11 January 2009
opinion
Lagos — It is not the first time he would 'gate-crash' into an alien profession. About 25 years ago, he took the real estate world by storm, establishing a property company that claimed a sizeable chunk of the business. His plan was simple.
With the benefit of hs original training in the law profession, he targetted the underbelly of Nigerian properties and dealt it a blow that compelled attention to the company and the man behind it. Undeterred that he was going into an area that he was not well versed in, Aribisala contrived a scheme to monopolise. He would sell the land, earn the fee for the sale and insist on having his company perfect the paper work. As his fame grew as a property lawyer, he got more jobs as a property consultant. He is so 'heavily involved' in real estate in Nigeria and abroad that many dont even know that he is not a surveyor.
Having made a good job of that venture, it may be right to say that this initial walk into a 'strange' provided the plank and confidence with which he made the current move into the hospitality industry. His property firm is the holding company for his flagship hotel, Protea Kuramo Waters and it was becuase he had the property at Victoria Island that investors from the Protea Hotel group in South Africa found in him a beautiful bride to court and partner with when they came shopper for collaborators in Nigeria.
No matter where his enterpreneurial quest lead him, Aribisala whose hotel is celebrating its third anniversary told Nseobong Okon-Ekong that he will always find good anchorage in the law and would like to be remebered as a lawyer, who exploited other business opportunities and made a huge success of them.
His sojourn into property and hospitality
I am into property, basically, property law. I have done that for so many years and I am known for that. When you hear about me, you think about property. I own a company called 'Aribisala Property Limited'. That was where we started. When you mention my name to those who know me, they will tell you that the man is into property law. It is the company through which we source and sell property to people then we sit on the documentation and monpolise the brief. If I am going to sell a land at Victoria Island for N200 Million, I will do the documentation and I will earn the fee. That was how we started. I have done that for over 24 years. I still have the property company and we use that as a holding company for this hotel. I am heavily involved in real estate both here and abroad.
On his penchant for straying into other enterprise
I will like to be seen as as somebody who has sort of veered into another industry and has been able to make an impact, but basically I stilll want to retain my own area of specialisation, which is, law. What you see here at the hotel is a hobby. I just want to look at it from a point of view from which I am making an impression, that is, talking about quality service and quality infrastructure. These are the areas we are looking at the industry and trying to champion. When we came in about three years ago, the concept of hotel changed. When you come in to this hotel, you begin to ask yourself, I'm in Lagos or Cape Town or New York, we try to improve on that we still have vast land stretching into the Kuramo Waters, so we are now moving up to really now try and catch the Five-Star itself. I think we want to build a hotel thatis really breath-taking. You will wonder by the time we finish it. In the past five years a lot has happened to the industry that is looking at the other existing hotels, one will begin to ask what has changed the concept of hospitality in the past years. It is simple, hotles before now where handled at unprofessional level. All they did was build rooms, let it out and collect money. But that is not the concept of hotels in the international arena. The concept of hotel is an experience of its own. It is now like flying an airline, which is not what it used to be like 25 years ago, same thing has happened to hotels. It is now being branded. There are world class hotel groups who now start from desing level and they get involved. By the time the whole project is finished and you get into a room you can feel the difference. You fell like you are in paradise you dont want to leave the hotel room. If you stayed for three nights by the time you are packing on the third night, you have that sense of lose. It is not like you come here, you call for a bottle of beverage and then you find yourself calling for another one, not because you cannot sit in your house or got to a beer parlour and drink it, but because of the environment, you dont want to leave the environment. How much of these experience is being shared in this part of the world? If you take a stistics of hotels in Lagos and Abuja, how many of them would you say give a worthy experience? It is not just building houses on a plot of land and you call it an hotle.
Kuramo Waters is built on two acres, you can't believe it we have 60 rooms and that is unprescedented. Look at the space. It is a boutique hotel and purpose built from the beginning just to create sheer pleasure. Why do you have to build 60 rooms on two acres? It is crazy, don't you think so? We could as well build 450 rooms, but that was the whole concept we have the breeze of the Atlantic Ocean coming in directly. By the time it is getting dark, between 7pm and 8pm, you may need to get some warm clothing. If we had clustered the whole place with rooms, it would have looked like any other hotel we are used to in Nigeria. This new trend is what we are trying to celebrate and the facility that is up to date and it is world class.
By naming some of the segments of the hotel after some of the popular resorts that you know in the wlrd like the Bahamas, St. Lucia and Antiqua, we are simply bringing back memories of the known get-awat destinations. The whole concept is to show that hotel is not just to sleep and wake up. It should go beyond that. You should want to come back again. It must be above what you are used to ordinarilly.
The segments of the hotel are pretty much the same. There are seven categories of rooms.
Usually you dont travel because you are going for business only. Nobody makes a clear distinctinction between travelling for pleasure or travelling for business. You can achieve the same on the same journey. There is no way you will spend the whole time doing business. You want to get back to the hotel in the evening and relax and may be set the last two days for sight-seeing and shopping. We think you can have both experience.
Why he decided to partner with Protea to develop a hotel
The experience to build a hotel has been with me becuase I love good things and when you love good things you show appreciation and the next thing is to see whether you can replicate these things back home. Looking at the situation before there is no way you could have come across this kind of idea. I f you have it in you and the opportunity comes to you for the first time you will grab it. It's been there, but when Protea came and I bought this long before Protea came to Nigeria and was looking for a partner to develop a world class hotel that is wnat happened. We started talking and they said come to South Africa and I went to Cape Town and I saw what they had. I said wow, I had been thinking about this, let's do it. They came lookig for us and that is what made the difference. It would have been a little difficult for anyone to achieve this.
Protea is involved in small and medium sized hotels. They dont do giant hotels. The highest I have seen them do is 300 rooms. They go as low as 30 rooms and as big as 350 rooms. You can fall in between. They want to take the experience to every nook and cranny. In Lagos, there are five Proteas- three in Victoria Island and two in Ikeja. To me, it makes sense to have five hotels offering the same serivce scattered everywhere than to have one ginat hotel. It means you are taking the service everywnere. I think we have 14 Protea hotels all over Nigeria
Each one of these hotels has its own character and its own style. Each one is built to serve a particular market. Rather than having disagreement, we use the multiple ownership as a strenght. For example, becuase we are always fully booked, all we need to do is to call the nearest Protea. They have been of tremendous assistance. Whatever price we discussed with that guest, we can make sure he gets it over there. It is a family. If I am going to South Africa as a Protea owner, you can be sure I wont pay a dime and if another Protea owner from South Africa is cominghere or anybody at the topmanagement level we dont pay we interchange a lot. You see yourself as part of a chain, you dont see yourself surviving alone. The relationship is too good to be true.
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Sir,
Few days back, I was contacted by an Indian HR consultant for a Job in author's firm, AOS Practice, which instigated my interest in the author and his firm. Since, there are so many “419 scams” originating from Nigeria and photographs do not reveal a man’s personality, therefore, I conducted extensive Net research on him , his firm, and his vision. I learned about him , right from his entry in Nigerian Bar in 1984, LL.M in Criminology, 12 criminal cases which he argued at the Supreme Court of Nigeria, loss of deposit in London Property… [Read Full Text]