I joined Etisalat in 2010, about a year after it launched as the 4th entrant into the Nigerian market — undoubtedly an ultra competitive market with the competition kicking off operations 7 years before we did. We had 2.8 million subscribers while the other 3 shared a combined subscriber base of about 88 million. So how did we become the most feared challenger and $1B company?

As Head of Strategy and Business Development — I led the strategy development and roll out / implementation — letting the market know that “the fear of Etisalat, is the beginning of wisdom”, as was commonly said in MTN. Yes, its true, but you may have to buy someone wine to get this gist, like I did.

Today, most telcos have created a separate unit to roll out the next-generation of products outside of the core portfolio of minutes and megabytes. Ours was created in 2011 and in 2013, I took the team over as the Director of Digital Business — we grew this business by 1000%; introduced around 1000 products into the market; outpacing the already fast-growing core business, five-fold.

So how’d we go from the early days to a peak 23 million customers and $1 billion in revenue? One post isn’t enough to articulate everything — but, in my mind, three ‘things’ were probably the most crucial for me, and the part I played:

— The team: what I had to figure out here was the type of leader I needed to be to deliver on the goals of each of these units and get the best out of my people — both units were by nature, quite different. One was strategic and planning-focused while the other operational and revenue-focused. After experience hiring for one type of team, how do you repeat that in a different context? How would I build a team culture that determined our success? There’s no playbook for doing that in Nigeria, and if there is, I definitely didnt have it.

— The approach: My inner geek always boils a problem down to the brass tacks and is usually some version of ‘what do I need to do to meet the goal?’. Seems innocuous, right? It is anything but that, since asking yourself this question is as much of an art as it is a science. Also — who do you ask? Ask too many and your ability gets questioned, ask too few and you miss out on resources. What you ‘do’ is defined not only by a simply articulated statement but what can affect you/the goal and if you’re not aware or prepared, you’re screwed. I’m well practiced with the screw-ups, along the way I picked up a few tricks to recover.

— Execution: In the Nigerian context, this is an especially prickly problem because of the uncertainty in the influencing people, processes and systems. That uncertainty is driven by the lack of set standards and quality in education, leadership, and work experience amongst many other things. And success within this context requires a tremendous amount of grit that we Nigerians are known for, but grit alone cannot execute a project, you’ll probably just end up with health issues. Delivering in a complex, corporate organization with 7-figure dollar goals, required a kind of adaptability that I had to find.

Understanding these ‘things’ also made the difference between partners that delivered the 10-million-user products and those that did not find traction — so my hope in sharing is that you can find some usefulness no matter the size of your operation / business and end up on the right side of success.

Despite making strides in size and quality of homegrown products, our ecosystem still has much work to do to find that balance between a strong value proposition and sustainable scale. But I still believe that local entrepreneurs are best positioned to lead digital transformation with localized solutions through successful partnerships with mobile operators.

It’s now time to chart a new chapter in my life, hopefully one that will allow me to continue the work of shaping the next generation of mobile-driven digital products. But in the meantime, I will share some more of my experience in future posts.

Finally, I take this opportunity to wish first, my team that grew and supported me, the company that I have called home, colleagues that became friends and partners that took chances with me and lastly my leaders that freed and empowered me, the very best in the future.

Peace.

This story is published in Noteworthy, where 10,000+ readers come every day to learn about the people & ideas shaping the products we love.

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Recently, I had the honor and pleasure of speaking at a Paystack event. The Women at Paystack wanted to demystify approaching a career in tech whilst discussing the realities of working in technology. I was asked to give the keynote on what future roles in tech would look like.

The question is a little bit of a doozie. Maybe even more than a little bit. Looking back over my career, I definitely couldn’t predict where I am now because that would also mean predicting what country I would be in, the state of my personal life, world events, etc. I mean, you can ‘try’ to predict the future and enjoy the exercise of your imagination but ultimately, you’ll probably only be half right, even if you’re some kind of professional futurist.

‘Women at Paystack’ event video stream, I would recommend watching the whole thing but I start at around 1:03

So here’s my timeline:

— 2000. Graduated with a degree in Electronic and Electrical Engineering and thus began my adulting

— 2001. Got my first job as a Radio Frequency Engineer at a mobile operator where I was responsible for deploying and maintaining cell sites across several states in midwestern US. After a few years and multiple technology changes, I needed a new problem to solve because essentially the core task remained the same but technology advancements made the toys to solve them better

— 2004. Went to business school (where by the way, in my application I said I would own and operate a telco in Nigeria), and took a swath of classes that cut across the spectrum of business so that I could solve as many problems as were thrown at me in the future.

—2007. I became a management consultant.

— 2009. The global economic crisis affected a lot of people, I was one of them. So after a couple of years solving different problems for different telecom companies, I headed to Nigeria.

— 2010. Got a job at EMTS (formerly Etisalat Nigeria, now 9 Mobile), first as the Head of Strategy (this story starts with me sitting in a bar wearing a red dress, but that’s a tale for another post). After tackling various issues across departments in the company, it was time for something else

— 2013. Next was a move to what is now called the Digital Business unit at EMTS, where we diversified our product portfolio from our core products (voice, data, peer-to-peer SMS) to include value added service, digital content, financial services, mobile advertising, APIs and much more

Now, rewind to me as an RF Engineer in Des Moines, Iowa in 2001 and ask me to hazard a guess as to what would happen to me 15 years later and I would have been completely and utterly wrong. As you can see above, many expectations that I had for myself or future roles have since changed — I do not own a mobile telco :). Put in a different way, in the time that’s passed since my first job, the iPhone has happened to the world and companies like Netflix, Google, Paypal and Facebook have grown to prominence. Imagine trying to hazard a guess what the next 15 years would look like with trends in IoT, AR/VR, self-driving cars, messaging and cryptocurrency lifting off.

But having said all of this, I don’t mean to say you can’t look forward. Did you spot the trend across the jobs ? — through all my roles, I had the opportunity to solve technology-based problems within the telecom industry. The industry remained the same, but the problems changed over time. I just followed my interests and gathered knowledge along the way and as opportunities came up, I made myself available.

So next, the lovely audience at Paystack and I did a little exercise in futurism.

We started with an important statistic. Nigeria’s population is expected to double to around 400 million by 2050, and will be one of 9 countries in which half of the world’s 10 billion people will reside. Put another way, Nigeria is roughly the size of the US state of Texas, and we will fit our entire population, which will be larger than the US by then, into that single state.

This prompts a few questions around what state of society we desire in Nigeria. For a peaceful one, we would need to consider how to satisfactorily feed, educate, employ, house, and entertain this massive populace at a greater scale than we are currently doing right now. So the question becomes how can tech drive scale and efficiency in solving these massive problems across the value chains of agriculture, education, job creation (or entrepreneurship which I believe needs to be a focus of our educational system) real estate, and entertainment, to name a few.

Let’s dive a little deeper:

As populous as it is, Nigeria really a country of many large towns, and one mega-city — Lagos. Sorry, Abuja! Since I’m a pragmatist, I’m going to assume that urban migration will grow faster than the state can keep up with it. So Lagos will lead the way in creating the next tier of city above megacity.

This raises the following questions for me:

— how will we feed the population? Will we grow more food or will food production have to get more efficient? At the moment, I gather than almost half the food grown in Nigeria rots before it gets to the processing plant? Can technology cut back this waste by connecting Nigerian farmers to Nigerian food producers?

— the ports already seem to be heaving, and food imports are likely a massive contributor, so will we have to build a new one or manage port traffic more efficiently? Better still, can we start growing what we currently import?

— how will people buy food? Are there enough markets? Will the increased traffic encourage people to visit markets? What are the shopping alternatives?

— what are the factors that affect the price of food?

— who has recently entered the food value chain?

I’m sure there are a ton more questions to ask but I will leave that to experts, and I’m sure you get my drift. Basically, these questions should point to the opportunities that existing and future companies will be trying to solve, which means opportunities for you!

Here’s non-exhaustive and rough formula that would apply to any industry:

— at what rate are the customers growing?

— who are the players between the raw material and the customer? Are they efficient or profitable? If not, why aren’t they profitable today?

— What is the motivation to use the product and how do customers get it?

— what external conditions affect industry profitability?

Use these questions to figure out if a company or opportunity is big enough or important enough and resonates with you. The bigger it is, the more likely you can have a long and fruitful career within that industry.

So, bottom line, prepare by staying sharp on the latest business and tech trends in your favorite industries, opportunities will show up, and the future will figure itself out!

Figure out your future career in tech was originally published in Code Like A Girl on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Across Africa, the mobile telecommunications industry has consistently delivered progressive scale and growth in country after country, under uniquely challenging economic circumstances. With almost 600 million mobile subscribers, the continent now presents a cross-continental mechanism for scale, leveraging the strength of mobile operators’ brand, reach, customers insights and infrastructure.

This level of mobile connectivity ushered in digital economies across Africa and produced business models that were uncommon in developed markets. Mobile operators have become enablers for economic building blocks like identity management, financial services and advertising; key ingredients for scale that allow home grown innovators to find and connect with audiences across Africa.

I’ve been uniquely privy to view some of the issues that challenge mobile operator partnerships for small businesses. These entrepreneurs are trying to leverage mobile operator assets for their businesses, and while the obstacles can seem insurmountable, the pathways to success really depend on perspective and approach.

The magic usually happens when the right proposition meets the right opportunity. Historically, the partnerships that work have a few distinct commonalities, the consistency and convergence between what both parties know and how both parties think. Without a clear understanding of these factors, negotiations will continue to falter.

Before approaching a telco for partnership, businesses need to know how their product will make money, and learn to express this by drawing parallels with the revenue models of their target telcos.

In the current African context, I would advise that any proposed technology (product or service)leverages SMS and USSD in its design. Once you’ve identified a telco partner, businesses need to think about (or maybe rethink) their approach in terms of risk.

Firstly, they must understand that mobile operators have surmounted this risk to achieve scale, and that current operational processes cannot be completely abandoned to enable the partnership.

Stakeholders across the ecosystem need to support their digitization strategies with these perspectives, and all parties to these transactions need to change and grow, to overcome the collective threat of obsolescence that will constrain African ecosystems in the absence of constant and rapid innovation.

About the Author

Adia Sowho, is the Director of Digital Business at 9Mobile. She started her career as an engineer with a mobile telecom operator in the United States. After obtaining an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management and a stint at Deloitte Consulting, she returned home to Nigeria. In her current role, Adia works on developing mobile content, technology and financial services products through partnerships with 9Mobile.

This article is featured on the State of Play report. To receive a free copy of the report click here.

Originally published at medium.com on September 2, 2017.

Last year I published an article sharing four tips to illustrate what frustrates start-ups and mobile operators when building partnerships. The spirited feedback on my second tip — Solidifying the Relationship — confirms what my daily interactions imply:

The philosophical, organisational and expectation-related disconnect between start-ups and established mobile operators is dangerously pronounced.

Reconciling this rift is my intent today.

The tech ecosystem — one that feeds emerging technology, expands consumer goods access, spurs job creation and broadens information sharing wealth — is in peril if mobile operators and start-ups can’t align. The stakes are particularly high in emerging markets where mobile operators’ commercial influence and reach may be even broader than financial service providers.

Mobile operator ubiquity means there may be more operators than profit potential, and partnerships are no longer a luxury, as they are a pipeline for product innovation that staves off margin decline and the competitive squeeze, in the face of declining revenues from voice. At the 2017 Mobile World Congress, Sunil Bharti Mittal, Chairman of Airtel, remarked: “…one doesn’t want a situation where there are one or two ‘healthy”‘operators, while another similar number struggle and the other three or four are in the ICU”.

This means: efficiently executed partnerships in the pursuit of relevant, creative, disruptive product development to re(shape) the digital future are needed more than ever.

As ‎Director of Digital Business at Etisalat Nigeria, I live empathetically at the intersection of competing motivations of revenue targets and product innovation. Implicit in my role is the idea that if mobile operators and start-ups can understand one another and practically appreciate the value in one another’s business contribution and approach, potent partnership potential is generated.

This is more than acknowledging your potential partner’s success. It is recognizing the deficiency in your own business and accepting that the whole is greater than the sum of your respective businesses.

Ready to partner? Here are four must-have perspectives for start-ups seeking a mobile operator relationship.

1. Risk needs sharing.

The universal risk–reward paradigm is bizarrely applied in mobile operator and start-up relationships. Start-ups sometimes enter discussions uninterested in absorbing risks driven by their own businesses, assuming that the mobile operator’s capital, networks and customer base makes its pockets full and immune to market consequences. The perception that no product fails at a mobile operator is presumptively false. Losing propositions are by far more popular than winners and the shadow of a losing product is cast over their internal champions and future product prioritization.

Most African mobile operators are still in the investment stage, meaning that mobile operators also possess a level of risk sensitivity and can’t fully absorb the start-up’s share. Risk doesn’t need to be equally distributed, but it should be reasonably dealt.

2. Parties are different but capable.

The collaboration should be symbiotic. Collaboration blooms when parties ascribe genuine and proportionate value to the contribution of the other party. The experience can be beautifully dependent — in fact, it must be — but inherent biases need to be set aside.

The problem?

In their respective cultures of mobile operators and start-ups, there is a strong belief that what each side knows, is more valuable.

In successful partnerships, parties share values and goals, even if stylistically or culturally different.

Don’t miss this. Start-ups complain that mobile operators are burdened with processes, over-reach on revenue share and move at glacial pace. Operators are skeptical of the aggressive, chaotic pace, fail-fast-initiatives and quick pivots of start-ups. Value can only be realized if both sides are healthily infused with the other’s culture, the emerging market ecosystem depends on it.

3. Age doesn’t matter, awareness does.

I hate calling out start-up founders as if all are part of a homogenous community. But for brevity’s sake, I’ll say it: founders have some maturing to do and tend to be disappointingly unprepared, entitled and shortsighted in dealings with mobile operators.

Yes, yes, I know… mobile operators are the scourge of the tech community — insatiable appetites for revenue, slow to innovate and rife with bureaucracy. But they do what start-ups haven’t — gone to market at scale!

Start-ups should, therefore, be prepared to answer:

• Why should the mobile operator be engaging with your start-up?
• Start-ups fail, pivot or change every day, how likely are you to see this partnership through?
• What will your product do for the mobile operator’s customers? Outside of increasing ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) and reducing customer churn, what makes the customer care enough to use it? Have you proven this?
• How willing are you to adjust your product based on feedback from the mobile operator? Do you have the technical capabilities to deliver a carrier-grade product?

Right or wrong, to mobile operators, unprepared start-ups are a risk. And sadly, this risk often obscures the view of the opportunities. The person on the mobile operator side’s responsibility is to quantify that risk. Thoughtfully considering the risk factors, so that the opportunity becomes clear, is the way forward.

4. Change is hard but obscurity is deadly.

While I’ve evangelized respect and appreciation of start-ups and mobile operators, I need to leave this as a parting message: Change hurts, but obscurity destroys. Mobile operators are waking up to a reality that is the future is not only about minutes and megabytes.

Seismic changes are overtaking the industry: agility, innovation, and business model variety are now essential. Start-ups have become an “access-to-innovation” avenue for mobile operators and pursuing it requires internal shifts and a meeting-in-the-middle mindset for benefits to be realized. The time is now for healthy deviation from rigid decision-making even though it has been the key to previous success at the mobile operator. However, start-ups with a structure that shows the promise of organizational and corporate maturity is appealing to a mobile operator and is a must for partnership

Mobile operators aren’t charities. Start-ups with only an innovative idea, aren’t automatically entitled to a mobile operator’s time or money. But, with a concrete plan, they are certainly closer. Change is hard, but if this partnership is vetted, offerings are complementary and parties are mutually inclined to go-to-market together, it is worth it.

And not just worth it, vital.

Posted in blog, Ecosystem Accelerator, Ecosystem Accelerator, English, Sub-Saharan Africa, Uncategorized Tagged adia sowho, elisalat nigeria, Etisalat, Start-ups

Originally published at www.gsma.com on May 16, 2017.

It is common knowledge that revenue pressure from OTTs (Over-The-Top) players, like Facebook and WhatsApp is eating into traditional mobile operator/telecommunications company (telco) revenue from minutes and megabytes. Telcos continue to seek the right monetization model to monetize and penetrate their walled gardens that have redefined communication. This is particularly acute in Africa where 3G launches were several years behind developed markets but consumers’ lower earning power accelerates this commoditization in the search for the cheapest megabyte. A good friend once put it well — “in Africa, you build a $50 ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) network for a $5 ARPU customer.”

In addition, the connectivity revolution has upended the Fortune 500 company, and fundamentally has changed the ways consumers ‘consume’ everything. Every industry now has to ‘digitize’ their value proposition — giving rise to what is now called, the ‘Digital Economy.’ In Africa, the value proposition may have to be wholly digital because sometimes the ‘analog’ proposition may not have even taken off here yet, lending even more importance to this new virtual economy.

These realities have created a tricky environment for the telco because the core value proposition is being encroached upon but is expanding at the same time, at different speeds! All is not lost though, as telcos own the wireless network infrastructure that powers connectivity, and while the burden of the capital expense still rests with the telco, the digital economy creates an opportunity to derive value from any industry with a digital aspect — from agriculture to waste management. Telcos must emulate or more feasibly partner with players in other industries, to deliver this next-generation of services, while focusing on the core connectivity business. This is especially tasking in Africa where many of these companies are startups because they are much younger than verticals they exist in.

The telco has four major assets that can be offered in partnership — its brand, reach, customer insights, and infrastructure. These assets can be leveraged for a diverse set of industries to derive digital business value.

These assets represent digital infrastructure that can take the place of physical infrastructure which is usually wanting. For example, pre-paid electricity meters can communicate account balance if they have a SIM card. Subscribers can then be notified of a low balance and authorize payment so that power is not interrupted. This leads to a contiguous subscriber experience and a more stable power sector with revenues that can now have a more meaningful effect on GDP.

Unfortunately, many of these partnerships do not survive the whiteboard because of a few common issues that are a challenge in most markets but more aggravated in an emerging market setting. In my role at Etisalat Nigeria, I am responsible for creating the enabling environment for these partnerships and the following are some of my observations of these challenges.

1. A Clear Path to Monetization

The core business of a telco is building out the network and deriving value from it; in emerging markets, many telcos are actually still in investment stage unlike other markets. The consequence of the environmental challenges mentioned earlier is that commitment of the finite resources must show a clear Return On Investment (ROI) and alignment with the telco’s goals. And at any point in time, there are 10 times more digital business opportunities being considered compared with the normal flow of products in a developed market telco. Remember, we are busy leapfrogging older tech that never made it to Africa in the first place.

Digital business, being new is essentially more risky than a telco is used to. This risk can be described along two lines: 1) Market/Demand risk — will customers pay for this product? 2) Execution risk — can we successfully deploy this product? You may think your product will make you a few million dollars, but until the demand + execution risks have been mitigated and enough consumers believe in this proposition, a telco won’t be fully convinced if they have not been successful with a similar product. The cost of covering these risks is a major reason for the ‘overbearing’ telco revenue share proportions that upset startups so much. Telcos have more experience creating products and scaling them than you do.

My advice: Put some skin in the game with a business model that shares the risk with the telco e.g. revenue share and have a frank discussion about a split that covers the telcos costs (and yours, of course). In Africa especially, there is a daily forex expense (for equipment sale, installation, and support) that must be covered to keep the network running. If the split is not in your favor, don’t panic! It is okay to push for a volume based adjustment — so the more successful your product is, the greater your share. This way, if your product hits a tipping point, then you can benefit more from the upside.

2. Solidifying the Relationship

Multi-million dollar companies are used to dealing with other multi-million dollar companies. Their process, contracts, and risk management philosophies are similar. These prospects are typically quite intimidating when a startup or small company is confronted with them.

My advice: Take time to understand these processes, the people behind them and what motivates them. Also understand that the telco will never move as quickly as you do because decision-making rests with significantly more people compared with your organization. And get some help from a professional (legal, operational, etc.) who is comfortable within this type of operating environment to guide you around these processes. You can often find a range of people who have worked within a telco or within an experienced partner before that can help. Take Facebook’s Internet.Org proposition, in a very short time span, the proposition was modified several times based on knowledge acquired from deployments with telcos (and often driven by ex-telco staff hired on by Facebook) which has rapidly improved their ability to partner. If the juggernaut that is Facebook can change to enable partnership with telcos in Africa — so can you.

3. Technology Compatibility

While telcos and OEMs do work to GSMA standards, there are many layers of proprietary technology that are not shared even amongst telcos in the same markets. The end product might seem the same but the means can vary widely between telcos. This tends to frustrate partners who wish to deploy their service with a ‘one size fits all’ approach. Creating the marriage between technologies to deliver the services results in lengthy integrations that startups might not have factored into their business models.

My advice: First determine whether the target market you can identify within one telco is enough to meet your numbers, if it is, start with one partner. Don’t spread yourself thin by trying to manage simultaneous integrations with different telcos. If your idea is truly revolutionary, there will be barriers to entry from competitors copying you. As mentioned earlier, but arguably more importantly in this case — previous operator experience on the partner side can significantly reduce the time these lengthy integrations could take. Also, remember the handsets. There are still by far more feature phones than smartphones in most of Africa. So please think about Android AND USSD.

4. Reaching Telco Customers

Telcos can only derive value from their own customers. Often partners expect a telco to deliver their competitors’ customers as well. Unlike the internet, the telco networks are walled gardens and do not offer universal connectivity. Furthermore, users and the go-to-market plans tend to vary by device. Sometimes, partners have products that work for the trendiest device at the time, which can often have a small subset of the telco’s customer base.

My advice: Not all telco customers are the same, be mindful of that. And as the ‘Internet of Things’ continues take off, this device diversity will deepen. Similar to the above, understand how many customers it would take to make your business plan and make sure you build your product to their needs. Start talking to a telco partner early enough so you learn about the right platforms to build services for.

All in all, when telco partnerships can successfully navigate these challenges, they can be immensely rewarding. But both sides need empathy, flexibility, and a little bit of luck to find that fit!

Read Adia’s “Meet the GES Delegate” profile, also found in this GES Medium publication.

Calling all African Startups: 4 Tips for Partnering with a Telco was originally published in Global Entrepreneurship Summit on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

• Name: Adia Sowho
• Twitter handle: @adiaspeaks
• Country of Origin: Nigeria
• Organization Name: Etisalat Nigeria
• Organization Website: www.etisalat.com.ng

Brief Description of Organizatio: Etisalat Nigeria is a mobile telecommunications company that commenced operations in Nigeria in October 2008 and has quickly grown to 22 million subscribers today. To date, Etisalat Nigeria has won several industry awards for its innovation and quality service delivery — Brand of the Year, Fast Growing GSM Company of the Year, Best Marketing Company, Most Innovative Corporate Social Responsibility Company, Friendliest Tariff Mobile Operator and Best Telecoms Customer Service among others.

What is the next big step you hope to help your organization reach? With the emergence of the digital economy, mobile telcos have to reinvent their business to include products beyond minutes and megabytes. This means becoming an enabler of digital business in other industries with competencies that telcos have already acquired. This represents a major change to the traditional business and my job as the Director of Digital Business at Etisalat Nigeria makes me responsible for developing these next-generation ‘products’.

What has been your biggest obstacle as an entrepreneur? Even though I work in a multi-national organization, describing my team as entrepreneurial is quite accurate. We develop innovative product with entrepreneurs and as such have to behave more like them in order to enable partnership. Now, the fact remains that I work in a multi-national organization which works with a completely different set of people, processes, pace and systems. Bridging this gap between my organization and my entrepreneurial partners has been the biggest challenge.

What advice would you give other emerging entrepreneurs? Understand your partner, have empathy. And if you’re really lucky, you will get the same at the telco — we are under pressure too. Mobile telcos are major enablers of digital business, which in Nigeria’s emerging economy is even more critical because of the absence of traditional systems and business infrastructure.

Meet GES Delegate: Adia Sowho was originally published in Global Entrepreneurship Summit on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.