By Bashir Adefaka
Larrie Paniel is a corporate Master of Ceremony and Public Speaker and is registered as such with the Corporate Affairs Commission in Abuja. He got his first degree from the University of Abuja in Business Administration where he was on top of his class and had his second degree from the University of Lagos.

He was one of the best students in his class as well. He became first, an investment banker with the Nigerian Stockbrokers Limited, which is a subsidiary of Starling Bank Plc, for about four years where he managed a portfolio value of about four billion. But something made him leave his job for public speaking.

Over time, I discovered that I had a flair for public speaking. From the university days, I was the director of socials in my department and then I contested for director of socials of the Students’ Union Government. Although the election was annulled, I was sure I would have been sworn in as director of socials of SUG. All these made me to have a flair for Public Speaking and the ability to convince people.

And over time, people would just call that they wanted me to anchor one event or the other for them and that was how it started. I didn’t take it seriously as a profession, it was just a passion I had. But over time, I just found out that I had so many jobs over the weekend and some people were even calling me on week days to anchor their events and all that. That was how I got into Public Speaking and anchoring events.

Larrie Paniel

I was with the Nigerian Stockbrokers Limited from July 2007 and I resigned officially in October 2010. But between those periods, I was already anchoring events for people and was handling people’s annual general meetings and so on.

I was actually pulled out of my job by the zeal and the passion I had for Master of Ceremony and Public Speaking. It got to the point that I was getting events to anchor on week days and because one also had to do the normal five days official duties at work, there was a clash between the two.

I looked at it and asked myself the question, “how long I’m I going to keep waking up at 5 a.m for capital market when my real passion lies in public speaking?” And I also looked at it that, “Okay since I also have a passion for education, it would be an opportunity for me to put in for my PhD as well as concentrate on my public speaking.”

To fortify myself in public speaking, I went to Lagos Business School where I did a short course on building and leading a team and you know you can’t build and lead a team if you don’t have communication skill because you are going to have many followers. It’s a little bit expensive but I knew I needed to be able to attain the height in the profession I loved most to do. I also went to Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria (FRCN) Training School to learn production and presentation. I did my internship with Metro FM under Aluoma Nwogbe and Cordelia Okpei, who are both seasoned broadcasters. These are the two things I needed to make a perfect master of ceremony and public speaker in me.

Having done all that, it’s now time and I’m ready to face the world.

Yes I left my paid job without considering the situation in Nigeria as it were because, I knew quite well that you can’t live with a paid job for the rest of your life. If you look at very wealthy people around today, it’s not only because they have private businesses they do but because they are doing things they love.

I found out, across Nigeria particularly in Lagos that we have not less than one thousand wedding parties on an average every month. Now, who are the MCs that are going to cover these events? Who are the wedding vendors, the DJs, the bands, the decorators, the planners, the artistes? People have to fill this gap.

So I discovered that I you can add value to the society, I discovered that I can add value to people’s lives, that people are going to need MCs for whatever events they are going to do. Besides weddings, people do corporate events, annual general meetings, book launch and so on. Even in your own small gathering as a press man, you definitely need a public speaker.

So I saw that there was a gap and that there was the need for me to fulfil my passion, that there was the need for me to add value and solve problems. It was the coming together of all these facts that made it very easy for me to decide and take the bull by the horns to do something for the society and myself too.

The events that I have handled can be categorised into two: corporate events and social events. For the social events, we are talking about weddings, we are talking about fashion shows, we are talking about birthday parties, we are talking about get-together and that kind of things. I have done over 200 events. And for the corporate world, I have handled over 30.

Capital for services are kind of different because how do you put a value to the schools you’ve attended in order to be knowledgeable? How do you put a value to the education you’ve acquired in order to render such services? I told you I went to Lagos Business School; I told you I went to FRCN Training School. How do you put a value on the so many seminars that you’ve attended? How about the books you read? How about some courses you took online just to understand the public. So, it’s very difficult to put value unto a service. You might just say oh, I would charge you this amount or so but it is very, very difficult to put value to service.

We were just talking about capital. You might not need a certain kind of capital per se in this line of business.If you want to becaome a corporate Master of Ceremony, apart from the fact that you want to look good, you have to dress well too and wear good shoes, take care of your skin and all that. But of course, you must have a car, and a good accomodation. Capital for services business is something that you can’t easily determine.

Where government can come in is to establish the theory of practical entrepreneurship in secondary schools so that by the time one leaves senior secondary school for the first year in the university or any of the higher institutions, he has learned the theory of entrepreneurship.

This is important because people need to understand that there are lot of problems in Nigeria that they can solve as youths. So even if we don’t have a government policy that favours us in this direction, we need to start thinking about how to solve these problems. If you step out just now, you will find out that there are so many problems confronting the youths and we can’t keep crying that we don’t have jobs, but there are so many opportunities on the internet. I’m amazed that people go on the Facebook just chat instead of to develop so many opportunities in networking.

I mean, some of my businesses are gotten through the Facebook. Youths have to go beyond sitting down and waiting until government comes and does something for them.