned out to be a medical doctor because I did take a keen interest in biology, which happens to be one of the things you notice when you are interested in humans. As much interest as I had in biology, I don’t think that was what I wanted to do, but my parents felt otherwise.

So everything moved in the direction they wanted. I studied Cell Biology and Genetics at the University for my B.sc and while there joined an International youth Non-profit where I was a project manager carrying out projects at orphanages and speaking to individuals in slums around Lagos. Post-bachelors, things got to a point where I knew I needed to do something different for my master’s program, so I did an MSc first in IT Business and Psychology afterwards. Something was still void so I took a professional course in Branding and PR. This was when my full-blown love for advertising started. Even in Uni, while studying Cell Biology and

Genetics, I had a flare for art, Public health, and loved everything that had to do with marketing and communication.

I’d throw myself to every opportunity that was out there. In fact, I set up my first advertising agency in Uni, which metamorphosed into what I currently run although I had to re-brand subsequently. I set it up while still in school.

What job did you take on after you left school?

It was actually quite interesting when I left school. I had secured an advertising job while in school where I worked for 4 years, but my next job after that was with a financial advisory firm for the next 3 years. I became a research analyst. From there, I moved up gradually and got another job with a content acquisition and creation company who I stayed with for another 3 years. I started as

|| Interview a content manager for them here in Nigeria, but gradually I got West Africa under me and handled the Middle East for them as well. I was the content development manager for East Africa and West Africa where I and my colleagues had signed up the top musicians and KOL’s at the time. Afterwards, I started an IT company with a couple of friends. We were supplying content to the telco’s such as MTN and 9mobile. It was an interesting journey, but after a while, I realised that I needed to return to my first love, advertising and branding. So, I gradually pulled back, realigned myself and went back to advertising and branding.

How has the journey been?

I think this is a very important question. We all get to a crossroad in life. The first thing you do is to stop everything and cut out irrelevant activities because at that point, all you should be doing is inwardly reflecting. Everything you are going through is internal, so you must trust your internal convictions more. All the externalised activities at that point may pose distractions, anything happening outside of you will support the fact that you should be doing this or doing that.

The greatest conviction you need is peace of mind because whatever decision you make eventually, as long as you feel at peace about it, that is your biggest pointer.

To be candid, it has been quite an interesting journey. It was a path of self-discovery because many other things have come into play. There are days you wake up feeling confused and not questioning what you are doing but other days aren’t like that.

Sometime in 2012, I had to go back and see if I could try my hands at psychotherapy, which was interesting because it was not popular then. I got a part-time job with a second Non-Governmental Organization (NGO). One of the things I was doing was writing copies for them. They couldn’t pay me, but I was still writing copies for them. I came to love what they were doing along the line because they were visibly impacting lives. It got me thinking and encouraged me to acquire more knowledge in the field. Within four years that I was with them, I had gone back to school for a master’s program in Psychology to add to what I already had and before I knew it, it took me down another path: Psychotherapy. I started counselling people, but in the evenings, the NGO would still pass on copies that needed to be written. So, it was like me having the best of both worlds at the time and made me see my PR journey differently. Beyond what you write, somebody at the other end gets to feel the impact of how good the job you do is or how bad it is. So, it has just been a potpourri of experiences for me.

You mentioned there was a time when you were confused and had to question what you were doing with your life. How do you get past it when you are in that kind of zone?

The second thing you must do is to take account of the skillsets that come naturally to you, which is what we call gifts. What is it that you are gifted in? Once you can find what your gifts are, you can ask yourself, ‘is everything I am doing now around areas of gifting?’ If yes, ‘can I move this gift to a talent?’ This is because people can see what you are doing when it becomes a talent(something you become the “go-to” guy for). From then onwards, you can move it to a point where it becomes a skill, where it starts attracting money. But before you move from talent to the skill stage, you must have put in some work. That is why you need to go back and re-educate yourself. Just expand your horizon in the field so that you can start attracting money to it.

Failure is inevitable in every man’s life; how do you handle failure?

Talking about failure, I have failed at plenty of things, trust me. If you have never failed, you have never learnt. Failure is an intrinsic part of our everyday lives. When you fail, it knocks the wind off your sail. Imagine a man or woman that has never failed, it almost makes you believe that you are invincible, but once that invincibility matrix is out, you are faced with the reality. So what it does is that it gives you raw objectivity in whatever it is you want to do, and it humbles you. That is the beauty that comes out of failure.

These days, almost every young person wants to own his own business. He wants to be called a CEO. What’s the reality of running a business in a country like Nigeria?

Well, I don’t mean to dissuade anybody from starting a business because it is the ultimate dream, but there is something I want all of us to know, and I think it’s a good opportunity to mention this. There is what I call the ‘toxic hustle culture.’ Everybody wants to make that one million dollars and leave their job. In fact, right now, people who have 9 to 5 are almost being shamed for being employees because popular media has ill-glamorised owning your own business. This has produced a trend where ‘due-process’ is being undermined or made to appear foolish. On the contrary, It is a fundamental factor in building anything meaningful.

I can give you a very prime example. If you tell me you own an advertising agency and you have not been able to write a copy, you have not been able to go out and handle marketing operations; you have not been able to close a sale, you have not been able to put your finances in order, at least sit down and know your basics finances - like inflow and outflow, if you have not been able to walk through all these departments and understand it at the onset, at least at the basic level, before you now hire people who are better than you to handle them, then you are a disaster waiting to happen.

Those lessons you failed will come back to haunt you at some point. So, the process is critical. The toxic hustle culture is killing a generation because everybody wants to drop-out like the zuckerbergs of this world and make it big (nobody ever remembers he had an option from his father to either run a Mc-donald franchise or go to Harvard). Firstly not everyone gets into Harvard without some level of work being put in and not all parents hand over Big-Mac Franchises as options to their kids. Most do not want to go through the process. So, yes, it is good to start your business but while romanticising with the idea of becoming the next Dangote or Elumelu, be willing to put in the work because I see a lot of people who want to start businesses but have no incline to what it takes to be in that field. They don’t even know who the top performers in the sector are. So how on earth are you supposed to survive in the business if you don’t know how it functions? If you don’t know the nitty-gritty and the in and out of business. It is dead on arrival, pretty much.

When you started Brand Envoy Africa, what was your first marketing strategy?

Let me backtrack a little. When I was in University, my first major gig was a marketing campaign with Hewlett Packard (HP), which was a huge morale booster for me, and from that point onwards, I never looked back and dreamt big. There was a combination of failures and successes, but I kept pushing.

When it was time to start my company, I knew I had to get the branding right from the get-go starting with the name. I wanted a Pan-African brand, so I named it Brand Envoy Africa. You don’t brand yourself locally if you know you want to be international, that’s why it started with the name, but beyond the name, there was something else that was important, launching out.

This is where the experience you have garnered all along comes into play. That’s why I advise people to resist the urge to throw themselves out there hurriedly; it’s important you test the market with your thought process first. So I started writing brand articles and marketing articles. I started researching, reading, and putting out my thoughts, and my thought would attract people, and people would seek out the writer. That was how I pushed myself out; after a while, partnerships, introductions, radio interviews, and speaking opportunities came. You see, it’s a chain of events. You must negotiate the path, and you must navigate it intentionally, which is a mistake a lot of people make. They first want to become popular and put themselves out there as the CEO or founder of XYZ company, but the foundation is faulty. Put your thought process out and let your thought process attract the people who are for you and then you grow with the right crowd. That was how I started.

How does one run a successful business in Nigeria?

If you want to run a successful business in Nigeria and any other place in the world, the first thing I think you must have is resilience. I don’t think life by itself gives you it’s best things easily. I believe, by default, nobody is supposed to make anything out of this life unless a version of you becomes valuable enough to attract and hold those things, and it’s a personal opinion. So resilience is the first thing you must onboard; your tenacity must be there because you will fail.

The second thing I think you must have is the willingness to adapt because there are days your flexibility would be required. There are days you set out on a path, and somewhere down the line, you have to change course and adapt. There are days you come into the meeting room, and a simple statement renders all the presentations you practised null and void. Right there, you need to create another presentation without creating another presentation.

The last thing on my list is that you must genuinely be interested in people. You must have a heart for people because your workforce is actually the lifeblood of what you do.

Let’s assume you knew everything and had to do it yourself. How long would you last? You should have great people skills. You should be able to manage people, you should be a good manager, and while you are at it, you should be human. I think that is what it takes.

If you knew what you know now, what would you do differently?

That is a million-dollar question. If I knew what I know now, like 10 to 15 years ago, I would have tried everything that came to my head, even when I felt finances were an impediment. I would have still attempted because, in actual fact, the more you come along in life, the more you notice that the problem is not really financing; the problem is you.

I could have written down all the concepts that came to my head. I could have had a jotter I moved around with every single day because the higher up you go, the lesser time you have and the lesser time you have, the lesser opportunity you have to do that same thing you love doing, which is why the higher up you go, you hire more people to help relieve you of time so that you can go back to doing the thing you used to love but it never really happens that way because the Interview || higher up you go, the more responsibilities you see, like having a family, children looking up to you, there are external dependents and all of that.

So it is actually a race. It’s tasking on your time, so when you have time at the onset, do every single thing that comes to you. Write every single idea, and write down every single concept. There was a concept I needed to go back and clean up and use for a campaign, a concept I wrote down 10 years ago, and it was still fresh to me. All I needed to do was just revamp it and make it relevant to the times.

There is so much ado about passion; some will say you don’t need to have passion for a business as long as it’s a lucrative venture. What is your opinion?

In my opinion, passion is 80% of the success game because that’s what keeps you going through tough times. One of the things you must teach yourself is self-motivation which is a branch of emotional intelligence. It gives you an opportunity to clap for yourself when no one else is there to cheer you on. There are days you will be in the dark, and you might be there with friends, siblings or a spouse by your side, who knows you are hurting, but words might fail you to communicate exactly what the hurt is. It’s a place deep and vulnerable that you struggle to express it. So one thing that keeps you going is your passion because that is the only thing that can advise you in the dark place nobody else can reach.

When all is said and done, and you are in that deep dark confused space, you first need to ask yourself why you started the business in the first place. You have to constantly remind yourself of the reason you started. I have heard people say cash is the ultimate motivation, but I have seen people who have all the cash but zero passion and motivation, and at some point, they had to leave that line of business to look for something else. Have you seen a multi-millionaire leaving his business empire to go and start art? That’s the power of passion.