allAfrica.com: Nigeria: Our People Don't Understand Businesses Associated With Airports

Nigeria: Our People Don't Understand Businesses Associated With Airports - Ogunbajo, AVIS Boss

YOUTHFUL Kolawole Ogunbajo is the managing director of Avis Nigeria, the global car rentals giant.

Ogunbajo cuts the picture of someone who is impatient with the system, as it were, in his country, Nigeria, and he has reasons to be, as will be seen in the conversation below which held in his Apapa office. Responding to a question about airports, his impatience with the system became palpable when he said that running efficient, friendly airports is not as difficult as it is made out here, and subscribes fully to the bid to concession airports if it will make them more business friendly.

HOW do you think the car rentals business could thrive in our kind of economy?

For car rentals in Nigeria, I would say it is the best in terms of providing short term car rentals to individuals and corporate bodies and big organizations that do not want to bother with fleet management as part of their services and with the introduction of renting of cars in Nigeria we are here to provide such service. I've been all over the country in the past seven months and we are located in Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt and Warri and in the next three months we'll be in Uyo, Calabar, Yenagoa and Benin.

What is the profile of the business like; how do you get customers? How do you get people to patronize you?

That's a very good question. Now you would agree with me that the world is a global village now and there are different means of communicating with the customers. What we are doing is to create the awareness in terms of advertisement - advertising through different media, the radio, the television, the website, direct marketing of our services with individuals and organizations and God has helped us to move fast because we are on the global Avis network and we are connected to seven thousand, two hundred (7,200) locations in one hundred and twenty-one (121) countries all over the world. So, with that performance, the business flows in on the individual side and on the organization side as well and that helps a lot and that's part of the advantages of having a franchise.

What is the competition like?

In Nigeria today, there's no competition because we don't concentrate on the competition. Though we study them, we don't concentrate on the competition because, as I said, the market has been going well.

What is the clientèle structure like?

I would say our clients are divided into three groups. I would say the first one, which is about fifty per cent, comprises Nigerian individuals and corporate bodies; another thirty per cent are the multinationals, while the remaining twenty per cent are foreigners coming to Nigeria that want to use our service.

How does the peculiarity of the Nigerian environment - state of the road network, the security situation and other systemic hiccups-impact on your operation?

Well, you will agree with me that every region in the world has its own problems associated with running a business. With Nigeria, so far, the problem we face or the challenges are the bad roads. The roads are bad but not all the roads are bad, there's the problem of traffic, problem of power, the fuel situation. Now, what we've done with each of those factors is to try and build at least a wall that will protect our business. Now, because the roads are bad, we will be running the business on high cost because we will have to be changing tyres and spares; so what we do is invest a lot in training of our chauffeurs, and when we train them, we try and get them familiar with the road network especially in the north or south-west area.

In terms of traffic, traffic is only intractable in Lagos and part of Port Harcourt; if you go to other parts of the country, the issue of traffic is less. With Lagos, what we've done is work one or two hours ahead of schedule, like if a client calls and says he needs a car at a particular place and at a given time, we try and make sure we are there, especially if it's advance booking. Once it's advance booking, we can plan very well. If you want our drivers to be at your house by 4p.m. or 5p.m., they'll be there. Sometimes in the service industry there can be problems; take for instance UK's Heathrow Airport Terminal 5, they spent billions of pounds, yet the problem are there.

Even in the service industry, problems will come up but you have to deal with those problems as you go along and when you are solving problems, it creates new ideas of how to create new ways of doing business, those are the areas we try to concentrate on. On security, we make sure they are where they are meant to be at the right time. So far we've had our problems but we've tried to cope in the kind of environment we operate in.

Are you into tracking?

Yes. In fact, tracking is good for performance. When you track a vehicle, you know when it is due for servicing, you can check the mileage, you can know know exactly the ending parker, to show you all the movement from day one. So tracking is very good, apart from security, it helps a company to know the bottom line and you will actually know where all the vehicles are.

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