His name might not immediately ring a bell, when you mention it out there, but that of the company he runs surely does. Easy going Bolaji Okusaga runs The Quadrant Company, Nigeria’s leading Public Relations Consultancy. And he has done so for over a decade.
When he first took over as MD, many didn’t give him a chance of success. The situation was made a lot difficult because he was coming in the wake of many PR gurus that have served before him. So, a lot was expected from this brilliant guy who had had stints with the Media and Banking before taking up the job in a conglomerate that has Mr. Biodun Shobanjo at the helm of affairs.
Everyone knows Mr. Shobanjo as a no nonsense advertising guru who is committed to the very best in the industry. So, everyone was eager to see how Bolaji would deliver on his promise to turn the fortunes of Quadrant around within the shortest possible time, at a time when the PR industry was transiting from the old order to the new digital age.
11 years down the line, Bolaji has dazzled everyone with his unique style of doing things. What has helped him is his rich pedigree and his tulelage.
He is a product of Obafemi Awolowo University where he graduated in Dramatic Arts as The Best Graduating Student of the 1994 Class, winning the prestigious Wole Soyinka Prize for the best graduating student in the department, as well as the Professor Michael Crowder Award for The Best Graduating Student in the 3 Creative Arts departments in the school.
He had a short stint in Arts Management and Consultancy at the International Centre for the Arts under the tutelage of late Ambassador Segun Olusola, before proceeding to do his National Youth Service in the Marketing unit of the Broad Street Branch of the then Lion Bank of Nigeria. At the end of the service, he was awarded a Commendation Certificate in recognition of his leadership qualities.
He proceeded to the University of Ibadan where he bagged a Masters in Communication and Language Arts in 1998 before joining Minaj Broadcast International as a Producer/ Researcher. He later joined Presentations Plus, a firm of Branding and Reputation Managers. While with Presentations Plus, working closely with the Director of Media and Publicity as well as other Campaign Directors, he handled as Head Strategy, the Media Strategy as well as the brand perception of the principal characters in the Obasanjo/Atiku 2003 Presidential Campaign.
He joined Marina International Bank and was part of the team responsible for delivering a compelling brand proposition which helped drive the bank’s business strategy. With the wave of the Nigerian Banking Industry consolidation in 2004 and its imperative for mergers and acquisition, he was part of a nine man integration project management team that drove the merger between Access Bank, Capital Bank and Marina Bank. At end of the merger which led to a bigger Access Bank in September 2005, he was appointed Head, Investor Relations in October 2005. He is at present the Managing Director of the Quadrant Company, Nigeria’s leading Public Relations Consultancy.
Working with a team of game-changers, The Quadrant Company was able to win the Award of the African PR Consultancy of the year 2012, the most prestigious international award in Public Relations by the Holmes Report/Sabre Awards – the first by a Nigerian PR Consultancy, under his charge.
Since differentiation is key to the market success of any business, Bolaji stresses the need for the alignment of the work-place with the challenges of the market-place.
He is a Strategy and Brand devotee with wide experience in the Mass-Media, Marketing, Public Relations and Banking. Aside from this, He is also interested in Politics, Policy and Corporate Governance.
Bolaji has attended several courses on Branding, Corporate Strategy, Product Development, Leadership and Change Management as well as Mergers and Acquisition. He is an Associate member of the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations and was also recently the 2nd Vice President of the Association of Corporate Affairs Managers of Banks.
What has kept him going all these years doing what he does as the big boss at Quadrant?
“I think it is the passion I have for the job” he said. “The job has a way of taking you over. This job is such that keeps you on the road and on your feet all the time. It keeps you meeting all manner of people. You are like a doctor in the public space. People tend to tell you their weakest points, what keeps them awake at night, from a Reportation or an Image perspective and you are expected to keep this close to your chest, whilst you design a strategy. That tills the scale in their favour. It just charges your adrenaline. I started running this company almost 11 years ago. And it seems very much as yesterday, I was on the corporate side, I worked for a couple of banks. Before then, I did a bit of agency work. I also did a bit of broadcasting. I worked at MINAJ broadcasting as a Producer and Researcher. Coming here, its been a different ballgame in the sense that as a CEO, and if you do your job very seriously, you are expected to know a bit about every issue you handle.”
“You need to have a bit of idea about everything and every area you consult for. So, if you consult for an Agric company, you are expected to know a bit about that sector. If it’s an Oil & Gas company, you must understand the fundamentals that drive the business, ditto for me working for a real estate sector, I must understand what drives the real estate sector. In a sense, it’s a job that makes you constantly and consistently to be acquiring knowledge because there is no way you can even design a solution except you understand the dynamics at play. To a great extent that kind of dynamism, diversity and scale of responsibility over time, is just pretty much what has kept my fancy. And before you know it, time just passes you by. The joy gives you much in terms of knowledge. This job is broader than just managing the media. The media is only but an aspect of what you do. You also have to manage fundamentals, around business, that speaks to building a reputation. You also have to look at stakeholders, so you do a stakeholder map that talks about institutional and individual linkage and how that affects the business or the individual or the course you are trying to manage.”
“Then, you design a strategy, which will involve a couple of things beyond just the media. The media is central to the value chain, because that gets you talking to a multi stakeholders at the same time, but beyond that, there are also other things. For instance, if you are managing a bank that seeks to raise money, everything does not start and end with the media. There is an Investor relations side to it, which will involve speaking to investor analysts. If you are managing an Agriculture company, seeking to derive some kind of value chain advantage, from what it does, you want to look at critical stakeholders within that value chain, and how you can bring them together probably in a seminar or a conference and then get a presentation to happen, then get some kind of feedback and use that to reappraise the way people feel about what is on offer.
If you are working for a consumer type of business, you want to profile the consumer, speak to representatives of that consumer to find out how you will do and manage the PR/brand process before you go to the media. It is a very complex and interesting field. So to speak, it has just consumed me in the last 11 years. I really live and breathe it.
How has he also seen the evolution of PR practice in the last 11 years, especially how the PR business has moved beyond dealing with the media alone?
“I started doing this, before I even came here. So, I probably started doing it before the arrival of the email. In those days, if you needed to get something into the media, you put in your floppy disc and you will send it to the media houses. Suddenly, the email arrived and it changed the dynamics. Everybody then jumped on that, and the email then became a platform for collaboration and messaging. That was in the late 90’s to early 2000.
Then came the social media in the middle of 2000, which started with the likes of My Space, Yahoo friends, to Highfive to Facebook and it then exploded to Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, Snapchat etc. So, the evolution has been fundamental. Just the same way the media is now totally affected by the reality of the kind of divergence and balkanisation that has happened within the media space, in terms of how it affects media services consumption. Nigeria has a mobile penetration in excess of 120 million. That tells you that about 60 million Nigerians have smart phones. The mobile is changing consumption. What is the circulation figures of the average newspaper, it probably circulates fewer than 200,000.
That is even assuming that it is doing well in terms of being able to acquire newsprint, and actually has its printing press. What all these mean is that people read you more online. To that extent, it has also affected our business. If you imagine that in the earlier days, we were hiring people stricto senso from the media, people who had media knowledge, so that they can design strategies that will get at the media, so that they can manage relationship with the media, that is gone.
Now, we are beginning to talk of social media influencers, the whole idea of integrated messages, because we are now in the era of integration. So, how do you start and end a whole campaign in the newspapers? If what you are trying to do is to get at a consumer, how do you deal with those who don’t even read the newspaper? That will change the kind of strategy you will use or deploy.
You must also take into consideration the fact that Nigeria has a very young demography, we have a mean age of 19. That means over 70% of the people in Nigeria are below the age of 20. So, it tells you that the mass of the people you are dealing with are not even in the traditional media. The TV and even the most consumed media has been dethroned by the internet. It has changed the dynamics of the business we do, such that some of us, if we are not careful we may be playing the laggard because the guys who now rule the wave are the digital natives, so if you are not a hybrid business as a PR company, you are at the losing end in the sense that you are losing many opportunities. Look at the campagn of 2015. It was fought and won on the social media. Nobody talks about the traditional media in the sense of it being the agenda setter any more.”
“We are now in the age of machine agenda setting as opposed to editorial and media-owner agenda setting, which usually is the essence of traditional media. That means one human being sitting in one corner can decide to cause problem for government or cause problem for companies. Now, how does the PR person cope if he doesn’t change with the trend? So, the whole practice has been disrupted, such that now, one small blogger can actually become a nightmare. We have seen that happen, time and time again. So, we are in the area of convergence, and traditional practice can no longer do it. Though, it is still a part of the mix, but what percentage? I can tell you its just about 15% of what we do right now that appeals to traditional media.”
“The whole chunk of it has gone to the expanded media space. And that is a major disruption for this business. So, we have had to rethink our role in the market, and review our organisational structure. We now recruit more younger people.”
– Seye Kehinde
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