SVYEP officer Camille Wang interviewed founder and CEO of HYBR Group Charles Ojei last month. HYBR is a boutique business development firm which empowers African entrepreneurs to work with corporations and governments to make impact. Here's Charles on entrepreneurship.

Camille:
Do you mind telling us a little bit about yourself and your business?
Charles:
Thank you so much for inviting me and giving me the opportunity to talk about entrepreneurship. It's something I'm very passionate about. My name is Charles. I grew up in West Africa. I started coding in my teenage years and went on to university to study industrial relations, personal management, in today's modern age, it will be called Human Resources. I did that in my undergrad days, and then never practiced it, because my first job was in sales at PG, Procter and Gamble. And then I also did marketing and strategy for a few years, and then I moved on to a science company and help them build their food and agriculture business in Africa. Did that for a few years, and then moved on to GE where I helped set up some of the high technology businesses in West Africa, and help expand their healthcare service business as well in Africa. And after that, went to grad school, to business school, came back and did my last job, incorporated with Samsung and led one of the subsidiaries and after that, I started my company today, which is HYBR, which is an innovation development firm.
Camille:
What sparked your interest in business or entrepreneurship, and how did you get started?
Charles:
So that's a very interesting question. Now that I think about it, I would say I never really set out to become an entrepreneur from when I completed my studies in university, my first job in corporate was in sales, and you know, it led from one job, you know, to the next. And I realized that in all the companies I had worked for, I was always given assignments that were focused on building innovations, building markets, building new products, building new customers. So I was always building things from scratch. I had a good appetite for risk, and I knew how to navigate uncertainties. So doing my doing my last job, which was at Samsung. And you know, after business school, I really picked up interest in entrepreneurship. So I said, You know what? Let me learn more about entrepreneurship. I enrolled in a program during my time at Samsung. I wrote in a program in the Netherlands, and I was really trying to figure out, okay, if I were to start my own company, what would it be? What would I be doing? So every six weeks I would fly into into the Netherlands, and then over, over a period of six months, and one day, we were doing a visioning session. It's really a time to reflect on your past and really look at some of the learnings and some of the things that you have picked up as you go along your career. So I reflected a bit, and I realized that, hey, I was, you know, I was always building and scaling solutions in the companies that I was working for. So I told myself, you know, why don't I help startup founders? Why don't I help leaders build and scale their businesses? So I was like, Okay. And then HYBR, was born, and our initial focus was really to help companies build and skill, and that was how I started my entrepreneurial journey in full.
Camille:
Can you share a specific challenge that you faced and what you took away from it or learned from it?
Charles:
Well, there are so so many, entrepreneurship is not a straight line. They are many, many ups and downs. There are days that you will be so excited, the days that you will be depressed, like, oh my god, what am I doing here? So there's really a lot of things that I've learned as I walk through this journey, I think some of the most important ones to me are as entrepreneurs. It's very important to understand the market that we are focusing on in the early days of HYBR, the market we serve were generally entrepreneurs, were generally startup founders, startup companies. But we realized that, you know, for the services that we were offering them, they really couldn't afford our services. So hence we ended up having a lot of cash flow issues that they weren't able to pay, even though our services were really good, but we struggled. And one thing I would say is that when you as an entrepreneur, you find out that whatever solution you're building is not really working the way you anticipated. Anticipated it to work. It's important you pivot very, very quickly. There's a very popular saying, fail very fast. So we needed to pivot. We needed to become a venture fund that will provide the cash or the financing that our customers needed, or we completely change our entire business model and the people that we serve. So for me, if I were to, you know, speak to entrepreneurs today is to identify the right market, identify the potential of that market and ensure that whatever you're building, you're building it for people that want it and can afford it.
Camille:
What do you think are some of the most important skills to have as an entrepreneur?
Charles:
You know, an entrepreneur is, especially in the early days, you would do everything, you would be your HR, you would be your finance, you would be your sales. You'll be sales. In some cases, you even be the engineer building the product. So you definitely would, you know, have skills in many, many areas. There definitely is a core thing that you probably are good at. Some founders are very good in engineering, and some founders are very good in sales. But I would say that these are, I would say more of, like, hard skills, you know, skills that you get you learn from from school and you pick up along the way. As an entrepreneur, I think what is really, really, truly essential are the soft skills, alright? And let me highlight two that I feel are really, really very important, irrespective of what you're building or which market you're serving or which industry you're in. I think the first one is your ability to solve problems, because you're going to see them on a daily basis, like problems are just going to be coming towards you, even when you're not looking for them. So you must be able to really learn how the world works very quickly. To be a good entrepreneur is really about solving real world problems. Because out of those problems, merge your products and your services, so you need to be able to, I would say, pick the right problems and the right people that have those problems. This is really very, very important. And problem solving requires a lot of observation. It requires you to be able to listen, listen to the market, listen to your team, listen to your customers, and learn, and then begin to craft and design solutions. You can build a good solution. If you don't have a good problem, the solution is a reflection of the problem you're actually trying to solve. So your ability to spot problems and solve them, I think, is a very essential skill. The second thing I think is important is your ability to work with people, because at the end of the day, building a business is really about interacting with people. Your customers are human beings, your investors are human beings, your employees are human beings, your partners, your colleagues, they're all human beings. The business is people interacting and, you know, doing business with each other, so as an entrepreneur, it’s very important to understand what drives people and what is the best way to communicate and engage, to motivate and to influence them. So working with people is really, really, very, very important, whether you're an introvert or you're an extrovert, you will interface with people, and you must be able to to work with people. So, problem solving and working with people. I would say, amongst many other skills are, quite important. They're very important.
Camille:
If you could start over, what is one thing, or like, maybe multiple things that you would do differently?
Charles:
So many, well, so many, I tell you the truth, so many. I wish I could restart the clock and go back eight years. And we fail to realize time moves very quickly. You know, it goes very, very fast. I would say that I wish I researched the space more, the space I was focused or working on. I wish I researched it more, because a lot of times we have this dot, right? We have this instinct, ah, there's this thing, there's this spark, there's this great idea that we have. We make these assumptions and we say we are onto something, but sometimes we need to just, you know, slow down a little and really try and understand the space that we are trying to work in, whether it's a tech, AI, FinTech, what is the true context of the problem or the dynamics of that specific environment or issue that we're dealing with? So I wish we did more research to truly identify the problem we're trying to solve and deepen our understanding of that problem. I wish we did that, and spent more time doing that. I also, you know, in learning about that space. Secondly, I wish we really went ahead to understand people that had walked the journey, specifically in that area, people that had succeeded and people that have failed, and why? Really trying to understand what are the existing models? So we don't end up trying to recreate things that have already been created. What models already exist? And where are the gaps in those models? And where do we truly innovate so that we can solve the problem that we are addressing in a better way. So I think gathering more intelligence around the problem that we're trying to solve, I mean not going into what you call the paralysis of analysis, where you're just, you know, soaking yourself deeply in so many facts, and not trying to move. There is a good balance between understanding the space you're in and moving forward in taking things into motion. So you know, doing better research to properly identify the problem and doing better research to see what already exists so you can innovate better.
Camille:
How do you measure your success?
Charles:
You know, it's tricky, right? Because in the early days of building a company, you really don't know what you're building. You are trying to get to a point where you have something that customers want. So depending on the stage you are in, as you build your business, your success will, the meaning of success will change. So in the early days, when you're trying to understand the problem, it's really about how many interactions are you having with customers or prospective customers, and what are you learning? All right, you know, what are you learning? And as you begin to build a solution, it's now about, you know, how quickly are you building it, and how are your customers using, you know, but as things begin to take shape, and you have a product that customers want to buy or want to exchange for value, then some really definite matrix for success now begins to emerge so things like, how many customers do you have? How many of these customers are active? What kind of revenues are you generating from these revenues? What do your margins look like? How satisfied are your customers? So net promoter score, NPS, how satisfied are your customers? What kind of profits are you able to generate from each transaction and over a period of time? And you know, apart from the financial and commercial and economic success measures, what kind of impact are you creating, either socially or environmentally, because these things are also important. How many jobs are you creating? What kind of environmental footprint do you have as a result of your products being, you know, produced and sold? So I would say that, you know, a founder or an entrepreneur should understand what stage they are in, in terms of their growth or their stage of development, and then understand for that stage what are the required success measures. Alright, because you know, you might say a success measure is, for example, revenue, but you don't have a product yet, right? So it's important for founders to, you know, be very clear what stage am I at right now? And based on that, what is the required success measure?
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