Adewale Fayinka's FBM Blog

It is that special season of the year, again. The countdown for 2018 is gradually coming to a stop. Festivities are in the air. People are bracing up to meet the New Year full of hope and great expectations. Every one dreams big for the year where everything falls into place. To achieve our dreams, we need to set goals and take action. Setting goals in life is a fundamental requirement for success. Setting goals allow us to create our future in advance. Setting goals helps us grow and expand, and allow us to push ourselves to transform in extraordinary ways that might not be possible without setting stretch goals for ourselves. We all set goals, right?  Every year, we start by making New Year resolutions. But how much of that did we follow through? Are you setting your goals effectively? Will your goals transform your life in the ways you want? These are the fundamental questions we hope to address in this blog post. Many times people think they understand how to set goals,

There are four key components to Emotional Intelligence. When these are taken together, they are referred to as Emotional Intelligence Quotient (EQI). Emotional Intelligence is our ability to recognize and manage our feelings so that they are expressed appropriately. Exercising emotional intelligence help us create harmonious and productive relationships at work or in life.   Soft skills are largely accepted as personality traits, interpersonal skills, social skills, emotional intelligence (EQ), and more that drive people to operate. They typically compliment hard skills to help people accomplish goals and/or objectives. People who possess a high level of soft skills are more successful. They sell better, get promotions, handle people well, communicate effectively, and are just overall more important than those that lack soft skills. The famous adage goes, “You get hired for hard skills, but get fired for soft skills.” Businesses are stuck in a soft skills dilemma. They want

"We will take all your jobs.” That was Sophia, addressing an audience of 60,000 world technology leaders at Web Summit, the world’s largest technology conference in Lisbon, Portugal.  Sophia was an humanoid activated by Hong Kong's Hanson Robotics, a robot powered by artificial intelligence (AI),  with rubber covering instead of human skin, cameras controlled by computer algorithms, she can recognize individuals, follow faces, sustain eye contact, and process speech. She can have conversations using a natural language subsystem and had recently been upgraded with functional legs and the ability to walk. CELEBRITY HUMANOID ROBOT Within 2 years, Sophia had already accomplished what it takes humans a lifetime to achieve - she was named the United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP) first ever Innovation Champion, become the first robot to be honored with citizenship of  another country, and have addressed capacity crowds of scientists, business leaders and res

Nigeria was a fast growing country with a population of more than 180 million citizens, and has the biggest GDP on the continent. The acquisition of Ensure Insurance Plc gives us full access to this key insurance market in Africa and marks a major milestone for Allianz’s long-term growth strategy on the continent … it will allow us to offer the best products and services to Nigerian customers in both personal and commercial lines.  That was the enthusiastic statement of  Coenraad Vrolijk,    the Regional CEO Africa, Allianz Group at the conclusion of its take-over of 99.03% stake holdings in Ensure Insurance from Global Oak Holdings in July 2018. The acquisition of Ensure simply followed the established trend since 2014 when  AXA SA acquired majority stake in Mansard Insurance Plc for $246m, South Africa’s Liberty Holdings acquired 75 per cent stake in UNIC Insurance Plc for $12m in 2017, and Sunu Assurances Vie Cote d’Ivoire, acquired 60% of Equity Assurance Plc in 2018. A S

Give me a lever long enough, and a Fulcrum on which to place it, and I will move the World. This is the third and conclusive part of our article of the above title. In the first and second article, we outlined the 3 ways that any owner of a small business or professional service can grow their business. In the first part, we mentioned the need to create new customers through the use of the 10 strategies discussed. You can get the full article here: http://bit.ly/2zfCcjv. In the second part, we also mentioned that you need to consciously increase the average transaction value of each of your clients. You can get the second part here: http://bit.ly/2RloS4g. In the third part to complete your master plan to grow your small business or professional practice, you need to increase the frequency of purchase of your products or services by each of your customers. In this period of harsh economic realities, this look like a daunting task, but it really is not. Like in the first and seco

“The best kept secret in the global economy today is this: When your service is awesome, you get so stinking rich you have to buy new bags to carry all the money home.” Tom Peters In our last discussion on the above topic, we did mention that there are 3 ways to grow your small business enterprise or professional service. Number one is to increase the numbers of your new customers. We then discussed 10 strategies you can effectively use to achieve that objective.    Today, we will discuss the second of the 3 ways – increasing the average transaction value per customer. The objective is to cultivate your existing customers to buy more, and buy your products or services more often. To achieve this objective, we will discuss 6 different strategies. UPSELL AND CROSS-SELL : Up-selling means to graduate your customer to a higher and usually more costly product alternative which you are aware is capable of delivering greater benefit and better performance. Cross-selling means that yo

Because it's purpose is to create a Customer, the Business has two - and only two functions: Marketing and Innovation. Marketing and Innovation produce results - all the rest are costs. You have probably heard that there are only three ways to grow any business or professional practice. Yes, you heard right. 1.       Increase your number of customers. 2.       Increase your average transaction value. 3.       Increase the frequency of repurchase. So, the million dollar question – how do you as owner of a small business enterprise increase the number of your customers, their average transaction value, and the frequency of their repurchase from your business? The average owners of small businesses spend a small fortune trying to get new customers to buy their products, or to get a bigger percentage of market share. Great move!  But the average owner of a small business probably don’t know that the cost of getting a new customer is significantly higher than t