What hurdles did you face before you started your career?
Those were amazing times. It was a combination of mistakes, passion, and persistence. I wrote free copies & willingly created campaign concepts for brands managed by different agencies and attached those to the CVs I sent in.
All in a bid to be proactive, but no one got back to me (well, I did hear from two agencies at the time through my advert concepts on TV with no credit given to me).
It was a big Ouchy for me, so I decided to get another job. Finally, I got an afternoon job as a glorified errands man in an agency, helping around the office to be around the agency life while also studying Cell Biology & Genetics. This was the most confusing time of my life.
On the new job, I kept reading copies left behind on their boards when cleaning up after their strategy sessions. It took a new GM coming into the company and anonymous copies sent to him consistently over a 3 month period on various in-house projects to get hired.
I was happy and gave everything I had for 6 months, and then the company shut down.
What Was the Greatest Hurdle You Had to Scale?
The greatest hurdle I needed to scale was constant disappointments. Disappointment for me at the time seemed a different kind of illness that gnawed at you on the inside with the tendency to break you into invisible places.
My spiritual belief in God and his ability to keep a man in uncertain times kept me going even as I kept learning and acquiring more knowledge.
What do you hope to accomplish within the next year?
Within the next year, I wish to accomplish 3 major things in Life, my Career and, most importantly, Spirituality. Firstly, my entire family and I are building a healthier lifestyle because we do not want to spend money trying to get back health.
With my business, I’m looking at creating more strategic partnerships that open us up to explore briefs and experiential campaigns from new regions. Lastly, as a family, we want to begin giving back to society with creative events that allow us to model a path to the next generation and build unwavering faith in their God-given potential.
Tell us about an accomplishment that shaped your career:
The accomplishment that shaped my career in Brand Marketing and Advertising was a campaign for Hewlett Packard. We created a campaign for onboarding more retailers for them and tackling the importation of fake HP products by various syndicates in partnership with the brand.
It was an offline campaign that happened in Nigeria. This gave me a lot of confidence as a Brand Strategist. From that moment onwards, we began working with other brands and running both digital and offline experiential campaigns for brands in Nigeria.
A few years down the line Africa and the UAE opened up to us with jobs for Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Bahrain, Dubai, and more.
Which celebrity are you most inspired with?
Personally, my yardstick for tagging someone as a celebrity is purely based on “Altruism” and sadly the words “” altruistic celebrity” are quite the oxymoron. Regardless, I’ll name two on a local and international level.
National Celebrity: Tony Elumelu
International Celebrity: Steve Hawking
What is the best and the worst part of being a CEO?
The best part of being a CEO (Chief Executive Officer) is the fact that it gives you time as a raw material that you could turn into something globally impactful.
The worst part for me is that when you fail to build something beautiful as a CEO it negatively impacts you and everyone else you take on that journey with you. Even if there was a good lesson to be learned at the end of that experience, you would have lost time.
What is the biggest challenge you have faced in your career? How did you overcome it and what did you learn from it?
The biggest challenge in my career was learning how to properly balance out my creative streak, introverted nature, and my innate understanding of human behavior.
I overcame it by stepping back from the day-to-day running of the agency, going back to school, and going through the tedious process of becoming a certified psychotherapist.
I learned that creativity was an amazing thing that could help me relax and be happy my whole life. I learned to become comfortable with introvertedness while using it to get inspiration for projects.
I learned that when you understand humans and their patterns you appreciate them more and their patterns can be relied upon to position a product where they’d most definitely see it.
What do you think about the qualities a leader should have?
I think every “good” leader should be visionary, flexible, genuine, and most importantly have a service-oriented approach to leadership.
Give our audience a word that describes you the best.
Balance (grin)
Inspire other
I have always believed that Inspiration must always begin from within. I am first unashamedly a born-again Christian that’s my balance. Knowing where my light was helped me build a career with exactitude and precision. Dark times had nothing on me because I held on to my light.
For you, some nights may be restless and some days spent in doubt regarding outcomes surrounding your life but these must never be reasons to quit. No good thing ever came easy.
Write out your dreams, look at them often and you will learn to avoid anything that would waste your time. Time is the unit by which your life is measured. Use yours wisely.
Narrator: Temple Obike
Company: Brand Envoy Africa
Website: www.brandenvoy.com
