Entertainment
How I started BHM Group with zero capital – Ayeni Adekunle
It’s been 10 years, BHM opened its doors for business with zero capital, experience and training but the company has crept up the ladder with amazing speed and valour, servicing some of the most impressive businesses in the land. Ayeni Adekunle, CEO, BHM has taken up some of the most daunting but selfless projects to re-position PR practice although some reason the motives could be selfish! In this interview, Ayeni bares it all, talking about the BHM strategy, its driving motive, how to get the industry out of the woods and how to make the practice more attractive to current and would-be practitioners and clients alike. Excerpts.
Happy 10th year anniversary, how has the last 10 years been?
The last 10 years for us at BHM has been interesting and challenging as well. We have faced disappointments, we have seen good times. We have grown in leaps and bounds. We have enjoyed tremendous support from our clients, staff and from the media. We have equally learnt a lot from different stakeholders and I think we have been able to build a “little Lagos agency” which people appreciate and reckon with. I am looking forward to the next 10 years.
You are never shy to tell anyone who cares to listen that you were never a trained PR person before you started your agency notwithstanding, the agency has made quantum leap. What does this say about the low entry barrier to the profession? Secondly, how did you overcome your ‘disadvantaged’ status?
I am a learner, I like to learn. True, I didn’t know jack about PR until may be early 2000s. I am a learner. If I find myself in any space, I do all I can to acquire as much knowledge as I can, that’s how I came about writing, show business, marketing communications and technology among others. Today, we do a lot in our business that has to do with technology, until a few years ago, I didn’t know much about technology, software development and engineering. I am very proactive in learning new skills that I need to help me solve problems that I am keen to solve. So, I like to share that I was an entertainment journalist, people traditionally expect brand journalists and business reporters to move on to work in marketing communications or to start agencies. All the same I found myself in that space, I opened up to it, I learned all I had to learn, we learnt on the job because we started an agency with no skills or experience only working for entertainers but we knew we wanted to handle big briefs for serious organizations. So we started acquiring the skills needed. We turned left, we turned right talking to people and colleagues and I think we enjoyed a lot of support from senior colleagues – some people in Public Relations Consultant Association of Nigeria (PRCAN) pointed us in the right direction. I am a student, I love learning. We have been able to build the “small agency” that we have today because of our exposure to what needs to be done and our seriousness towards doing those things.
BHM HQ, Akute, Ogun State. Circa 2006/2007
You never wanted to do PR, so how did you find yourself in the practice?
I never wanted to do PR because I did not know jack about the subject. At best my dream was to set up a consumer organization that will use entertainment to solve problems. However, once Keke Ogungbe mentioned to me, “You write very well, why don’t you do this”, I went to study about it. And because I was working in the media and in my space I was a little bit known and respected, it was easy for me to cross and offer publicity services for the entertainers of that time. I am proud always to say that some of the first people we worked with are musicians! – 2face Idibia, Weird MC, Lagbaja, Tunde and Wunmi Obe name them. We saw quickly that we had to make a transition, we had to rebrand in 2009 for us to position ourselves as a corporate organization that can represent brands in the telecommunications sector, financial services, people in Oil & Gas, Fast Moving Consumer Goods etc. In 2009, we rebranded and our story changed. Today, I dare say that we are one of the few agencies that understand how to use the power of consumers, the power of celebrities, entertainment and youth culture to help brands connect with that sector of the society. Incidentally, Nigeria is at a period in its life where youth population is unbelievably so high. I think we were just prepared for today even though we didn’t know it as at then. Young people love entertainment, sports, music. They love films. Incidentally, we are coming from this background. My background was also in media – I worked in print, radio, TV and digital so I just think that a couple of things happened to prepare us for this assignment. Most importantly, we saw the handwriting on the wall, we were proactive about how and where we wanted to play and we enjoyed the support of the industry – journalists, associations like PRCAN, NIPR and two of our clients most importantly, Deola Art Alade and Funmi Victor Okigbo. These were those who compelled me to change the company’s name, rebrand and rejig our business model in 2009. It took them over a year to get me to understand what they saw that I didn’t see. Of course, we were playing big in entertainment, we were doing the biggest events and shows. We changed our name from A.YE.N.I to BHM and our story changed. If I look back today, I can clearly see that if we didn’t make that move, it is highly unlikely that we will be here today.
Good that you seized the opportunity and became a force to be reckoned with in an industry that you knew little or nothing about. But what does this say about the professionalism and its poor entry barrier?
I like it. I consider Public Relations as a practice within the creative industry, interestingly even though I understand that it’s a marketing communications discipline. I like the fact that you can wake up today and decide that you have interest in PR. You can then begin to test the skills that you think you have with your own personal brand, your product or service. And you can along the line get the right certifications. What this means is that you cannot claim to be a chartered professional until you do the right things. I had to sit for Exams to become a member of NIPR when it got to that point. I had to apply to join PRCAN and also the CIPR in the UK. I like the fact that what differentiates PR from a lot of other disciplines is the creativity and the story telling. It means you cannot actually succeed in PR if you are not mad upstairs, if you are not creative; if you don’t close your eyes and see images and pictures and all of that. No certificate will give you that. So I like the fact that any individual can wake up and think I like to do this. Guess what you find out, that everything you thought you knew, was wrong! You think it’s easy, you wake up and you begin to fall flat on your face. Then you realize that whao! This thing isn’t what I thought. Secondly, you can play at the periphery and think you are doing great but if you want to run a serious organization, if you want to run a serious and credible practice, you’ll understand that there are steps to be taken and certifications needed. To be a corporate member of the PRCAN, you’ve got be a member of NIPR, you have to be there because you are qualified to be there. I don’t think the paper certificate that you have gives you the creative skills to do amazing work. What it does is that it makes you to understand the theories and ethics of the profession. Part of the problems we have is that there is a clear gap between the theory and practice. So I like the low entry barrier. I am one of those who think that just as it is in poetry, writing and media – you can become an author overnight, it is the consumer that will decide whether your book makes sense or not – I do not know any single PR practitioner in Nigeria today who knows what they are doing, who is worth their onions, no matter how long they have practiced who has not done all they can to join the fold of NIPR or PRCAN as the case may be.
How did you draw the line between theory and practice before you were able to blend the two together? How do you resolve the dissonance especially in fledging careers?
Deliberately, I went to sit in class to test my skills and I passed at first sitting. I found out that everything they were teaching in class was correct, they were theories but for me who had been practicing, they were not in order because most of them had not been updated. I was so much agitated that initially, I had to take on the lecturer but had to caution myself that I was there as a student. This is because I had been engaged with the media, the PR industry, the client and the community, I discovered then that we must work to combine theory with practice.
In view of this, I keep recommending to those I know in the academia that PR students need to do at least 1 year internship pre-graduation, working in an agency because schools graduate a lot of students. When they come here to work, we insist they must undergo a mandatory 6-month internship no matter the grade they left school with. This is because we found out that everything they know they have to first unlearn.
Practitioners who want to build serious consultancies must help you refine all that you think you know. You can create laws and regulations but beyond enforcing it, people must see the values that “I am missing out if I don’t do that”. We all saw the crises last year when MTN and Guinness were said to have appointed two agencies that were not PRCAN members. No matter what skills you have you need to be certified to practice but being certified to practice does not confer on you the kind of skills you need to do great works in today’s economy. If not, clients want result, they do not care, they’ll bring in those who have those skills, call them a different name and give them the briefs. Clients want to build brands and sell products, they care less about your certificates but the results. You have to balance the theory and practice, there are many people carrying the NIPR certificates but cannot do great jobs. We need to fix that
Talking about great jobs, how great are we doing as an industry?
That’s a tricky question because we have done great stuff, we can still do great stuff, we currently are not doing as we should be doing. In 2015, BHM came out to say “PR is dead”, there was an engagement, there was conversation and I like what it threw up. In 2016, we launched the Nigeria PR report – agencies cannot pay salaries, people do not know what PR is, we saw it clearly that we have work to do. I do not think it’s an isolated PR problem, the media and Advertising industries have the same challenge locally and globally. There is a sort of incursion, disruption into our space by a couple of practices who appear to have seen the future and they are making the best of it. Are we folding our arms? No. I speak for BHM and couple of other agencies that I have seen what they are doing. I know that we are not just folding our arms and complaining. I see a boom around the corner. I say it all the time that PR has the potential to do greater work than advertising. I say it all the time that all the agencies parading themselves as digital marketing agencies belong in PR. I say it all the time that PR agencies should be the one that should be in charge of community management, social media and all of that for brands and organizations. We, the storytellers should be the one teaching organizations how to navigate the digital media space. We should make use of software engineers and developers more than any other segments in the marketing communications space. As storytellers, we should be the ones to tell organizations how to use Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and build tools to measure and evaluate those platforms. We should be the ones to interpret those reports. We are the ones who should be the custodians of the whole change happening in the media landscape. We should be at the forefront of videos and memes. We should be the ones creating new ways of helping our clients tell stories and engage with their stakeholders. We have an opportunity because I see a lot of young people interested in PR increasingly. I see PR agencies now paying attention to technology and social media.
What will happen in the next 5-10 years is that if we continue to do the right things and take the right steps, you will see PR in a space where people do not anticipate it to be. You will see PR leading other aspects of marketing communications to launch marketing campaigns and programmes. I hope we all rise up to the occasion. Only those who make the right investment and plan for tomorrow will be around to enjoy that boom. PR is about perception management, so we need to use our medicine more. We need to stop hiding. If you call a committee of CEOs in Nigeria, will you say you can count 10-15 CEOs of PR companies among them? This is why at BHM, we are committed to developing the ecosystem. It won’t happen overnight, but we are certain it will happen eventually.
The BHM Nigeria PR report is fraught with challenges even by supposed beneficiaries, what’s your position?
There are two choices in life, you could sit down, complain and blame every other person or pick up your tools and work. We belong to the school of thought that says “if you want something to happen do it”. The PR report came as a result of personal frustration because I pick up reports from all over the world and I don’t see Nigeria there and I know that there are agencies here doing great work. I want to quote local facts, data and statistics and I cannot find them. We quote data from America, China and others and I say this can’t continue. Let’s talk about ourselves and our work and clients to see data from the industry here. That is what we have done and I am proud of it. It’s just one edition, may be when we come back after the 5th and 10th editions we’ll be able to know the import of this project. It is a very small beginning, self funded and it’s given out for free. I think it’s a good start, I wish every PR company will pick an aspect of the industry and make their intervention from there. CMC connect recently exposed us to issues on measurement and evaluation- something they could have kept internally for their staff. Everyone left the workshop enlightened. Just one annual PR report in a country of 200million people is inadequate, we need more of it. Part of the problem is that there are too many opinions being passed around as facts because there is no data. I think that we deserve recognition from other parts of the world, Nigeria is a tough place to practice PR. A time will come that the world will appreciate that.
What have been the downsides of lack of data and relevant statistics on the industry?
One of the major downsides is that PR professionals can’t justify billings. I think this work you’ve given me, I should charge you N50million. What exactly are you paying for? When you go for PR training, there is something called RACE. The whole concept is built around research. You have to understand the problem before you start a campaign, what is the plan that you have? What are the outputs expected then what is the impact? The first issue is that we are not able demonstrate value because PR had been reduced to newspaper clippings and that’s why we are using advertising value equivalent which is a joke. We have not been able to demonstrate value at a very macro level. Secondly, we have not been able to measure even for ourselves the success of our strategies. You do not measure a campaign after the campaign for reporting. You measure a campaign before; during – so that you can change some things that are not working well so that you can optimize; then you measure after. Mind you, you don’t measure output alone, you also measure impact. In view of this, where you would have thought it impossible to discuss along the lines of ROI in PR, you can competently discourse ROI. We all need to embrace an analytical mindset.
So the biggest problems confronting the industry are billing, respect for the profession and most importantly, we are not able to develop scientific models. By now there should be models which you can just plug and play to get solutions. The reward system will be subjective if there is no basis. So where we need to be is a place where I can demonstrate, “This, your product had this problem or suffered this lapse and I recommended for you to execute this strategy. You gave me approval on 22nd of October and these were the things we did. Based on those, these were our expectations. These were the things that we changed, this was our messaging. These were all the things that we did and were being measured day-on-day or week-on-week. We saw there was a spike at this point. The day we did this particular stuff, there was a change. We commissioned a research and these were data gathered and what the people said during the survey. This reveals that your product has moved from 40% adoption rate to 65%”. You can demonstrate as a result of what you have done. That is PR! Whether change in perception or adopting a product or idea, it could be in sales or resolving a problem – it can be a board dispute, community intervention or political campaign, you need to be able to demonstrate it. That’s where we need to be. That’s where’s we’re going to be
You spoke fairly glowingly about the industry, where were you when the political parties and government resulted to importing PR consultants to work for the parties? Do you blame them for this action?
Absolutely, the federal government for example is the highest level of custody for law and order in the country. They are the guardians of our laws. It is irresponsible of them to break their own laws. It’s a joke on all of us if any serious organisation in Nigeria, in the private sector not to talk of the government goes out to seek PR professionals or lawyers from other parts of the world. This is especially so for PR and Advertising profession where there is clear understanding that first, it is wrong legally. Secondly, context – you must work with those who understand those you are trying to deal with. However, I must say as my style, instead of complaining, “why is government doing that?” We need to elevate the level of our practice so that anywhere anybody turns, they will have to look for our professionals. Foreign companies and governments will want to work with us if they discover that we are the best in the world. We must be in a space where countries and multinationals from anywhere in the world would scramble to request our intervention as PR consultants because of the track records or solutions that were provided by our companies. It is possible!
Can you appraise the BHM group over the last decade?
I think we have built something from nothing. Our pay-off line is “Inu ikoko dudu leko funfun ti jade”. We built something but we still have a long way to go. We built everything from one man’s dream. Everybody knows our story, zero capital, zero experience, zero training. I like that we have been able to demonstrate the power of possibility in what we’ve done in telecommunications industry, financial services, in music, media, digital and so on, I am very proud of all of them including the little things we have done in our own ways to make the industry better. Also important, is the fact that we put our people before profit, we value their convenience and compensation among others. Grateful that we have taken the opportunity to build what we have and I like what I am seeing for the next 10 years, for us and for our sector.
In concrete terms, what are the other companies in the BHM group?
I think agencies need to invest on assets. A long time ago we invested in media assets – thenet.ng., newsroom.ng, Star.ng and orin.ng. Last year, we launched our digital agency called ID Africa – infodigitalafrica, with skills to deliver results across the continent and markets. For me it is a demonstration that even though, we started lean, the little we have made are being reinvested into the company. I am one of those who feel sad that the biggest products in the media, social and digital spaces in the past few years have not been created or owned by PR or advertising agencies. Imagine if it was a PR agency that created Facebook or nairaland or jobberman. Jobberman is stakeholders’ management between employees and potential employers. Imagine if we created Twitter, Twitter is an amazing tool for news creators and media organisations. We are the ones that understand these concepts. Part of what I am passionate about is changing our thinking from a service agency waiting for clients briefs, to a product organization with opportunities to play in the consumer space. Yes, we have created brands and companies that are doing well, the next few years are even going to be more interesting based on what we are putting in place and the opportunities ahead.
You have fairly bogus ideas of what the next 10-year holds for the Nigerian PR industry, can you distil in a few points first for BHM and then the industry at large?
BHM will switch into a product organization; success regionally and globally; we want to give the industry a new set of entrepreneurs, right now we have a few ex-staff who run their own agencies. We do not mind being a breeding ground for people who will go and take over the industry with fresh ideas. Then I do not want to see myself here still running this show.
For the industry, we need to invest in research and data, we need this to take better decision, do better and advise clients better. I see a lot of mergers and acquisitions to survive and to compete globally. I also always preach corporate governance, we need to run our organizations with profound corporate governance ethics, have very active boards and play in a space where even the owners cannot jeopardize the future of the company. Next five years, we should see a PR company going public. Those things may look impossible but it can be done. I have very big dreams because I know what will happen in the consumer space. But it will only happen for those who see the future and plan ahead.
Now what do you have against affiliation?
I have nothing against affiliation but it’s not in our strategy. We would rather be the one giving out affiliations. We want to build this local Nigerian company that will be proudly Nigerian and will be one of the reasons why the whole world thinks positively about Nigeria, we want to do it quickly. With such model, we are not going to be sourcing or seeking affiliation because it will not help our vision. One of the reasons for affiliation is to be able to tap into global best practice and we have our model for that. We think global PR companies have a lot to learn from us concerning how to do great work in the African continent. Another reason is access to clientele, we have a strategy, we need to grow fast, own our space and our region. Even if there were to be any talk such as affiliation, it will be on our own terms. We want agencies in South Africa and others looking up to us, wanting an affiliation because of certain benefits they can derive. I want a small agency in America thinking they want an affiliation with us so we can open them up to the African market and its vast opportunities. It always seems impossible until it is done. The dream for me is to build an agency that companies from outside of Africa will want to affiliate with if only to access the African market.
