*Laments infrastructural deficit in the business environment

By Moses Nosike

Tobi Asehinde, is a young upwardly mobile Nigerian and he is making a huge impact in creating jobs and wealth in the Nigerian economy upon his return to Nigeria at the successful completion of his study in Computer Engineering at the University of Portsmouth, UK. Tobi Asehinde acquired skill in digital marketing after losing money to a digital marketing company while he was trying to setup an online tourism company in the UK.

He has vast hands-on digital marketing experience and has worked with various clients in different industries and business niche in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Gambia, United Kingdom, United States and Many More.

Today, he is the founder of Digital Marketing Skill Institute, a global training institute empowering people on digital marketing skills with one ‘goal’ which is to make an impact in creating jobs and wealth creation for Nigeria and the Global economy.

Excerpts:

How and why did you find Digital Market Skill Institute?

It all started when I was in the University of Portsmouth, UK where I partnered with my housemate to set up an online tourism business. We paid someone to render digital marketing service for us, he was to design a website and help us promote it.

But we did not make any headway with our plans because it was not executed properly. So, we lost the savings we made from a summer internship we just returned from. Coincidentally that year also, I went to America for my brother’s graduation and during the graduation, I wore one of the branded shirts I made for the company, people were asking me what the company is into and I told them, it was my start-up.

I got people from that event requesting to help them build websites and market the website because they assumed I had the skill at that particular time which I did not; however, I did not decline because I was trying to recoup some of my money. Moreover, I was a student of computer engineering which is not far-fetched from digital stuff and building websites was going to be part of my final year project.

So while in the US, I took up two clients who paid me about $1,500 to build websites for them before I went back to the UK. So, as soon as I got back to the UK, I had to learn how to build a website and promote the website; my clients’ websites were delivered and they were very happy about the results they got from marketing their website. That also opened my eyes to know more about digital marketing and I decided to dig deeper into digital marketing which I discovered was a good business to venture into.

Immediately I started soliciting jobs for digital marketing and the few I got were executed and clients were happy. In addition to that, we discovered that it is more powerful to train people on digital marketing so that they can earn a living from it in the way we have done because we cannot help every business and we want to make as much impact in every business, we train people and replicate ourselves to help these businesses with digital marketing and these businesses pay these people to run digital marketing campaigns for them.

Is there job creation in digital marketing?

Yes, digital marketing is a job-creating and high-income skill. Like I said earlier, a lot of business owners prefer to hire digital marketers because some of them don’t have the time or have the skills. At this juncture, let me explain what digital marketing is, which is all about promoting business products and services online in a means to attract, convert and engage new and returning customers.

What that means is that as a business owner I need to promote my product and services and I need people that have digital marketing skills to promote those services. Digital marketing provides you the opportunity to earn a living without being in a working environment and also hire other people. What I mean is that as a digital marketer you can work with a company on a full-time basis, you can also work as a freelancer, companies can outsource their digital marketing service to you.

And you can also grow into a stage where you become an agency hiring people. So as a freelancer, you are one man person, but when you can start to hire additional hands as such you establish an agency; that is one of the reasons we are in business.

Like I said earlier, we want to impact and we discovered that training people is one of the ways to make an impact in the Nigerian economy and globally because most of the people we have trained had gone ahead to work for people, start their own agency or become freelancers. A lot of the people we have trained are hiring people.

For instance, let me share with you the story of two of our students. One opened her office in Ogba and the other opened in Ikeja hiring over four people each. So, digital marketing creates a lot of jobs.

With people coming to gain digital marketing knowledge, would you say the Institute has achieved its focus?

Without a doubt, we are on the right path. We have a goal to train one million people in the next decade, so by 2030, we want to reach one million people globally. We are very committed to meeting this goal because I believe that the ripple effect is wide.

For instance, if someone finishes from our institute, and he or she is able to work with 10 customers that pay N100,000 then he or she stands to make N1m a month and N12m a year and if he or she can easily hire one or two persons which basically takes two persons out of unemployment. Imagine if there are one million of such persons hiring two persons; that is creating two million jobs. That is the essence of what we are doing. We really cannot do it alone and that is why we are actively looking for both government and private partnerships to help scale the impact.

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Tell us the strength of Digital Marketing Skill Institute in global competitiveness?

We are registered in the US and also in Nigeria. So, we are a global company. We have two branches in Nigeria; Lagos and Abuja respectively, hoping to expand to other African countries and other parts of the world as well.

We deliver courses physically right now in our Lagos and Abuja offices. And train people in different parts of the world through our online platform. We have people from the United States, Sweden, United Kingdom and many other countries who are taking our course online.

What are the challenges of training people in the Nigerian business environment?

There are two challenges here. Challenges in the business environment and that of training people. The challenge in business is human capital. We had to hire people and train them to develop a system in order to be able to keep our sanity.

We had to and be able to get good hands and have processes that validate someone before they can work for us, by giving them projects to do before we hire them and things like that. So, human capital is one of the big issues. Also, we have discovered here that transportation is another challenge for employees.

The distance and proximity to work is an issue. People coming to work from a far distance and before they get to work owing to traffic are drained. And because of the nature of our job, remote options cannot be available for everybody because they train people physically and a lot of people want to come and see us in the office for questions.

Also in terms of training people, another issue is people being committed to training. Some people find it difficult to set at least two hours to practice what they are being trained. And in our training, you can’t graduate if you are not doing your assignment.

So, we have a lot of amazing people doing amazingly both locally and internationally after we had trained them. The secret is that they took the time to do their assignments.

Our environment and infrastructure….

Being someone who has travelled to different parts of the world, developed and underdeveloped countries, Nigeria has issues around infrastructure like bad roads, poor power supply. Those things are attributing issues. Even though it can be of positive value because part of the cost is added operations.

We know that NEPA might take power and we run on Generator. And that means that it pushes expenses to the consumers. Because as a business person you have to factor in those operation costs to get your business running.

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