By Ebele Orakpo
Mr. Frederick Ohiaeri is the Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer of 62:15 Associated Industries Ltd. and its subsidiary, 62:15 Healthcare Ltd. In this chat with Vanguard in his Lagos office, the graduate of medical physiology from the University of Port Harcourt speaks on his business, the challenges and how he has been coping. Excerpts:

According to Mr. Frederick Ohiaeri, he came to Lagos a few years ago with the dream of making it big in life even if it means working himself to death to actualise all his dreams.

Ohiaeri

To be successful in life, Ohiaeri believes that drive is the most important ingredient.

“Drive, for me, is something that makes a plane that has lost all its engines to still be in the air; a car without fuel still running; something that makes a man whose legs and hands have been broken in a fight to keep fighting. A lot of people will say these things are impossible but what drive does is that it makes what people consider impossible possible,” he said, adding: “Some businesses with very strong human capacity and experienced people had collapsed while some that started from the scratch by people who are considered inexperienced and with no educational background, had survived because of drive.

“For a lot of people, drive is usually rooted in a lot of things. Some people’s drive is rooted in the fact that somebody said to them that ‘look, you cannot make it in life. You cannot amount to anything; you are useless,’ or someone may be less-privileged as a result of one circumstance or the other, and people say to him: ‘look, that kind of dream is not for you, it is for people whose parents are wealthy,’ and he wants to defy all that.”

I had an idea:

“After graduation, we were supposed to go for NYSC but the letter did not come on time, so, we spent one year at home because the school had some issues.”

Instead of whiling away his time, the author of This is Lagos, decided to get himself busy while waiting for the call-up letter. “I got a job which I did for a while and then there was this idea that just popped into my mind. I am the kind of person that takes a lot of risks. So I quit the job and went to do some research on the idea. How everything came together is sometimes surprising and I find it very difficult to understand. I took the remaining money I had and travelled in search of a safety match-producing company. Somebody told me there was one in Calabar so I went there and there was none. I went to Onitsha but there was none. My money had almost finished and I came to Lagos and there was none too.

So somebody told me to go to Ibadan. I went to Ibadan and luckily for me, I found one. On my way out of Ibadan, I got a call that the NYSC posting was out and I had been posted to Oyo State. I never knew that Ibadan was in Oyo State so I came to Lagos and asked a cousin where Oyo State is and he said: ‘are you not just coming from Ibadan? That is the capital of Oyo State.’”

Call it divine arrangement because not only was he posted to Oyo State, but his place of primary assignment was close to the match factory so he was able to conduct his research while doing his youth service.

“I had a concept of how more value can be added to safety matches because the industry from my research, produces less than two per cent of all the safety matches used in Nigeria and the rest is being imported. It is a huge market in the sense that it is something that everyone uses everyday. So I was wondering how we can be importing about 98 per cent of something that everybody uses everyday, and yet, we claim there is high rate of unemployment.

What is the problem of this country? I brought a lot of ideas on how this safety match can be sold that can actually attract people to buy it and create jobs. So I did the research and kept it in my locker and surprisingly, the CBN said they wanted people with genuine business ideas. I did not attend the programme but somebody who did, mistakenly dropped the paper on my bunk so when I woke up and saw it, I read it, immediately, my project came to mind,” he said.

“One of the things that really gave me a boost in terms of my confidence in myself was winning the CBN award while I was serving. That award made me realise a lot of things, that actually if you prepare on time and plan for something, it is always easier for you to hit it head on.”

Decisive moment:

“After youth service, I expected that I would go back to Port Harcourt, it was really a decisive moment for me. I looked at Lagos from different angles. Talk about the five richest people in Nigeria, the five biggest churches, the five biggest politicians, they are all in Lagos so why am I going anywhere else? It has to be Lagos. But I told myself that ‘look, if it means struggling and dying in Lagos, let me struggle,” he noted.

Ohiaeri said that one thing that has worked for him is his determination to make a difference, to stand out wherever he found himself and it has paid off.

“I built a market base for myself before I left the companies where I worked. So up till today, it is the market base that is sustaining me but the thing is that a lot of people complain when they see challenges but I was running after the challenges because I knew they were opportunities for me to do something.

So today, I’ve built something on those opportunities that I had in the past. And I believe strongly that 62:15 Associated Industries will be a household name in this country and in West Africa.”

Initial capital:

“When I wanted to start off on my own, frankly speaking, if I had any money at that time, it probably was about N200,000. I took a very big risk that a lot of people wouldn’t have taken. I did not have up to five per cent of the funds I needed. If everything had gone wrong, I would have started all over again, I would not have given up.

In fact, nobody gave me a chance. They all said I was going to flop. And to be very frank with you, all their analyses were realistic but I did not want to listen to them. I told myself that even if I failed, I would try again. I’ll keep trying until I succeed.

A lot of friends that I begged to join me at that time said to me: ‘Do you know how much it costs to import drugs?’ Luckily for me, I had companies that had pharmaceutical products but did not have marketing strategies. Some of them came to me and gave me their drugs and asked me to build a market for them and I did.

Someone first gave me drugs worth over N1.6m to sell and return the money. While I was doing that, another person recommended somebody else who did not have enough market. I bought my first car, bought the second and third cars and started employing people. And here we are today,” he enthused.

Ohiaeri said he will rather be master of his destiny than a slave in paradise. “If I lose I lose, if I win, I win but I will keep fighting till I die and let it be told that I fought even if I did not succeed.”

He said the unwillingness of some customers who buy drugs on credit to pay after selling; government policies which sometimes affect cost of doing business and lack of electricity supply, are some of the challenges they face.

On the future of the company, Ohaeri said: “In the next five years, I expect to be the best in my field. In the pharmaceutical industry where I am, I expect to be a force to be reckoned with.”