National Daily

We are crossing the hurdles –Spectra boss

The Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer, Spectra Nigeria Limited, who also is the Chairman, Nigerian Association of Small Scale Industrialist, NASSI, Mr. Duro Kuteyi reveals some of the hitches in small scale businesses and suggests the way forward in this interview with PATRICK AIGBOKHAN. Excerpt:

The company
SPECTRA Nigeria Limited was incorporated in Nigeria in 1991 and started operation in 1992. It was established to produce foods and agro-allied products. Then, we also had right to go into farming which we are now doing, but I am not sure we are interested in the processing. But we can encourage people to go into agriculture and then give them the assurance that their products will be purchased by us.

Business challenges
Among our business challenges are competition in products sales and distributions, inadequate infrastructure which happens to be a general problem, and at the same time, we face a lot of hurdles from the every day manufacturing business activities, especially the double taxation by the government agencies, poor water and electricity supply system, and at the same time, making sure that the roads leading to your company is up to date.

Management challenges
Some of our challenges are difficulty in retaining staffs in terms of having and keeping high standard staffs since there is a big competition whereby the telecommunications industry, the banking industry, and all that, have gone to the market to pick the best brains.

Also, the way we think in the small scale business environment is another problem of getting the highly skilled workers. And once you have staffs that are not trained, you know you have problems too. And when you have staffs that have resistance to being trainable, you have a problem. All these are areas where we are challenged and we need to be assisted.

Another challenge we have is getting Human Resources consultants to train the staffs because it is not all such consultants that can conduct a comprehensive training for the factory workers. Apart from the factory workers, we have the foremen, the supervisors and the managers.
In the area of marketing, I am sure many companies have burnt their fingers. Like where credit sales are involved, it becomes very difficult for you to realise your money. Sometimes, some of the marketers would have collected the money and pocketed it, and they will tell you that the customers have not paid, only for you to get there and discover that the customer had even paid the money at the instance when the goods were purchased from the marketer. These are just some of the many challenges of management in this business.

Effects of government policies
Government policies have not been consistent. Sometime ago when the environment was harsh, at that time, the SMEs had good outing. For instance, during the military era when the environment was hostile to big time investors, the SMEs had no much competition. And you know that during that time, the multinationals were closing down, the SMEs were doing well. But shortly after we had our unguided democracy, unguided economic situation whereby you can protect the SMEs and what the SMEs are doing is the same thing multinationals came back to do. Like we have big companies producing water, big companies just importing to package, these jobs are supposed to be for the SMEs. And this has actually given the SMEs a lot of headache that they find it difficult to operate such that a lot of them had to close down. This is an area the government need to address.

The question should be; what is the need for the SMEs, how do we protect them, how do we assist them in market access? The government should come out and assist them with low interest rate funds for them to be able to import machineries and produce at international standard.

Management style
In my company, we work together, not as a master and servant relationship. It is a corporative system with, just having to know a little about who the overall boss is. We work as a team, just as having a team of the Sales Manager, the marketing team, the production team, and we have other teams, and then, the vertical and horizontal section.
We work in a brotherly way, and when you look at it, it looks like a family affair. The working atmosphere is such that one would want his child to work, even after he or she might have worked there as well.

Coping with company and NASSI responsibilities
Initially it was very difficult when we were not having competent staffs in NASSI , but now that we have enough competent staffs to manage the affairs of the organization, it has made me so free enough to concentrate on my business.

The future of spectra
Our company has a lot of hurdles to cross, but we are crossing them one after the other and we are also climbing higher. We are crossing the hurdles. Our ultimate goal actually is to present our products to the whole world as functional foods and, at the same time, assist more Nigerians in the area of food processing, assist entrepreneurs in establishing their own industries. To achieve this, we are working with the relevant government agencies to push this concept across by going from states to state to assist in entrepreneurship in the field of food processing.